The Car of the Future

This week in Japan, Honda rolled out the future of personal transportation: the FCX Clarity, a hydrogen-powered fuel-cell car that emits only water from its tailpipe. It can go 280 miles on a tank of hydrogen—a renewable fuel that has nothing to do with fossilized dinosaurs—while getting the equivalent of 74 miles per gallon and doing zero to 60mph in less than nine seconds. The first Clarity rolled off the assembly line Monday and the Hollywood crowd is already lining up to lease it for $600 a month. Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the first. "This is a must-have technology for the future of the earth," Honda President Takeo Fukui said at the rollout. "Honda will work hard to mainstream fuel-cell cars."

Sounds great, but sadly the mainstreaming of fuel-cell cars will come much farther downstream. Honda, for all its good intentions and buzz-worthy PR, is heavily subsidizing the Clarity, which actually costs several hundred thousand dollars to produce per model. Fukui says it will take 10 years to get the price of the Clarity below $100,000. And they only plan to lease 200 Clarities over the next three years. The biggest roadblock, though, is beyond Honda's control—the almost total lack of hydrogen filling stations. That's why Honda is making the Clarity available only in southern California, which has 19 hydrogen fueling stations but really only three you can pull into like a regular gas station. So should Jamie Lee Curtis want to take a road trip to Vegas in her new Clarity, she will be stranded on the Strip.

So what will the rest of us be driving in five years? The answer is not so much "Jetsons" as it is "Smallville." Auto experts and futurists say our rides in 2013 will definitely be more high tech (though not as futuristic as fuel cells), but the most noticeable change will be their size. We're already downsizing at a rapid clip. But instead of replacing the Hummer with a Honda, by 2013 there will be new models on the market that offer seven-passenger seating, in a significantly smaller package. Under the hood, we'll have hybrids, diesels and turbo-charged engines that are good on gas and not so bad at burning rubber. But we'll still be riding on fossil fuel—just less of it. "Five years from now," says auto analyst Lincoln Merrihew of TNS Automotive, "we should have smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient vehicles but not necessarily slower ones as turbos capture some former glory and since electric vehicles accelerate pretty briskly."

Driving the change, of course, is $4 gas and runaway oil prices. Another accelerant is new federal regulations that require all automakers' new models to achieve an average of 31.6mpg by 2015, up from about 25mpg today. By 2020, they have to hit 35mpg.

Still, despite the panic at the pump we're all experiencing now, analysts believe gas prices will eventually fall. (I know, you don't buy it. I'm having a hard time myself). The economists at Global Insight predict that by 2013, the average price of gas will drop a buck to $3.08 per gallon. That's why they don't expect all of us to squeeze into tiny Smart cars like the Europeans (who endure $7 a gallon gas). "When the gas bubble bursts and prices go back down, this hysteria will die down," says trend watcher Wes Brown of the Iceology consulting firm in Los Angeles. "The reality is that people need vehicles of different sizes. "We can't all fit into a Prius."

But many more of us will be fitting into Prius-style gas-electric hybrids. J.D. Power and Associates predicts hybrid sales will reach 1.1 million in 2013, accounting for 7 percent of the total U.S. auto market, up from 2.5 percent today. And by then, we'll have 89 different hybrid models from which to choose, up from just 16 today. Among those: three new versions of the Prius—a sport wagon, a family sedan and a tiny mileage miser about the size of a Smart. GM's plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, also will be on the road by then, offering 40 miles of pure-electric drive before a tiny engine kicks in to recharge the battery (not propel the wheels like current hybrids). Honda also has two new hybrids coming—a small family car and a sporty two-seater. In fact, there will be hybrids in every shape and size. "Hybrids will be the new status symbol," says John Wolkonowicz of Global Insight. "Having a hybrid in 2013 will be like having a V8 in 1955."