Starting next fall, inter-campus commuters could cover the 32-kilometre trip between U of T’s St. George and Erindale campuses aboard cleaner hydrogen-burning shuttle buses. A prototype of the vehicle, which is based on Ford’s E450 chassis and burns hydrogen gas to produce power, was shown off last Wednesday at UTM. Able to seat 12 people-or seven when equipped with a wheelchair lift-the bus is far less polluting: its main effluent is water.
Though less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells-which produce energy by chemically converting hydrogen gas to water in a battery-hydrogen-fed internal combustion engines (ICEs) are much closer to market. “It’s not so much developing a new technology, as taking an existing (one) and adjusting it to the fuel,” said Rich Williams, a manager of Ford’s hydrogen ICE research program, who took passengers, including your correspondent, on a bus ride from downtown Toronto to UTM.
Ford is looking to lease up to 100 of these buses to clients in the public sector -“the type of partners (who) want to be on the cutting edge of technological innovation and environmentally friendly,” as Williams put it. Their production cost, though, he estimated, would be twice the price of the gasoline-powered model it is based on.
