Concepts · 2002–2011
Around the world on hydrogen.
While the industry debated whether fuel cells could ever work, Mercedes built two hundred of them, handed the keys to ordinary customers — and then drove three around the planet.
Stuttgart, January 30, 2011 — one hundred and twenty-five years, almost to the day, after Carl Benz filed the patent for the automobile. Three lime-green B-Class hatchbacks pull out into the winter morning, pointed east. They will not stop until they have circled the world.
Their tanks hold hydrogen; their tailpipes emit water vapor. The F-CELL World Drive was the exclamation mark at the end of a decade-long sentence — the quiet, stubborn program that turned fuel-cell cars from lab demonstrations into vehicles you could lease at a dealer.
Chapter I
Shrinking the power station.
In 1994, the first NECAR — “New Electric Car” — proved a fuel cell could drive a vehicle, provided the vehicle was a van with its entire cargo bay full of equipment. Five years of miniaturization later, NECAR 4 hid the whole system in the sandwich floor of an A-Class, with 200 kilometers of range.
The A-Class F-CELL of 2002 turned that experiment into a small fleet. From 2004, real customers in Berlin were filling real Mercedes with hydrogen at a public station — commuting, shopping, parking on the street — in cars that looked like any other A-Class apart from the lettering.
The decisive step came in 2009. The B-Class F-CELL was built not in a workshop but on series production tooling — the first fuel-cell car in the world manufactured under series conditions. Its 100 kW drive matched a two-liter gasoline engine; its 700-bar tanks stretched range to around 400 kilometers; it started in winter.
Two hundred were built and leased to customers in Europe and California. By 2013 the fleet had covered more than 3.3 million kilometers — at the time, the largest fuel-cell fleet experience in the world.
- Drive output
- 100 kW
- Tank pressure
- 700 bar
- Range
- 400 km
- Series built
- 200
125 days · 14 countries · 4 continents
30,000 km
Around the world — on hydrogen, in 2011
Chapter II
The long way home.
The World Drive’s real cargo was an argument. The cars ran faultlessly across Europe, North America, Australia and Asia; what nearly didn’t were the logistics, because in 2011 the entire planet had only around 200 hydrogen filling stations. A support truck carried the fuel the world couldn’t yet provide. The technology was ready, Mercedes was saying — the infrastructure was not.
One hundred and twenty-five days after leaving Stuttgart, the three green cars rolled back in, having proved both halves of the point.
Epilogue
The road not taken.
The F-CELL line continued into the GLC F-CELL of 2018 — the world’s first fuel-cell plug-in hybrid — before Mercedes concluded that batteries had won the passenger-car race and redirected its hydrogen work toward heavy trucks. The World Drive’s warning aged well: more than a decade later, the filling stations it went looking for still mostly don’t exist.