Violins and Starships

The Latest Planet-Saving Car

August 20th, 2008

I know at least one person who will probably be excited about this. Oh what the heck; I think it’s cool too but I don’t have much hope for it. Or, actually, I don’t have much hope for hydrogen. Most people won’t buy hydrogen powered cars until there are a lot of hydrogen refueling stations and there will not be a lot of hydrogen refueling stations until there are a lot of hydrogen powered cars on the road. (And, by the way, doesn’t hydrogen tend to explode rather easily?) This car is dual fuel though so they might sell a few and those few people can drive around looking cool and burning huge amounts of gasoline while waiting for those hydrogen stations to appear and as a bonus they get Green points for driving something that at least can run on an alternative fuel.

Filed under: Science/Nature/Tech Comments (4)

4 Responses to “The Latest Planet-Saving Car”

  1. George
    August 20th, 2008 - 9:56 am

    That’s awesome. But yes, I agree, people won’t buy them without refueling stations everywhere. It’ll be a long time coming. From what I understand, though, hydrogen is much less explosive than gasoline.

  2. fillyjonk
    August 20th, 2008 - 11:04 am

    “hydrogen is much less explosive than gasoline.”

    That sounds like a job for the Mythbusters…

    But yeah…I wouldn’t buy a hydrogen car without being jolly sure that most/all of the places I tend to drive would have a refueling station. It would be truly horrible to run out of fuel in, say, remote western Oklahoma and be told the nearest place to refuel is over 100 miles away.

    That’s also why I’m not real hip on electric cars yet; they have a 40-mile range (or at least the ones I’ve read about). Unless the bookstore in Sherman plans to install a big row of plugs so we can “recharge” while we’re shopping, an electric car just wouldn’t work for me, at least not outside of town, and I refuse to own more than one car.

  3. Lynn
    August 20th, 2008 - 11:51 am

    Mythbusters did demonstate that gasoline is not as explosive as is generally believed, or at least as Hollywood shows. For example, you can’t make a car explode by shooting the gas tank.

  4. Hippie
    August 20th, 2008 - 2:09 pm

    The people who wrote that article need to do some research so they won’t look so silly. Mazda’s foray into the use of the rotary engine did not begin with the Rx-7. It began with the R100. Even in this country, the Rx-4 and Rotary Pickup came along years before the Rx-7.

    Now that that’s out of the way…

    Hydrogen is a nice warm fuzzy fuel, if you smack yourself in the forehead with a big rock so that you forget your grade school science. You can’t just go find hydrogen somewhere, it’s always bound up with something else. Water, of course, is the popular one – but electrolysis of water takes about 75% more energy than can be had from using the hydrogen. Find an encyclopedia, look up “Thermodynamics”. Second and more common way to get hydrogen, is from petroleum products. That’s right, your warm fuzzy hydrogen car still uses evil old big oil, and won’t be a bit cheaper to use than gasoline.

    And lets not forget, the 600-Lb metal hydride tanks needed to make the stuff safe to handle. 34 gallons of gas only weighs 204 pounds, and will take a vehicle weighing almost 5,000 lbs over 500 miles. Enough hydrogen to run a car 200 miles weighs almost 3 times as much if you include the tankage.

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