JMU AFV Lab Blog

I saw an article on the autobloggreen blog this morning on Yamaha and Honda electric motorcycles.  One of the links in the article led me to this item on Yamaha’s concept vehicles at the Tokyo Auto Show in 2007.  Below is the text of that item. I was particularly drawn to the “DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell)” concept used in this concept vehicle.  This concept has already been applied to power sources for laptops and such, but this is the first I’ve seen for a vehicle.  Maybe this could be a project for the AFV lab?

Carrying on Yamaha’s onslaught of the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show and their slew of environmentally-friendly cycle concepts, we now introduce you to the FC-Dii. Like the LUXAIR that we showed you previously, the FC-Dii appears to be based on a model originally shown in 2005 called the FC-me. Like that machine, the FC-Dii gets its power from a fuel cell which uses Yamaha’s methanol-water solution. The fuel cell creates electricity which continuously charges the on-board lithium ion battery pack. That battery pack is also removable for charging and replacement purposes. According to Yamaha, their fuel cell “features the highest level of power density in the 1kW class… which achieves a top-level performance of 30% system efficiency for a DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell) system.”

The bike itself appears quite small, which makes sense considering that Yamaha would want to keep the machine as light as possible. Nothing really appears to be innovative here besides the fuel cell system, and a good deal of the components appear to carry over from the FC-me. AS soon as we are able to get better pictures, we’ll be sure to update this post.

Related:

• Tokyo 2007 Preview: Yamaha on two-wheels - Tesseract - Part 2 of 6
  
• Tokyo 2007 Preview: Yamaha on two-wheels - LUXAIR - Part 1 of 6
  

[Source: Yamaha Motors]