A Hydrogen Filling Station Could Be Coming To A Roundabout Near You

There is constant noise, PR and talk of cars running on electricity and their hybrid counterparts. This is nothing new; these cars have been around for the best part of ten years now. But what about hydrogen cars? You may recall, as we do here at The Insurance Factory of a car called the Honda Clarity. This was a car famously driven by James May on Top Gear a good few years back. (The video is below, incase you haven’t seen it.

We remember at the time when the Clarity was reviewed, that this looked like more of a viable future for motorcars rather than electric, whereby you have to continually charge your vehicle every 100 miles and have to deal with replacement batteries. Hydrogen cars have less moving mechanical parts and they are much kinder on the environment. However there is now a new initiative with the government announcing plans to help fund hydrogen filling stations across the UK.

OLEV (Office FOR Low Emission Vehicles) have announced an £11 million investment, which will see up to fifteen hydrogen filling stations to be setup in the UK. It is divided up by £7 million being spent on building seven brand new filling stations, £2 million on upgrading existing filling stations (yes, apparently they do exist!) and the remaining £2 million on funding approximately forty hydrogen-fuelled vehicles specifically for the public sector. That means £50,000 per car, somewhat expensive still at present, but you needn’t worry you wont need any special modified car insurance for one of these cars when they hit the market.

You could well say that this amount of new stations is simply a drop in the ocean compared to the existing 8,500 conventional filling stations. However, this is a big major step for this industry. This investment is part of a much bigger initiative whereby the government has a £500 million fund setup for low emission vehicles. This is earmarked to be spent between 2015 to 2020. The government is aiming for the UK to be the global leader in this developing field. Expect initiatives within the next couple of years when these cars come on the market for sale.

The bad news is that right now you cannot buy a hydrogen car in the UK right now. However Hyundai have announced that they will be rolling out its ix35 model to businesses and for fleet use. Toyota has also announced that they are planning on launching a hydrogen fuel cell car only next year. This will be a proper saloon car too, unlike the electric variants such as the Nissan leaf, which is a supermini. This is set to be priced at approximately £40,000. These are exciting times for the automotive industry in the UK right now.