BMW Details Its New Fuel-Cell Car and Urban-X Incubator in NY

• BMW assembled a diverse group to showcase its hydrogen work during Climate Week NYC, hosted by the Climate Group and taking place every year in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly.

• Virtus Solis is a company that wants to harvest renewable energy in space. It’s Electric focuses on urban curbside EV charging. And Vycarb uses sustainable minerals to take carbon dioxide out of the water and store it as stable, dissolved carbon in water.

• BMW held a forum on hydrogen, where executive Jüergen Guldner emphasized that hydrogen is useful for storing large amounts of energy, such as from use-it-or-lose-it wind and solar generation.

For Climate Week NYC happening now, BMW assembled a diverse group in lower Manhattan to showcase its work in hydrogen—including details of its first series-production fuel cell in 2028—and the companies supported by the Mini brand’s New York-based Urban-X tech incubator.

“We believe our challenges can be solved by technology,” said Alexander Bilgeri, a BMW vice president whose responsibilities include sustainability.

First, the car. Jüergen Guldner, a BMW general program manager for hydrogen technology, said the production car follows extensive testing covering 600,000 miles in 20 countries with an iX5 prototype SUV.

The production car, developed in partnership with Toyota (which is providing the fuel cell), will be out in 2028 in countries with the infrastructure to support it, Guldner said. He said BMW is looking at several existing platforms as the base for the hydrogen car, and that the fuel cell won’t go into a ground-up new vehicle.

Urban-X, launched nine years ago, is not a funder, nor does it take a stake in the companies it mentors, explained Sarah Schappert, an Urban-X director. Instead, she said it provides a group of experts that can help launch startups with sustainability goals.

Urban-X, BMW said, “aims to change cities for the better by supporting startups that reimagine city life.” The companies presenting in New York were a diverse group, with innovation in common.

Climate Week NYC began Sept. 22 and runs through Sept. 29, hosted by the Climate Group and taking place every year in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly.

It’s Electric is a New York-based company that, said co-founder and chief operating officer Tiya Gordon, is focused on urban curbside EV charging. It’s up and running in Boston and working on the outer boroughs of New York, including Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

The concept is getting around the long timeline and high cost of connecting to the grid by using the excess power that is available in existing buildings. “Our spaces are located wherever cities have created priority areas for EV charging,” she said. “All ride sharing needs to go electric.” The company has a pilot program with Uber working on just that.

It's Electric is developing a tool kit to help cities electrify, and it is looking to expand to other locations, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Yonkers, Alexandria, Virginia, and Jersey City. The company is hugely ambitious, considering it has less than 10 employees and was founded only in 2022.

The big challenge with urban curbside charging is finding—and holding onto—the real estate. Gordon said city ordinances that charge non-EVs with loading zone violations when they park in electric spaces is a start.

EV charging for It’s Electric is Level Two, 240 volts, designed for overnight parking. “Once people find a city space they want to hold onto it,” she said. “It would be a big headache to move them in and out for 40-minute fast charges.”

Meanwhile, Dollaride is out to convert the dollar vans that offer inexpensive rides in urban transit deserts to electric power. Co-founder and CEO Su Sanni said dollar vans currently provide 120,000 rides daily in New York.

The company’s business plan is to buy electric vans and lease them to operators, and so far it has six on the road in New York. The recipient of a $10 million state NYSERDA grant, Dollaride wants to expand beyond New York to Washington, DC, Atlanta, Miami, and other cities.

Virtus Solis is a company that wants to harvest renewable energy in space. The company intends to place solar panels in space-based satellite arrays, then uses microwaves to bring the energy to earth.

CEO John Bucknell said countries like Germany virtually shut down their extensive solar networks in the winter, “but in space the sun is shining all the time.” He said the technology will be cost-competitive at scale, which is something that energy startups often say.

Vycarb, which has a demonstration project at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, uses sustainable minerals to take carbon dioxide out of the water and store it as stable, dissolved carbon in water.

“Existing carbon capture doesn’t permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere,” said Garrett Boudinot, Vycarb CEO. “We are both permanent and low-cost, and we can furnish proof that our system works.”

The company has been in operation for several years and counts as one of its clients the mining giant Rio Tinto. But Vycarb sees a greatly expanded future in which it is capturing gigatons of CO2.

Several reports have identified car dealers as one bottleneck hindering EV expansion, because they can be less than committed to selling them. Problems include ill-informed sales staff who steer customers away from EVs and a lack of available inventory for test drives.

Lectrium takes on the point of entry at the dealerships’ websites, using data-driven tools to add useful information that could increase buyer interest. For would-be owners, the long-standing hangups include range anxiety, affordability, and finding a place to charge.

Lectrium CEO Peter Barba said its features include a range map, a list of state and federal incentives, and a dollar figure showing how much can be saved on an annual basis through the purchase of that particular car. The company has signed up 100 dealer groups and individual dealerships so far.

The Climate Week presentation included a booth from Redwood Materials, the company headed by former Tesla executive JB Straubel in 2017 to recycle EV batteries. Redwood extracts lithium, cobalt, and nickel and other reusable materials to become building blocks for new batteries.

Cell manufacturers are delivered valuable cathode active material, explained Tod Xelowski, who oversees automotive partnerships at Redwood.

BMW this month announced a partnership with Redwood to recover the end-of-life packs. Redwood has signed on many other automakers, including Toyota, Volvo, Ford, and the Volkswagen Group. The company has a campus in Reno, Nevada, and is working on a second in Charleston, South Carolina, near BMW’s plant in Greenville.

Later in the day, BMW held a forum on hydrogen featuring the aforementioned Jüergen Guldner, Lewis Fulton, who directs the Energy Futures Program at UC Davis, and Jason Munster, who did hydrogen work at both the Department of Energy and Shell and now heads advisory company CleanEpic.

Guldner emphasized that hydrogen is useful for storing large amounts of energy, such as from use-it-or-lose-it wind and solar generation. He noted that BMW has produced vehicles that burn hydrogen in internal-combustion engines, such as the H7, but that route—pursued by some commercial truck makers—is not BMW’s path today.

Munster said that actually producing commercial hydrogen costs only about $1 per kilogram (the equivalent of a gallon of gas), but that supply-chain middlemen jack up the price at the pumps to its current $15 or so.

Obviously, that challenge is one of the key issues for hydrogen cars going forward. So-called “green” hydrogen from renewable sources (and used to produce e-fuel, a fossil-free gasoline and diesel) is currently even more expensive.

Munster showcased increasing problems meeting infrastructure demand as battery-electrics ramp up, and said they can’t go it alone for next-generation transportation. He also said California’s experience with cars like the Toyota Mirai and Hyundai Nexo shows the need for a hydrogen producer being recruited as part of the team.

“We need more collaboration,” he said. “Vertical integration isn’t going to work.” He added that fuel-cell funding is expected to survive any change in federal governance. “Hydrogen is well-liked on both sides,” he said.

Several of the presenters showed graphics of the $7 billion regional Hydrogen Hubs, which are designed, the DOE has said, to “form the foundation of a national clean hydrogen network that will contribute substantially to decarbonizing multiple sectors of the economy, like heavy industries (steel and cement production) and heavy-duty transportation.”

So far, hydrogen is showing the most promise in those heavy-duty trucks, as evidenced by the new commercial fueling station to service Hyundai drayage-duty port trucks in Oakland, California.

BMW will likely assess progress on programs like the Hydrogen Hubs before deciding how many fuel-cell cars to produce.

How committed are you to reducing your carbon footprint with your next vehicle purchase or lease? Please comment below.