BMW's hydrogen journey included this V12 sedan that could run on gasoline or hydrogen. But was it particularly 'green' despite the zero emissions?
foray into production hydrogen cars such as the X5 may seem like a relatively recent effort, but in reality the automaker has been working on hydrogen cars since 1978. Finding some of the predecessors to today's hydrogen efforts from BMW is a tall order these days, but at one point we managed to see firsthand just what BMW was working on decades ago when we encountered this 750hL in a car museum in Shanghai, China.
With a 5.4-liter V12 underhood and several hundred pounds of hydrogen hardware, the 750hL was perhaps not the most efficient testbed for this tech., as drivers could fill up the hydrogen tank and get about 250 miles of range out of it, and when it was empty they could switch over to the gas tank and continue on, giving the car an impressive overall range in its category, albeit not a very practical one as hydrogen was even rarer in the year 2000 than it is today.
BMW went on to fit a similar system into the next-gen 6.0-liter V12-engined 7-Series in 2005, which was actually available for lease. But by 2005 the hydrogen infrastructure in Germany was hardly better than it was in 2000, and the bivalent approach to the monster V12 hardly made the car"green." It achieved 16.9 mpg running on gasoline and 5.6 mpg when running on hydrogen, while carrying about 550 pounds of extra hardware.
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