Amid Hybrid Hype, a Lonely Advocate of Fuel Cells

DETROIT

It was a tough sell. But Noordin Nanji, marketing vice president of Ballard Power Systems Inc., was determined.

Accompanied by his publicist, Rebecca Young, Nanji walked the floors of the sprawling Cobo Center here, collaring journalists attending the North American International Auto Show to make his pitch. He was pushing fuel cells, specifically proton-exchange-membrane fuel cells produced by his company, with headquarters in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The problem is that fuel cells are no longer sexy. They've been eclipsed in the media's mind and, thus, in the mind of the public, by gas- and diesel-electric hybrid technology.

It matters not that, in the automobile industry, hybrids generally are regarded as an interim step toward cleaner, more fuel-efficient technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells.

Gas-electric and diesel-electric hybrids are of the moment. The news media love them. Toyota Motor Corp., the biggest purveyor of hybrids, gets lots of greener-than-thou credit for promoting them. There's a buzz; and where there's buzz, there are politicians; and when you mix buzz and politics together, you get policies, which beget certain permutations in business.

For example, Travelers Insurance announced last week that it is offering a 10 percent coverage discount for hybrid-vehicle owners in the United States, beginning next month. It is not so much that hybrid vehicles, per se, are safer than any other cars. Nor is it that, for example, a luxury, hybrid sport-utility vehicle is any more fuel-efficient or sensible than a high-mileage subcompact car. It's this: "Our preliminary research indicates that hybrid owners tend to fall into the preferred insured category, and at Travelers, lower-risk drivers are rewarded with lower premiums," said Greg Toczydlowski, senior vice president of product management for Travelers.

Translation, courtesy of Travelers spokesman Greg Gibson: "Our experience is that the kind of people who buy hybrids tend to be safe drivers." And because hybrid vehicle sales, now barely a sliver of the U.S. market, are expected to occupy a 10 to 15 percent share by 2015, it makes sense for Travelers to go after the kinds of customers who buy hybrids.

So, when you juxtapose the hybrid craze with the fuel-cell daze, you get an idea of how lonely and difficult Nanji's life must have been here last week during the media-preview days of the auto show. He had no fancy press event, no hip-hop dancers, no scantily clad models and no hybrids in a show where it seemed that all other exhibitors had all of those things. I admired his spunk, and I joined another journalist in listening to him.

"Look," Nanji said, "we know that we have a way to go before we can make fuel cells commercially viable. But we're making progress."

We'd heard that before. We pointed out to him that progress does not make headlines. Journalists need a hook.