Quite a lot of coverage today in the media about this fuel cell motorbike - a joint development between Suzuki and Intelligent Energy.

I haven't been able to find any technical specifications for the Crosscage, pictured above, but I suspect it is closely related to an earlier model produced by IE, the ENV fuel cell motorbike .

To quote this article in the Times about the Crosscage, " . . . It is believed that the cheapest fuel cell car would sell for about $1 million (£500,000). Moreover, until now nobody has managed to build a commercially viable motorbike. The Crosscage, its designers argue, therefore represents a huge breakthrough.By combining Suzuki’s capacity for mass-production and a lightweight, air-cooled fuel cell designed by Intelligent Energy, the Crosscage may offer a fuel cell vehicle that might be affordable to many people. If Toyota succeeds in its recently stated goal of producing a fuel cell car costing $60,000, Phil Caldwell, director of Intelligent Energy, said that a fuel cell-powered bike might cost a fraction of that sum."

That all seems quite reasonable to me. Yet the fact that the Crosscage is being displayed as a concept in a trade show is about right. The root problem in my view, as with all hydrogen fuel cells seeking commercial viability, is the hydrogen. In my book, there are 4 types of fuel cell;

i) Portable Battery Class
ii) Stationary/Distributed Generation Class
iii) Industrial Class
iv) Vehicle Class

The inescapable flaws with hydrogen as a fuel source are it that it costs a lot of money to produce, store and transport, let alone do all of these things in scale. There are however some listed fuel cell companies whose technologies run off natural gas or off the shelf fossil fuels or methanol. Those companies include FuelCell Energy, Ceres Power, Ceramic Fuel Cells, Mechanical Technology Inc, Medis Technologies, Polyfuel and Voller Energy. So as long as natural gas is fairly clean and relatively cheap, why shouldn't it be the bridging technology for fuel cells before the hydrogen era - if it ever happens ?