cars.blogs.ca — Several months ago at the Tokyo Motor Show, Honda introduced a wind cheating, earth friendly, fuel cell-powered concept called the FCX. Several weeks ago in Detroit at the NAIAS, Honda quietly announced that they would build a production vehicle based on the FCX concept.
Feb 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
osbjmgFeb 7, 2006
@repler - Mind the details, God is in the details. Just reading and complaining about headlines is masturbatory.
dwatchFeb 7, 2006
I just love the arguments on these hydrogen vs. gas threads. Lots of misconceptions, half-truths, even myths, stated as fact. Everyone seems to be an expert, and no one really is, especially not me. However, I have been following these developments very carefully for the last decade or so. Some things I've learned in the past few years....Yes, hydrogen is only an energy 'carrier', but so is gasoline. Its simply a carrier of solar energy that struck the earth millions of years ago, creating vegetation, which was then subducted into the earth, where it was pressure cooked into crude oil. Every fuel out there is an 'energy carrier'... don''t let that term confuse you. It is the net energy-in vs. the energy-recovered efficiency you need to look at. Also important in the argument of 'whats best', is the total damage to the environment the process of converting energy to the carrier then back again. So far, a renewable energy source (wind / hydro / solar / wave / biomass) that converts water to hydrogen (and then the hydrogen back to water in a fuel cell) looks like its the least damaging in the long run. Using stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons has one massive drawback, we are freeing into the atmosphere all that carbon trapped with the hydrogen. Also, depending on who you talk to, oil will run out one day. Everyone has a different opinion about when, but most agree we are using it faster than the Earth is generating it. Even if it doesn't run out in the next century, I don't want my children living with the results of yet ANOTHER century of releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Free cooking oil will not be free if everyone starts using it. If there is a demand for something, they (the restaurants) will start charging for it. In fact, in most big cities, fast food chains are already selling their used oil. Its normally only small mom-and-pop dinners or small towns that don't already have a used cooking oil reclamation plan already in place. As far as using veggie oil for every vehicle application in the future, I don't think that will happen if there is a clean, easy to use, cheap hydrogen solution. We might use the oil for things like jet fuel or large ships engines, or other applications where the lack of efficient combustion is offset by the concentration of energy per volume. Using natural gas for the source of hydrogen might not be an ideal solution right now, but its the best one we have, today. Once we get weened off the internal combustion engine, the next step is to free ourselves from the gas pipeline. Once there becomes a critical mass of customers using hydrogen, there will be incentives to research and market home/commercial hydrogen production using clean energy. By the time that happens, the technology to convert water to hydrogen will be much more efficient, giving us economically viable options. There will always be a cost of energy to convert the water to hydrogen, that's simply the law of thermodynamics, but the overall cost to a consumer will drop, due to mass production, better efficiency, and government incentives, and new technologies that we can't conceive of yet. Did you know they are working on a hydrogen producing algae that eats animal waste? Its already here, its only how much it costs to set up the plants versus how much they can charge for the hydrogen (and lack of a strong consumer base) that's stopping them from going into full production plants at this time. Hydrogen stored in a massive, lightning attracting, fragile, flammable bags floating hundreds of feet from the ground is dangerous (Hindenburg argument). Hydrogen stored in metal tanks in your trunk, especially in hydride form, is safer that that metal tank of highly explosive gasoline. Consumer storage of hydrogen has progressed in the past decade or to from storing it in crygenic form, then highly pressurized, then low pressure tanks, then chemically, now, and most exciting, in metals in the form of hydrides. They can store more hydrogen per square centimeter than anything else, except the cryo method. Obviously there are no statistics on the safety of a lighter-air-gas vs. liquid fuel in a car crash, since there isn't a large enough base of consumers that have hydrogen to make it statistically valid, but common sense would say that lying on the pavement in a puddle of flammable fluids waiting for a spark is far more dangerous than a gas that floats away from the scene of the accident and and dissipates very quickly. And, it does no damage to the environment after the crash... bonus!
andreoFeb 7, 2006
It's about time. I've been waiting for fuelcell technology to come to the general public for years. I tried like hell to get in on the fuelcell beta for the home from a company called plug power. If this comes out in the states in the next couple of years I know what car I will be buying next.
deuteriumFeb 8, 2006
Screw this eco-crap, the sky is falling, psudo-science, calcium deficient, Vegan, BS. You can have my V-8 internal combustion GASOLINE engine when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
gigavikingSep 14, 2006
This is PIMP. I'm hounding Honda dealers to get me on a reserve list now.
yournewsnowApr 21, 2012
I like the idea of using hydrogen powered cars but I truly believe the way of the future is pure electrical cars. With the battery technology improving all the time, they will replace gas cars in the not too distance future I think.