Andrew English's column

English takes issue with the Americans' waste culture

Auto Express Car Reviews

By Andrew English

30th November 2007

At the recent Los Angeles Motor Show, I offered to buy lunch for Honda’s environmental manager, John Kingston. But cordon bleu this was not.


	“The inventor of the fuel cell was a Brit. but the Californians have stolen the idea – and there is nothing we can do about it”

We grabbed our plastic trays and made the usual comments about American portion control (food enough for four on each plate), then we ordered a smoothie and John boggled. “Will you look at that!” he said. “That hot tap must stay on all day.” True enough, the woman simply replaced the used glass-mixing jug with the one that had stood under the tap while she prepared the next drink. Clouds of steam billowed from the booth; it was a spectacular waste of energy, especially at a show that sells itself on its environmental credentials.

I had to drag John away before he screamed at the assistant. But that 24/7 hot tap seemed symptomatic of the US view of the environment – especially that of the beautiful people of California, who practise profligate waste, ignorance and a sanctimonious attitude to the rest of the world.

The state’s foggy, smoggy climate is well documented. It was one of the reasons European ships sailed blithely past the entrance to San Francisco Bay until 1769. On some days, Orange County, which includes Los Angeles, is a cauldron of photochemical smog between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean with 20 million people living in it. Air quality is an abiding obsession and, as America’s biggest and most important car market, Californians wield enormous influence on the vehicles that you and I drive.

So the first smog controls, which throttled engines in the Seventies, were dictated mainly from California, as were the first catalytic converters. Pressure from America and car makers forced the EU to mandate catalysts, and that killed off the promising study of lean-burn engines. This from a city that spurns the use of public transport, has rudimentary rail services and where everyone drives everywhere. Once, I spent a week travelling round LA by bus. It’s where I met the poor people.

Perish the thought that Californians should ever do anything as dirty as making vehicles for a living, but they do tell everyone else what to drive. Hybrids, for instance, are designed largely for the stop-start jams of LA and Tokyo, where traffic shunts into work and out, and all that braking energy can be saved as electricity. Plug-in hybrids are the latest piece of ‘Not-Invented-Here’ technology trumpeted by the Californians.

And now, we have the first production fuel cell, Honda’s FCX Clarity – launched to great acclaim at the LA expo. Local Honda staff, many of whom weren’t even working in the industry when I first wrote about fuel cells, fell over themselves to ‘explain’ the technology to me. I was left with the distinct impression that fuel cells run on jam.

As I had to keep reminding myself, Sir William Grove, the inventor of the fuel cell in 1839, was in fact British. The FCX Clarity itself was developed not in California, but at Honda’s research centre in Tochigi, Japan.

Now, we learn the FCX Clarity is a sell-out, its dedicated website has crashed and rich Californians are eager to lease this hydrogen-fuelled vehicle for £300 a month. Being rare, expensive, environmental and new, it is virtually irresistible to them.

Brace yourselves for endless snaps of movie stars spilling out of FCX Claritys at red carpet events, while politicians such as Californian governor Arnie Schwarzenegger prove their environmental credentials by refuelling a claret red hydrogen Honda. There’s nowhere in Britain to fill up with the gas, so we won’t be getting it in the UK. That means the Californians
have stolen our invention. And there’s nothing we can do about it.