Tuesday, January 03, 2006

HYDROGEN CARS: IF NOT NOW, WHEN?


To find out where some of the major automakers are with their development of hydrogen-powered cars, go to www.fuelcellstocks.com/. ../hydrogencars.htm ! There is some interesting stuff there.

4 Comments:

Blogger Mandelbrot's Chaos said...

The question I have about hydrogen fuel cells in the short-term is refuelling stations. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells are cool, but the infrastructure currently does not exist for the average Joe to go down to the 7/11 and fill their fuel tank with an extremely flammable gas that's lighter than air; or, for that matter, for a 7/11 to store hydrogen gas in sufficient quantities to sell it in the quantities needed by the general public. At least as a bridge technology, I still go with biofuels with an emphasis on biodiesel.

12:12 PM  
Blogger Snave said...

And I guess one thing I really wonder about with hydrogen is, how explosive would it be in a crash? Would fender benders become the kind of fantastically explosive things we always see from Hollywood?

5:19 PM  
Blogger Damien said...

I guess they'll have to fit some kind of safety device somehow (a binary agent to mix with the h2???) Anyway I'm still pretty chuffed after driving a friends Prius (great fun).

2:07 PM  
Blogger Sheryl said...

There was a Scientific American episode on hydrogen cars about a year ago. (I think it is still online and I would be happy to find the link if anyone wants to view it online.) What they were saying on that program was that whereas the hydrogen was more explosive, that when they compared them with regular car explosions, the hydrogen might catch on fire, but it didn't continue to burn after the initial explosion, whereas with regular fuel, the fire gets bigger and bigger and consumes the whol car.

I'm probably not explaining that well, but apparently they did do some studies and decided they are actually safer in that regard.

Hold on...let me me find that link. OK, it's the third segment on this page:

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1403/video/watchonline.htm

5:11 PM  

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