Originally Posted by willravel

Can you imagine putting a live extension cord into the gas tank of a car?

Originally Posted by pigglet

re: the electrolysis thing for H2 storage; way too inefficient. you have to have the energy in the first place to split the water molecule. some people look at doing this with solar energy, but the conversions currently are too low. as to the charging of the battery, as i understand it these engines are programmed to switch back and forth and perhaps even simultaneously operated from the battery and the combustion engine/fuel cell. in the worst case, the battery is your fallback power, so you'd definitely want to start with it charged. its not used solely to collect "waste" energy from the combustion engine/fuel cell. and yeah, i find it really difficult to imagine that a design engineer wouldn't have made it virtually impossible to blow the car up using the battery charger through the hydrogen refilling port. for what its worth gasoline is a *way* better fuel than H2 on either weight or volume bases, its just dirty and in limited supply.