Wheels: Mullins to Donate $15 Million to the Art Center College of Design

Greentech: Fuel Cells at Center Stage

In Tokyo on Wednesday, Toyota was the first automaker in the new season of international auto shows to reveal its fresh take on this headline-grabbing technology, quickly followed by Honda and Hyundai in Los Angeles. All three automakers unveiled new design studies intended to signal that fuel-cell vehicles, which produce zero tailpipe pollutants, are ever so close to production. Each concept vehicle demonstrated progress in the efficiency and packaging of their fuel-cell systems, which generate electricity onboard by combining hydrogen and oxygen and emit only water vapor.

What these automakers failed to deliver in terms of specifics they offset with lofty promises of a real and rapidly approaching hydrogen-based future. 

Before you file this news with reports of the imminent arrival of flying cars, consider this: For the last four months, I have been living with fuel-cell technology, logging more than 2,500 miles at the wheel of a Toyota Highlander FCHV-adv test bed. And I took two short test drives of a sedan that the company said would be ready for volume production in about 24 months.

The all-electric Toyota technowonder that visited my driveway was based on a 2008 Highlander midsize crossover. It offered nearly 300 miles of driving range and five-minute fill-ups — a combination that no battery-electric car offers. I drove for days without tailpipe emissions and without depleting the tank. Multiple round-trip journeys from my East Bay home to San Jose or Sacramento were no problem.

Those trips are a challenge for the Nissan Leaf E.V. that I usually drive, which offers 80 miles of real-world range and charging times measured in hours.

“Toyota made a decision — the fuel-cell car is going to be a big part of our future,” John Hanson, a Toyota spokesman, said. “That’s the direction we’re going, big time.”

Toyota is not alone. Four other carmakers — General Motors, Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes-Benz — are also promising fuel-cell cars in the next few years. They must satisfy California’s zero emission laws, essentially requiring that by 2025 about 15 percent of new cars refuel by plugging into the grid or filling up with hydrogen.

For me, the transition from an E.V. to a fuel-cell car meant trading one refueling limitation for another. My Leaf offers less than a third of the range of the fuel-cell Highlander, but replenishing it at home is as easy and accessible as charging a cellphone. When the tanks in the Highlander were nearing empty, I needed to make a 15-minute drive to the only accessible hydrogen station in Northern California, six miles away in Emeryville.

My first visits to the station, on the block where Pixar makes movies, were a scene you’d expect from one of the studio’s hapless characters. Even after training, my first tries ended with the heavy connector being ejected and falling to the pavement. That was user error; soon enough, I figured out the problem, and topping up with hydrogen gas became routine.

A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of hydrogen contains nearly the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. To top up, I added about 4 to 5 kilograms of gaseous hydrogen into tanks at a pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch. The Highlander traveled about 55 miles on a kilogram. In Emeryville, I paid $12 to $13 a kilogram.

Measured against a baseline of a 2008 Highlander Hybrid, which carried an E.P.A. rating of 27 m.p.g. in the city and 25 on the highway, that’s roughly equivalent to paying $6 for a gallon of gasoline. According to Toyota, full-scale production of hydrogen is projected to drop the cost below the current price of gasoline, but for now E.V.’s that charge from the grid and store the energy in a lithium-ion battery pack operate at a cost-per-mile expense that’s commonly one-third that of filling up a fuel-cell vehicle with hydrogen.

Some aspects of the 2008 fuel-cell Highlander are by now outdated, so Toyota gave me two turns, once in May and again in September, in a test vehicle that it says is more representative of the sedan it will offer in 2015. This mule, which had its fuel-cell powertrain installed in the body of a Lexus HS 250h — a hybrid model that has been discontinued — used zip ties and gaffer’s tape to hold together prototype parts and diagnostic equipment. But it gave a sportier drive than the Highlander. The production car will carry a Toyota badge.

All electric cars, whether drawing their energy from batteries or fuel cells, offer impressive low-speed response and near-silent operation. An unexpected exception in a fuel-cell car is the hiss of an air compressor, which pumps oxygen from the atmosphere to the fuel cell.

The main challenge facing Toyota engineers, however, is the vehicle’s price.

Wheels: A 1960 Cadillac Takes Center Stage at the Metropolitan Opera

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Diana Damrau as Gilda, dying in the trunk of a 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and Zeljko Lucic as Rigoletto in the opera “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera.

In classical opera, characters tend to get around in swan boats or chariots, but a production of “Rigoletto” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera puts a 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the spotlight. A soprano who has been fatally stabbed is briefly stuffed in its trunk, and the final duet, with the soprano dying in her father’s arms, takes place at the car’s rear, framed by fins and tail lights.

Traditionally, that scene is set on a riverbank in Renaissance Italy, bu the Met’s new production of the Verdi opera, directed by Michael Mayer, transports the action to 1960 Las Vegas. The Cadillac is the real thing, bought on eBay, then painted indigo blue with metallic flecks by the Met staff and illuminated by the lighting designer, Kevin Adams, to reach the high C of automotive fantasy.

Christine Jones, the set designer, explained in an e-mail that she wanted a car with a “look and feel that suited the period” of the Rat Pack, as well as the “overall sexiness” of the production’s last act, which opens with a pole dance at a sleazy club on the Vegas outskirts.

In traditional stagings of “Rigoletto,” as well as in the new one, the title character discovers that Gilda, his innocent daughter, has been seduced and raped by a powerful man. The father hires an assassin, Sparafucile, to kill the villain.

The Met’s current version gives the Cadillac to the hit man, who plans to drive his victim’s corpse to a river and dump it. But Gilda sacrifices herself for her seducer and ends up bagged in the trunk. Popping the lid open, Rigoletto, finds his daughter dying of her wounds, with just enough breath for the finale.

As happens in opera, the Met had to settle for second choice instead of the vehicular diva it really wanted. “We originally specified a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham,” wrote Ms. Jones, only to find that “without knowing it, we had picked one of the most rare American cars that were essentially handmade in Italy.” Realizing the difficulty of snagging a Brougham, Ms. Jones turned to the Coupe de Ville, which she described as having a “very similar look without being almost impossible to find.”

The engine and most working parts were removed so that stagehands could easily move the car on casters. No other modifications were needed to soprano-size the vehicle. “Luckily, the cars of this era are long and wide,” Ms. Jones said. “There was never an issue about space for the singer. We were more concerned that Diana Damrau would not be willing to get into the trunk during her performance as Gilda,” said Ms. Jones, referring to the German soprano who has been singing the role. But as it happened, “she was excited about the idea and suggested it to Michael Mayer before he gathered the nerve to suggest it to her.”

The car’s mock Nevada license plate reads, “SPARAFUC,” a detail not necessarily visible in the opera house, Ms. Jones said, but shown in close-up in the Feb. 16 live transmission of the opera in HD, which played in movie theaters around the world. Actually, Nevada did not issue vanity plates until 1969, said John Walters, a member of that state’s branch of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. Still, it seemed like a realistic possibility, said Ms. Jones, who said her research had shown that other states had issued personalized plates even earlier.

And the plates seemed appropriate for Sparafucile, the killer, traditionally played as cocky and now the sharply dressed owner of a Cadillac. “They call them ‘vanity plates’ for a reason,” Ms. Jones noted.

The new “Rigoletto” will be presented at the Metropolitan Opera for six more performances from April 13 to May 1. A repeat of the HD transmission will be shown in movie theaters on March 6.