sciam.com — When can we expect to see hydrogen "fuel cell" vehicles start to appear in the showrooms down the street? Two main hurdles stand in the way of mass production and widespread consumer adoption of hydrogen ?fuel cell? vehicles: the still high cost of producing fuel cells, and the lack of a hydrogen refueling network.
Jul 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
carlthomasJul 10, 2008
Another technical issue is how to "store" a sufficient amount of hydrogen in the "fuel tank" of the vehicle. As far back as 1980 Mercedes-Benz was running hydrogen powered vehicles on the text tracks at their Stutttgart factory. I had the good fortune to get a demo ride in one of them. The engine was a regular internal combustion engine. Marcedes-Benz at that time handled the storage problem by using a granular metallic hydride in the fuel tank. The hydride could absorb and desorb very large amounts of hydrogen. Thus no "high pressure tank" was required. Carl Thomas, Knoxville, Tennessee