Nissan’s “Nissan Green Program 2010″ seeks out eco-friendly technologies to develop products and services that cut CO2 emissions, produce clean emissions and recycle resources. As part of this program Nissan has been developing technologies for Fuel Cell vehicles. As reported a while ago, Nissan’s XTrail Fuel Cell Vehicle set the world’s first speed record on the Nurburging track for a Fuel Cell Vehicle. It was slow, but it proved the point that Fuel Cell Vehicles can race around a track. With Nissan’s current success at having developed a fuel cell stack that doubles the power output compared to the previous generation, we may see a Fuel Cell Vehicle doing lap times closer to that achieved by the GT-R. Well maybe not in the near future, but one day at least. What’s also notable about this next generation Fuel Cell Stack is that it cuts down 35% of the cost of production. It does this by using less Platinum, an integral part of a Fuel Cell Stack. This is important as one of the drawbacks of alternative fuel vehicles is cost. Hybrids are still quite expensive and even more so are other technologies.
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Considering it’s a Fuel Cell Vehicle and probably weighs more than a regular X-Trail, a time of 11 minutes and 58 seconds isn’t that bad. Also it’s the only Fuel Cell Vehicle ever track tested on the Nurburgring. So Nissan and Greenpeace should both be proud - a fast cross-over Fuel Cell Vehicle that’s friendly on the environment!

The X-Trail FCV runs purely on electricity produced by the hydrogen fuel cell stack and so emits zero emissions and runs without so much as a whisper. The regular gas drinking engine has been replaced by an equally powerful electric motor that produces up to 120 horsepower. Although some of the uphill sections were challenging for the X-Trail FCV it was still able to complete the run and clock-in a respectable time to boot. Toyota and Honda may take their own Fuel Cell Vehicles to the track, not wanting to be out done by Nissan.

>>> Nissan X Trail FCV Nurburgring Record <<<