The unique fleet of 100 hydrogen-fuelled BMWs, produced near Munich and now hitting the roads around Berlin, will at first have a special breed of customers - celebrities, politicians, sports stars and industry leaders. Whether any Australians make the grade is yet to be answered.
It is the German carmaker's plan to lease the vehicles to high-profile people around the world to act as "pioneers" in the clean energy journey.
Celebrity names already suggested include Madonna, Al Gore, Dr David Suzuki and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
BMW identified hydrogen - the most common element in the universe - as the fuel of the future because of ease of supply and its environmental benefits.
Cars fuelled by hydrogen emit little more than water vapour, taking harmful carbon dioxide out of the emissions equation.
"We have now achieved an important milestone on our way to sustainable mobility," BMW's Traffic and Environment Board's Dr Klaus Schearer said at the Berlin launch of the Hydrogen 7 last week.
"It is no secret in saying that the world's fossil energy supply is coming to an end.
"The future of mobility concerns us all if we are to sustain our standard of living in the future."
At the Hydrogen 7 launch, BMW heads would not put a price on the fleet of 100 cars, which have a material value of $500,000 but have a speculative worth of up to $2 million because of the research done.
They did reveal, however, that under the lease arrangements of up to six months, the celebrity pioneers would be assigned a "personal assistant" for the car and, at times where hydrogen fuelling stations and appropriate technicians are not in the area of use, mobile fuelling stations and a team of technicians will be assigned to the car and its "customer".
"We have no price on the car. We regard this as an offer to society to show society where we stand on clean energy," said Dr Frank Ochmann, one of the fathers of the BMW hydrogen program.
The BMW Hydrogen 7 is powered by a monofuel combustion engine – it can run on both hydrogen and petrol. BMW has been developing hydrogen technology for the past 20 years, stepping up this latest project over the past 5 years.
The six-litre V12 Hydrogen 7 can cover a range of about 200km on its 8kg tank of liquid hydrogen. Running the car on petrol gives the vehicle an additional 500km of driving.
BMW HYDROGEN 7
* The luxury saloon is kitted out with everything you would expect from a top of the range BMW vehicle and would be worth in excess of $400,000 without the hydrogen technology.
* 6-litre V12 monofuel (hydrogen/petrol) combustion engine.
* The 220kg double skinned hydrogen fuel tank stores 8kg of liquid hydrogen (10kg of H2 = 38l of petrol) which can carry the car about 200km under average driving conditions. For the next generation of hydrogen vehicle, BMW believes it will get the weight of the complex storage tank to as low as 80kg.
* There is no fuel cell technology in the Hydrogen 7 - as has been the push of other carmakers. BMW suggests a small fuel cell could be incorporated into future generations of clean energy cars to power accessories such as air conditioning.
* Switching the car from hydrogen to petrol (which gives 500km of extra range) is done with the push of a button without interrupting travel.
* Refuelling the hydrogen car at specialised stations is not greatly different to topping up the petrol at your local servo, however, the hydrogen cars will initially only go to areas in and around Los Angeles, Washington, London, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Milan because of a lack of hydrogen infrastructure.
FAST FACTS
Power: 191kW @ 5100rpm
Torque: 390Nm@ 4300rpm
Top speed: 230km/h
Acceleration: 0-100km/h in 9.5 seconds.
Fuel consumption: Hydrogen 13.3 litres per 100km. Petrol 13.9 litres per 100km
Is hydrogen safe?
* The hydrogen in the BMW is stored in a double skinned steel tank as liquid at a temperature of -253C
* Hydrogen will "boil off" after time, particularly when stored in lower volumes - meaning some fuel loss. BMW has established that boil off of H2 in its car is minimal and does not start until 17 hours after the tank has been filled. There are management systems in place for this process.
* In testing, the hydrogen tank was put the the wringer to prove that hydrogen is a safe option for motorvehicle transportation. It was subjected to numerous crash tests, shot at, hit with iron bars and subjected to fire without incident.
* The car has been road tested over more than 1 million km in Africa, throughout the Nordic countries and in heavy city traffic.
