Exclusive: We drove a prototype hydrogen BMW iX5 – True

Hydrogen The BMW iX 5 has a tank with a capacity of almost 6 kilograms of hydrogen and will cover approximately 500 kilometers. The waste is demineralized water, about 9 liters per hundred kilometers. Photo: Pravda, Martin Domček The BMW iX5 Hydrogen will probably go on sale probably at the end of the decade. However, it will be tested “in bulk” next year. At the end of last week, we had the opportunity to exclusively compete in the pre-production piece of the BMW 5 Series hydrogen, which bears the preliminary designation BMW iX5 Hydrogen. And not only that. Directly in the car, the company was done by a leading expert on hydrogen propulsion, Dr. Jürgen Guldner, who heads BMW’s entire hydrogen technology project. Since it was a pre-production piece, one of our first questions was when such cars would actually go on sale. Although it was previously written that next year, it will be a little later. Currently, there are only a few hydrogen cars in BMW, in which we had the opportunity to drive for a short time. By the end of the year, however, there should be several dozen and their testing will move to a new phase. Although the Munich brand relatively recently released information that the car will go on sale maybe next year, so only in a very limited number and in some markets. According to Guldner, a wider deployment of this model can realistically be expected by the end of the decade, when the hydrogen infrastructure will be more developed and the current problems with the lack of various components will be solved. BMW iX5 Hydrogen can pump hydrogen at a pressure of up to 700 bar, there are very few such fillers so far, the standard is rather half pressure and the Bratislava hydrogen pump has a pressure of 200 bar, which is not very suitable for passenger cars. Until then, BMW wants to work even more on its efficiency. The car we drove had a hydrogen tank with a capacity of 6 kg of hydrogen, while its average consumption during a normal ride was about 1.2 kilograms per hundred kilometers. In other words – the range to the reservoir is about 500 kilometers. However, it is possible that the car will have two such tanks. Until now, the price of a kilogram of hydrogen has been 9.5 to 10 euros per kilogram, which is not a market price, but is agreed by consensus. Currently, however, due to high energy prices, it will increase somewhere to 11 to 12 euros per kilogram. Photo: Pravda, Martin Domček BMW iX5 Hydrogen The BMW iX5 Hydrogen consumes approximately 1.2 kilograms of hydrogen per hundred kilometers. In terms of technology, the engine in the iX 5 hydrogen uses a surprising number of components from modern BMW diesel engines, as its end product is the electricity that drives the car, which is why it has the iX model designation, reserved for electric cars. However, since it is an internal combustion engine, it also produces waste. It is water. According to Jürgen Guldner, this is absolutely pure demineralized, de facto distilled water. If it does not escape from the exhaust in the form of steam, which of course can condense into water again, you could easily use it, for example, in an iron. Finally, we got a specific answer to how much of this water the car actually produces – during a 100-kilometer drive, it is about 9 liters. Read more Hydrogen as the fuel of the future? Europe ‘pours’ EUR 470 billion into it. In terms of other technical parameters, the battery itself has a relatively small capacity – less than 3 kWh. We asked if it would be possible to increase its capacity and make a hydrogen plug-in hybrid out of the tested car. According to Guldner, there is no technical problem with this, even this one was on the table in BMW. In the end, however, it was postponed because they primarily wanted to develop a hydrogen car with a sufficiently high performance and would have to be limited in the case of a plug-in hybrid. BMW does not want to go down this path yet. And speaking of power, it has a hydrogen pre-production model of 275 kW or 374 horsepower and accelerates to 100 in less than 7 seconds.