wnker85

Hey, i'm new around here and i didnt know if anyone has thought of this.

Hydrogeen cars are really good idea. But if cars go around spewing water instead of smoke, then won't the weather be affected as well. Some placees in Arizona now have humidity because of their back yard pools. I just don't see this as an anwser. and anyways how am i supposed to drive a string ray without gas.

shakran

no they're not a good idea at all. Hydrogen does not exist by itself for very long at all in nature. It wants to combine with other molecules, such as oxygen to make water. To make the pure hydrogen these cars require we have to crack the molecules, which takes a HELL of a lot of energy. That energy comes from coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants. You put more energy into cracking the hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen when you use it as a fuel. Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy producing medium.

In short, a hydrogen car will pollute far more and waste far more energy than a gas-powered car. The only difference is that the pollution/energy waste happens farther up the fuel chain than in a gas car.

The ONLY reason Bush & Co. are endorsing hydrogen cars is that a common source for getting hydrogen is methane, which is a by-product of oil wells. It's cheaper to get and more expensive when sold than oil is. In short, Bush's oil buddies stand to make a frigging FORTUNE if hydrogen cars become popular.

wakelagger

Also, electric cars don't seem like the best idea either. Sure the car isn't emitting pollutants when you drive it, but think of coal powerplants that have to produce the power that you suckaway in the car's incredibly long charge times. Also, if the battery dies, getting rid of that beast full of acid and toxins will not be a walk in the park. But then again, car companies have pretty much killed this idea.
Personally, I think car's should all have air-hogs type engines. Nothing like pneumatic power.

MSD

Hydrogen and electric cars produce more emissions and consume more fuel than regular cars.

The hydrogen comes from gasoline, so guess what? You pay gas tax on it.

Electricity comes from burning the fossil fuels that aren't being put into your car.


The clear answer is the gas-electric hybrid, which is far more efficient and clean than any viable alternative.

Peryn

i Absolutely agree. For now.

At the moment, hybrid technology is THE way to go. Its cleaner and more efficient than our alternatives. Long-term though...not sure its the best. As our technology advances i think fuel cell technology, solar, whatever... will be the way to go. But until then, i hope they pour more research into hybrids. Would love to get a high performance car that was clean and fuel efficient.

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shakran

you might. Rumor has it that Honda is working on a hybrid NSX. 400+HP and 30-40mpg. That should be entertaining!

pocon1

However, I believe Honda is working on solar powered devices to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Obviously, this is very slow and expensive, but it is a potential source to be investigated. But right now, the costs are prohibitive.

mystix

i say we revert to diesel and kill all the trees. Wait, I mean hybrid.

stingc

If fusion power ever works out, then the water->hydrogen bit won't be an issue anymore. That's probably not going to happen very soon, but it'd be nice to have the technology when it does.

mr_mcrafe

I 100% agree. More efficient vehicles would also decrease the problem, i.e. less Hummers and F250s doing 10km commuting runs every day.

In the future, I guess solar power or something. There's that possibility of a giant solar power station in space that beams down power to Earth, without the atmosphere in the way to weaken all the solar rays.

Tidal power maybe too, or wind...

mystix

with bush's initiative to take all the tritium from the moon, we can get those fusion cars out.. only problem is we need some good cold fusion.

Charlatan

Hydrogen is a problem only if we get our hydrogen from fossil fuels or use fossil fuel or nuclear power to get it.

Unfortunately this is how we make electricity these days.

More money needs to be spent on improving:

a) renewable resources (wind, solar, geothermal and tidal)
b) methods of storing this power (better batteries, flywheels, etc.)

One of the ways of storing this power could be hydrogen but I don't think it is wise to get involved in hydrogen just yet. If we go down the hydrogen road now it is too soon. We are still too dependent on fossil fuels and nuclear for us to make a clean break (unintentional pun there).

Electric cars or even hybrids can be made way more efficient but so can our energy generation in general.

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stingc

Even if we go into orbit and have perfect solar panels, and perfect method of transmitting that energy back to earth, its still only possible to get around 1.4 kW/m^2 out of solar panels. In imperial units, that's a whopping 2 horsepower for a panel 3 ftx3ft square. The world's energy will never be supplied from orbit in this way. *Maybe* a huge array on the moon, but that's way way into the future. By that time, fusion should work, which is very efficient, and essentially non-polluting (unlike fission).

Hydrogen cars will put out water, but water is a much more natural component of our atmosphere than all the stuff that comes out of normal cars. At least if we get the hydrogen from water, we're not adding anything new to the atmosphere. We're changing its distribution, though, which will have some consequences. The larger problem (as mentioned) is producing the hydrogen.

Another thing to note is that "renewable energy" also has environmental consequences. If we relied heavily on, say, wind power, weather systems would probably change dramatically. We'd also have a lot of dead birds. You can't take energy out of a system without changing it.

All things have consequences, but its kind of pointless for us to argue here which ones are more worrying. I don't think any of us here have real data to back up the claims of which energy source is "better" than another (myself included).

shakran

If we get hydrogen from water, we have to expend energy to do it. That energy comes from fossil and nuclear fuels. It still pollutes, and worse than a gasoline powered car because it takes more energy to extract the hydrogen than you get out of straight gas.

BigTruck1956

Actually, i believe that currently much of our hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas. Fuel cells themselves use hydrogen far more efficiently than an internal combustion engine that would burn that natural gas (or gasoline) would. For reference, internal combustion engines are only about 15% mechanically efficient--the remaining 85% of the energy is lost in heat while fuel cells can ptentially be 60% efficient in electricity generation.

more info here

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shakran

the hydrogen comes from methane. The energy to release the hydrogen from the methane comes from fossil fuels and nuclear power.

While a fuel cell is very efficient in using the stored energy in hydrogen, the process to GET the hydrogen is grossly inefficient. The net result is that you expend less energy just using gas than you do making the hydrogen, then using the hydrogen. Hydrogen cars are a scam fronted by the oil companies because methane is found in oil wells and is cheaper to get than oil is - so the oil companies don't have to buy new land in order to make huge new profits.

Tech

not true. the energy in most electric cars come from the braking. rather than turn the kinetic energy into heat on your brakes, it stores it as battery energy which fuels the acceleration.

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Dixie_Wrekked

this thread is a vault of knowledge, i never knew the downside of hydrogen cars untill now

shakran

Nope. Regenerative braking gives the car SOME energy back, but most of the car's energy still comes from the wall outlet.

Think about it in terms of physics. If you put energy into the car to make it go, some of that energy is lost due to heat, friction (which is really just another form of heat) etc. You then store kinetic energy by braking, but you can't capture what you've already lost, and you can't capture what is lost in braking due to heat - regen. braking doesn't change the way the brakes work at all. They still generate heat. Regenerative braking actually uses the rotation of the wheels as a generator to feed power into the batteries. So you're still losing energy to the friction process of braking.

Put another way, if the car started with 10 units of energy, drove for 1 mile, and then came to a stop, and had 10 units of energy still, you'd have a perpetual motion machine on your hands.

vapusforever

Personally I think that Hybrid cars are the way of the future. They are a gradual shift from the usual that people will be more willing to accept. A hydrogen power or purely electric car is quite a jump from what we are all used to and will take at least 2 decades to become the status quo.