The flatbed truck should have had been painted green or have wild weeds growing from the flatbed.

M.O.D.O.K.

And in other news Al Gore is green.

GiltProto

HYPOCRITES!!! that's the worst way to portray the eco-friendly hydrogen cars! i cant believe it!

Charging_Mooses

It's the thought that counts.

e-friend

Using hydrogen itself as a fuel source is pie in the sky thinking. The infrastructure simply is not there for widespread adoption any time soon. My bet is straight electric cars will come a lot sooner in mass production than hydrogen cars will. We need to build a few power plants though if we hope to not have brownouts in the middle of winter (let alone summer).

thor79

fail

killermicrobe

Does anybody seriously think we'll care about these cars in 2020?

pdok

If you haven't read the Wired article that the article links to, read it. Extremely interesting, and sounds a lot more doable than hydrogen. It's a long read (10 full pages), but the ideas expressed are revolutionary.

e-friend

Sadly hydrogen is a means of fueling vehicles is a costly and time-wasting diversion created by people who want to ensure that electric vehicles never get to the consumers.

Whereas hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe it is one of the least abundant elements on planet earth. As a result, to make hydrogen you use electricity - in other words hydrogen is a very expensive and complicated battery. In tests the same vehicle running on hydrogen and then on battery (a hydrogen vehicle is after all an electric vehicle) showed far more efficient energy usage when running on battery simply because there is no energy wasted converting the gas to electricity. not to mention that you bypass the whole fuel cell construction.

The fact of the matter is that big companies (read "oil" and "car") want to ensure continued monopoly when it comes to fueling and maintaining our vehicles. While combustion engines and now fuel cells require regular and costly maintenance, electric vehicles are virtually maintenance free and can be fueled from anywhere. No wonder they are doing everything in their power to prevent these snappy little things to ever hit the road.

And don't even get me started on Ethanol - the dirtiest and most inefficient of all fuels, abandoned in the 1920s because it was less efficient than coal-powered cars!

mor10

I'm all for getting off oil for vehicles, but as replacements for it go, hydrogen is a particularly stupid one. It's incredibly expensive, inefficient, impractical, and hardly even that much better environmentally.

1. Both the hydrogen itself, as well as the vehicles to put it in, are very expensive. Below are the words of Takeo Fukui, the president of Honda, who are arguably the leaders in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles:

"Mr. Fukui said the cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce, though he said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase."

[www.nytimes.com]

2. It's not efficient, because at every stage of getting the energy originally in the form of natural gas or electricity to actually move a vehicle forward, we lose even more energy, and there are many steps other than just the production.

3. They're not really practical, as we'd need to build a huge number of expensive new filling stations (the inherent chicken & egg problem), then use even more energy shipping the hydrogen to them, and since large amounts of hydrogen are difficult to transport safely, the cost is again increased.

4. Finally it's not much better environmentally, if at all, since we tend to either make hydrogen from natural gas (thus emissions), or water, which uses more electricity than the hydrogen produced will ever give us.

[www.thenewatlantis.com]

How about rather than screw around with hydrogen, we get the energy we can make efficiently, cheaply, and with few emissions (electricity), and use the efficient, ubiquitous, and cheap distribution system we already have (the grid) to get it to vehicles instead.

julian

@thor79:
Electric cars will have similar problems if they tried to do a tour like this given only Oahu has a network of rapid chargers. Unlike hydrogen, of course, they can still charge, it will just take longer without rapid chargers. Best alternative is to use a genset trailer:
[en.wikipedia.org]

Much less pollution than flatbed trucks.

I have much more confidence EVs can overcome their obstacles for widespread adoption than hydrogen cars. Who knows in the future though.

stopcrazypp

The US power grid was built at the same time relatively speaking all over the country. While all connected at some level, the national grid is extremely inefficient. If it was redesigned from the ground up, electric cars like the ones mentioned in the Wired article would be even better.

Back to reality. A national grid will never be made. Too expensive, too much time, too much existing infrastructure.

The same is true of our communications networks, but that's a different issue with an equally unreachable, though obvious (see above paragraph).

e-friend

So with such a large event they couldn't make prior arrangements for more stations to be open? Nice.

subino

Weird timing - I just got done watching "Who Killed the Electric Car" - and was about to do some research on the claims made in the movie when I found this post. I'd recommend giving it a watch if you want a simple intro to the EV program.

phitool

If you follow the companies backing hydrogen, you would understand why it's not a good idea.

We already have electricity delivered throughout North America at industrial and commercial buildings at 208, and then households downgrade that to 110.

Increasing electrical production and efficiency will be a much more rewarding venture than hydrogen.

Hybrid vehicles let the cat out of the bag, and the eyes of many consumers have been opened to the idea.

Plug In Hybrids are the next step, and then complete Electric Vehicles.

Gas and Diesel will always be around, until we find alternatives to go 300 miles per charge/tank, we have to burn some fuel.

Bio Diesel and Ethanol should only be considered if waste materials are being used for the production process, otherwise they put strains on the food supply.

skulldriveshaft

Wait - the future is hydrogen-powered Buick Regals with busted front-ends?

JacquesAss

cant wait for Agassi's cars to come out, I'm definetly on board in Tel Aviv

User Formerly known as Arelar

I read the Wired article about Agassi.

I hope his ideas come around.

strider_mt2k

ah, its so good to see Americans living up to their true blue nature. Seriously this is typical of how Americans, and people in general, are. They are all talk with very little action or follow through. Its half-hearted and media whoring nothing else. People talk about "global issue and environmental awareness" (yuck) and then go to their homes with A/C , 5 tvs, three computers, to many air breathing kids that play with their Chinese made toys (one of the biggest polluters in the world) , eat the food grow with chemicals and hormones, while day surfs the net for porn, mom sucks on a cig and their three gas guzzling cars sitting in the driveway.

Oh, I love propaganda and fear mongering. YAY GO GREEN!

rjupiter

@stre: If only there was a way to power a generator with a turbine powered by compressed air that can be contained in a vehicle no larger than what we use now.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

At this point, hydrogen is as stupid an idea as ethanol for powering cars. let's have a show of hands: who has a stockpile of hydrogen lying around? anyone? oh right, it's not found just lying around. we need electricity to make it in large quantities. piece of cake, right? i mean we've got plenty of electricity to spare. oh right, most of that shoots crap into the air, which is why we're going to hydrogen in the first place. i guess we're in quite the predicament then. let's revamp the power production infrastructure first. and let's not pretend that we can do it all with wind power or some such nonsense. we need an intelligent mix of power sources. germany moved away from nuclear and invested heavily in wind. now they have to keep gas-fired plants running 24/7 because the wind isn't constant and the power grid is too unstable. guess who's reinvesting in nuclear?

ethanol? easy-peasy. we've got iowa to grow all the corn we'll ever need and then some, right? oops. we'd need nearly all of the plowable land in america to produce the amount of ethanol required to supplant gasoline.

bottom line: consumer vehicles are not the largest users of fossil fuels. we should do what we can to make them cleaner and more efficient, but let's put the big bucks into replacing the aging coal plants with something a little greener.

stre

Please stop with this excuse. It can be made solely with solar and water...

2. It's not efficient, because at every stage of getting the energy originally in the form of natural gas or electricity to actually move a vehicle forward, we lose even more energy, and there are many steps other than just the production.

wcnghj

@Kaiser-Machead: how do you propose to compress the air? takes electricity to run a compressor, and since no machine is 100% efficient, more power will be used to compress the air than can be extracted from the compressed air. the only way this would improve the situation is if the difference in efficiency of compressing the air (including both the compressor and the power plant creating the electricity to power the compressor) and using an internal combustion engine was large enough to make the process as a whole more efficient. i'll believe it when i see it. (this argument assumes the current mix of power production: mostly fossil)

stre

@stre: Yeah I know. If only there was a way.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

@JacquesAss: i like the idea. now we just need figure out how to get the car started! i propose that everyone moves the top of a hill.

stre

@stre: How do you propose to compress the air? You mount wind-turbines on top of the car!

Duh.

JacquesAss

Et al,

I read a very good article about hydrogen in Scientific American quite a few months ago.

Hydrogen is not the way. The article pretty much nailed it.
Hydrogen is a monetary exchange only. You cannot find free hydrogen ready to compress, you need to separate it from water (the easiest source) and compress it to transport it. Compare that to regular fuels that need almost no processing and have huge energy returns.
Hydrogen molecules are very small compared to natural gas.
Natural gas lines currently loose 1 million cu.Ft. of NG per day due to leaks in the system (a tiny amount by all means of the total volume moved).
If we were to use the NG lines for Hydrogen you would leak so much that the planet would get hot in NO time. Hydrogen is a much worse green-house has than CO2, and many others.
There is no infrastructure to transport hydrogen. The cost associated with making one "without leaks" will never be recuperated.
The amount of power (energy) stored by hydrogen is very low, even in liquid form... which would be nearly impossible and dangerous to have in a vehicle.
Refueling is a risky manouver.

There are many other nono's to hydrogen....

The article did say that there are ways to use hydrogen that might make it possible to use in the future such as using materials to trap hydrogen so it's stable and non-explosive, to be able to release the right amount to fuel cells and then use the electricity... etc.

As far as burning it, or using it directly in a fuel cell. Keep dreaming. The energy stored is hydrogen is not enough, unless you want a vehicle that is mostly a fuel tank for 1 driver only, otherwise the typical 4 person sedan will only carrry you less than 200 miles. Not good by today standards.

Hydrogen is a currency. Not a fuel.

Very interesting article...

aec007

Hydrogen is NOT a fuel *SOURCE*

HoseHead

Like all projects... the entire effort on this hydrogen car project has conveniently ignored the 'Maintenance' aspect... "we never learn". ... back to basics and earlier the better.

honk4RC