Hydrogen Powered Commodores - Not so far away?

[shaggerz]

Hairy Eater: no offense, but whoever claimed that is full of more BS than every livestock farm in Australia combined.

It takes an 8000 horsepower nitro methane powered, 45 PSI boosted 8 litre V8 dragster with tyres as wide as a small car to do the quarter in 5 seconds. (can you tell I went to the Nationals at Willowbank over the weekend)

Hate to break it to you but short of some massive shift in the method used to convert electrical energy to kinetic, no electric car will ever perform as well as your average petrol engine. Some have come close to decent performance, but after a range of 400-500 kilometers need 12 hours to charge, rendering them useless for any long distance driving.

 

[ascension24]

I saw it on tv the other night too, but man 5 seconds, come on, you either 1, have a really bad memory or 2, just like to bullshit. The cars were pulling mid 12's
All they did was take your average small car, deck it out with an electric motor and a **** load of batteries. Nothing new at all.

The thing about electric cars is that they produce max amount of torque straight away so they were quick off the line.

In normal mode they were getting 400ks from full battery life, but they had to change things around for the drags and they would probably only get about 2 or 3 runs because they would drain the batterys pretty much instanteously because of the huge amounts of current being drawn for the drag runs.

And yes they took all night to recharge the batteries.

Anyways check this out, def car of the future. pretty awesome.
http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/54264/Top_Gear_GM_Hy_Wire_Concept_Car.html

 

[1vngal]

Also, these cars themselves are very costly to produce, which in turn will most likely make them ridiculously expensive to run

They wont be expensive to run

Ooops....I meant they'll be expensive to buy!!

*runs off to find the edit button*

 

[Cheap6]

Try searching for 'Tesla cars' for a practical and well funded, if expensive, attempt at an electric vehicle.

I can't see hydrogen happening to any great extent any time soon. For it to be widespread even in 30 years it would have to be ready to go now and it is not. Not even close.

In 30 years time I reckon that we will still be using IC engines to move stuff around but with greater efficiencies and a wider variety of fuels, mostly liquids: alcohols, coal or biomass to liquids, and what is left and permitted to be used of fossil oils. Also methane: CNG and biogas. Pure electric power will be used for shorter intra urban transport only.

 

[davey g-force]

I just saw an article on a new hydrogen ROTARY engine:

http://carsguide.news.com.au/story/0,20384,20472566-21822,00.html

Apparantley the rotary is well suited to hydrogen and can be made to run on both petrol and hydrogen! Sounds promising - Mazda plan to release it in 2008.....pity it's in a daggy people-mover!! :bang:

 

[1991_Vn2nV]

Apparently in America all the Shells are installing hydrogen setups at their service stations... Interesting read on the Mazda, especially about the Rotary's being able to run hydrogen relatively easily.

 

[J_D]

The big problem with everyone going to hydrogen is the additional electricity required to split the hydrogen from water. The only way to reasonably accomplish this is to use nuclear power, as using coal power would defeat the purpose of using hydrogen in the first place(low emissions). I think that if they released an electric car at a reasonable price this would help greatly. I know everyone goes on about range but think about how many people/families have two cars. It would be practical for most of them to have an electric car for going to work/shopping etc and a petrol/diesel car for long haul trips.

 

[Wombat]

One enormous drawback which should cap once and for all any talk of a so-called "hydrogen economy", a term we are going to hear more and more as a catchy phrase...it is going to be used more and more for fuel cells and so-on, yet there is, as I say, one huge problem...
If you have a power system based on coal-fired stations, the enormous amount of power needed to produce Hydrogen means you get less energy out of the hydrogen you have just made than it took to make it...therefore I don't care how clean and green your car is running on hydrogen, it is still polluting more than a big block Camaro with stuck-open secondaries...it's just the pollution is coming from the smokestack of a power station somewhere instead of from the car exhaust.

Electric cars are a great idea for cities...however, see the above reasons about moving the exhaust from the car tailpipe to the smokestack.

 

[1991_Vn2nV]

I dont think Nuclear power is very far away from being a very common and large part of our energy sources anyway.

 

[shaggerz]

the pollution is coming from the smokestack of a power station somewhere instead of from the car exhaust.

You are dead right there. Its frustrating that people so easily jump on the bandwagon without considering that Hydrogen is NOT a source of energy! Its just a means of storing it... We need to talk about fixing the emissions from electricity generation before we can even THINK about considering hydrogen as an alternative fuel for vehicles.

I saw that Al Gore movie, and despite it being incredibly boring for the most part, it does paint a grim picture that suggests that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations, but the disastrous effects will now start to be imposed on MY generation! Thousands die each year in heat waves across the world and each year the temperatures reach new highs... Greenland is showing signs of melting which have occured to islands in the past in as little as 30 days from the point Greenland is at right now. If Greenland WERE to melt, millions would die as the ocean worldwide rose over 10 feet, submerging thousands of square kilometers of previously inhabited land. The maps of the world would need to be re-drawn because almost every country's coastline shrunk my massive amounts.

Anyway I doubt I need to preach the disastrous effects... Point is that something needs to be done NOW... not later... and the only really useful technology we have to reduce emissions by a significant amount is nuclear power... it may not be an ideal solution due to the waste issue, but it sure beats the living snot out of what we are using now.