“The real innovation in automobiles is taking place on the outskirts of a town in Switzerland, ” says Bruno Giussani in his monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online.
The Hy-Light is a silent car with great speed and acceleration and amazing stability that produces zero air pollution. It’s a car built around a hydrogen fuel cell. The gas station is a group of solar panels. It’s 180 miles of energy is stored in supercapacitors: a compromise between a battery (which can store a lot of energy but isn’t good at delivering bursts of power) and traditional capacitors (which offer phenomenal power but little storage). The Michelin-designed electric motors and suspension are inside the wheels.
The announcement adds the industrially disruptive vision that “every Swiss will be able to produce the energy for his own home and car” through a combination of solar panels, a home electrolyzer, and a fuel cell.