Hydrogen-fueled car sets new Guinness World Record
MANILA, Philippines — A team of students from the Netherlands has set a new Guinness World Record for the longest distance traveled by a hydrogen-fueled car on a full tank.
Delft University of Technology students drove an EcoRunner XIII for 2,488 kilometers on just 950 grams of hydrogen fuel, a year after a previous model bagged the first spot in the Hydrogen Efficiency Challenge.
For comparison, that is roughly a longer distance than from Manila to Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, improving the case for hydrogen fuel as a better alternative for vehicles.
The student team initially wanted to break the car's previous record of 2,056 kilometers, which it did after two days of driving on Germany's Immendingen test track at 45 kilometers per hour (full speed) but still had hydrogen fuel to spare.
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The 24-man team decided to see the car's maximum distance on a full tank. It came to a full stop after driving for almost 2,500 kilometers.
The car drove for 30 minutes, shy of 72 hours, and only stopped every two hours to switch drivers; only one person can fit in the small car.
The EcoRunner was a concept car constantly in development for nearly 20 years, with the first three-wheeled version setting a record after driving 557 kilometers on just a liter of petrol in 2006.
Students then began using hydrogen fuel, where the first four-wheeled urban model from 2021 set another record after driving for 1,195 kilometers — notably less than half of the newly-set record — in 36 hours on a single tank.
The current EcoRunner XIII model is lighter with a refined aerodynamic shape, almost shaped like a bullet, and operated through an electrochemical reaction. Its hydrogen gas is routed from a tank to a fuel cell that produces an electric current, with water vapor being the only emission.
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