Daimler’s F-Cell Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle was parked at the 2008 SF Auto Show this week when I attended. Other than Toyota’s Fuel Cell car, well half of it, this was as close as I had come to the car of the future. Meaning the hydrogen fuel cell car will always be in the future.

Based on an extended version of the current Daimler A-Class chassis, the F-CELL has a Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) hydrogen fuel cell that powers the vehicle and sports 72kW (97hp). Of course there’s also an electric motor that outputs 65kW (87 hp) an drives the front wheels. With two onboard hydrogen fuel tanks pressurized at 350 bar (5000 psi) Daimler’s F-CELL goes for 177 km (111 miles) and reaches a top speed of 140 kph (87 mph).

Nothing but water vapors for emissions and unlimited resource in hydrogen. All we need is the infrastructure to support refueling and orders to justify mass production to the point of bring the price per unit.

The cars ARE ready and they don’t look bad at all.

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I saw the 100 MPG Toyota Prius – Plug-in Hybrid Conversion in SF. What can I say? It’s a Toyota. It’s a Prius. It’s a hybrid. It goes a long long way on at tank of gas. Our local cheap gas stand is selling at $1.99/gal. One hundred miles for $2.00.

My first car was a 1960 VW Beetle. It got about 20 mpg or so and I paid about 30 cents for a gallon of gas. If my math is right, then my VW Bug in 1972 went about as far on $2 as this Toyota does 36 years later. And we wonder why Toyota is making money hand over fist while GM and Ford and Chrysler have their hands out.

I am a little slow sometimes. Okay, a lot slow. I spotted an eBox at the SF Auto Show. I thought to myself, “This car sure looks like something to me.” Duh…it’s a modified 5-speed Scion xB wagon.

The way it works is after buying a Scion for $15K “engineers will remove the internal combustion engine and related components, and install AC Propulsion’s electric drive and battery system composed of more than 5,000 small cells.” The cost of the conversion is $55K. At that price, we wonder why people aren’t knocking down the doors.

I wonder how much it’d cost to make the car from scratch? Why can’t we be Earth-friendly without breaking the bank?

They stuck the weird cars in a room off to the side . No matter, I found them – the cars that are meant to be Earth friendly, because I went looking just for them. Hanging out in a room with other cars with signs saying they’ll go 100 miles on a gallon of gas was a VW Jetta that runs on Biodiesel/VegOil Conversion.

I reckon I can buy a log at Safeway and stick it in the tank or stop by McDonald’s and ask for their left over vegetable oil. Sounds reasonable to me. Now as long as nobody uses gasoline to fry eggs we’re good to go.

Regular readers here at Greenpacks will know that I am putting up a bunch of post/pics from my recent gallivant to the 2008 San Fran Auto Show.

There was more than one display that kind of caught my eye. I was looking for a green cars, eco-friendly cars, that sort of thing. Cadillac had a rotating display of its Luxury Escalade SUV stating it was confident enough to talk about fuel efficiency in the same sentence as luxury, SUV and big big car. And no Britney Spears …

They claim that the world’s first full-size luxury hybrid SUV, their 2009 Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, gets better mileage than the Mini-cooper. With a 332 hp V8 engine that generates 367 lb-ft of torque at 4,100 rpm they claim they seat more than 4 adults luxuriously and still get 20mpg … in the city!

But, what about all the hardware that went into making this monstrosity? Never mind that I suppose. At least, Cadillac is using the right buzzwords and aiming in the right direction, eh?

I got to attend the 51st Annual Auto Show in San Francisco. I went for the intent of seeing what’s going on in the green world. Being in Northern California, I expected to see a whole lot more than I did. Still, I saw some. Some pics will follow in subsequent posts, including a $455,000 Porsche.

Here I discovered the reason why Toyota expects its version of the Fuel Cell vehicle to not only have zero emissions but also to get really really good mileage.

Take a look and see if you can figure out why, too.