BMW’s Hydrogen 7: What Are They Smoking?

BMW, that Bavarian purveyor of sex on wheels, those ultimate orgasm machines that seduce with shapely bodies then seal the deal with swank interiors and a playful-yet-sophisticated nature, has always been the Car Company that Could Do No Wrong. When others missed the mark, you could always count on BMW to get it right – to mix form and function in precisely the right ratios and cook up cars that both young and old dream about while shivering through cold and lonely nights waiting for a tow truck after your ten-year-old piece of crap breaks down and you realize that, despite the joy of avoiding car payments, perhaps it really is time to buy something new.

Not that I know from personal experience or anything. I’m just sayin …

Anyway, the point of this post is that, while I’ve always been a BMW fan as well as someone who’s pretty damned passionate about embracing alternatively fueled vehicles, all indications are that BMW’s new Hydrogen 7 – which should be a big old slice of rolling heaven for someone like me, even if I could never come up with enough jack to actually own one – looks instead like a misguided technological train wreck. And that makes me sad.

Why? Because at first blush, this thing seemed like a brilliant showcase of clean technology for those who want – and can afford – the status and guilt-free luxury of a 7-series that spits mere water out the tailpipe. What’ll show up in the driveways of 100 lucky VIPs next spring, however, looks more like an ill-conceived solution looking for a problem.

The German magazine Der Speigel slams the Hydrogen 7 as being worse for the environment than a heavy diesel truck. Despite marketing images of the Hydrogen 7 humming happily past windmills or parked beside solar panels the article reports that this thing's 12 cylinder engine – which can run on either gasoline or liquid hydrogen – gets a mere 17 MPG in gasoline mode and 4.9 MPG when burning hydrogen. In other words, as Der Speigel says "BMW has created an energy-guzzling engine that only seems to be environmentally friendly -- a farcical ecomobile whose only true merit is that of illustrating the cardinal dilemma of a possible hydrogen-based economy."

There are so many things wrong with this vehicle that it'd take more room than I have here to list them all. Most egregiously, since it takes more energy to create hydrogen than you can get from it, hydrogen offers absolutely no help to our environmental or oil supply problems until it is produced from renewable sources. Which means putting hydrogen into an internal combustion engine – especially one that gets less than five miles per gallon when burning it – is an enormous waste of energy all around.

Beyond the crass and hypocritical attempt to market this beast as a "green" mobile is minor problem of dealing with the liquid hydrogen fuel … assuming you can locate a place to fill it up with liquid hydrogen in the first place. Liquid Hydrogen needs to be stored in special tanks at extremely low temperatures and evaporates and escapes as it heats up. And it's expensive: Der Speigel estimates that it'd cost $38 to drive the thing 62 miles using hydrogen fuel. Talk about conspicuous consumption!

This whole vehicle smells like what happens when you lock a bunch of unsupervised engineers in a lab for too long: They lose track of reality and get so heads down in showing how clever they are that they emerge with a Rube Goldberg-esque solution looking for a problem. Embarrassing.

BMW announced a concept X3 Hybrid over a year ago. You'd think with all the money and time they spent on the Hydrogen 7, they could've produced a truly compelling hybrid by now – one who's closest competitors are the plain-jane (read: booooring) Toyota Highlander Hybrid and the Lexus 450h, which, while a bit better, still feels like something a rich kid's mom would use to drive the team to soccer practice (read: too expensive and precious for most active people who actually need four-wheel drive).

Here's hoping BMW gets their engineers pointed in the right direction in a hurry, so they can return to their proper place, at the front of the pack.