Status of NHTSA’s hydrogen and fuel cell vehicle safety research program

Hennessey, Barbara; Nguyen, Nha

Affiliations

¹National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), United States

Abstract

Safety information is vital to support the FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership, a cooperative automotive research effort between the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Council for Automotive Research (USCAR), and fuel suppliers. This partnership began in 2003 as part of the President’s goal to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, improve vehicle efficiency, reduce vehicle emissions, and make fuel cell vehicles a practical and cost-effective choice for large numbers of Americans by 2020. NHTSA’s safety initiative complements these efforts by conducting research to support determination of fuel system integrity performance criteria that address the unique hazards posed by the onboard storage of hydrogen and the operation of high voltage fuel cells used to provide electrical current for hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (HFCV) powertrains.

This paper provides a description and timeline of the research tasks initiated in fiscal year 2009 to support the development or acceptance of proposed safety performance criteria for HFCVs. This is the third such status report published in these conference proceedings [1,2].

Links

URL: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0507.pdf

Cited Works (2)

Year	Entry
2005	Hennessey B, Hammel-Smith C, Koubek M. NHTSA’s four-year plan for hydrogen, fuel cell and alternative fuel vehicle safety research. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV). June 6-9, 2005; Washington, DC.
2007	Hennessey BC, Nguyen NT. Status of NHTSA’s hydrogen and fuel cell vehicle safety research program. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV). June 18-21, 2007; Lyon, France.