Prospecting the Future for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Markets

As there are currently no retail markets for either hydrogen as a transportation fuel or fuel cell vehicles, any discussion of such markets necessarily prospects the future. To do so, we must evoke an image of the future. Such a task is inherently uncertain – many forecasts have been wrong even for mature markets, much less markets as tenuously incipient as those for hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles (FCVs). We undertake this risky enterprise by framing the discussion of future markets for hydrogen and FCVs around these two questions. 1.What is the history and future of mobility? 2.Within this future, why would anyone buy a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle? We address the uncertainty of predicting the future by grounding our answers in a theory of the development of modern societies and the related long-term development of the infrastructures modern societies build to support themselves. The infrastructures we address are automobility, energy and information. This theory and history describe a trajectory from which we argue modern societies are unlikely to deviate, except in the case of catastrophic events or fundamental shifts in values. Given this, it seems plausible to us that the further into the future we go, the more likely it is that the future we describe will come to pass. Building on insights previously expressed by others (e.g., Jones, 1978; Reichman, 1976; Hupkes, 1982), we have begun a multi-faceted study of the positive utility of travel, that challenges the notion of travel as purely a derived demand. Early papers in this series (Salomon and Mokhtarian, 1998; Mokhtarian and Salomon, 2001) focused on the conceptual basis for such a positive utility. Three components to the utility of travel were identified: (1) the conventional component – the utility of arriving at a desired destination; (2) the utility of activities that can be conducted while traveling (listening to music, talking to a companion, thinking or relaxing, potentially talking on a mobile phone, working on a laptop, or reading); and (3) the utility intrinsic to travel itself. The third component of utility involves psychological needs or motivations such as the enjoyment of movement itself (including, but not exclusively, the enjoyment of speed), curiosity or information-seeking, variety-seeking, a need for escape, a need for independence or desire for freedom, the satisfaction of skillfully handling a vehicle, and the "display" of travel or a vehicle as a status symbol. While even most transportation professionals would readily acknowledge the role of these motivations in the demand for leisure or discretionary travel, we contend that those same motivations are at work to some extent in the demand for daily mandatory and maintenance travel – and that it is important to inquire further into the question of "to what extent".