OT: Hydrogen Powered SUVs are Here

You have filling stations near you that can supply hydrogen?

AIUI the hydrogen powers a fuel cell, which in turn powers an electric motor.

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Its all bollox. Most probably you will see the most cost effective solution is to hang onto whatever IC car you currently have and eschew the purchase of any new virtue signalling GreenCrap™ , secure in the knowledge that you have saved far more energy and carbon emissions by not causing a new car to be made.

Hydrogen is 6x less efficient than battery electric and you can't make it at home (which you can electricity with solar PV). So it only really makes sense if power is 'free', which it currently very much isn't.

Leave hydrogen for shipping and maybe long distance trucking where there are fewer options and paying that 6x cost is the least worst option. EV makes much more sense in a passenger car.

Theo

The recent trend of advertising electric cars as portable batteries for your hair drier is amusing.

What happens when an EV runs out of juice after being stuck in traffic on a cold wet winter night on the M25 ?

Adapted IC engines can run on hydrogen.

Same as an ICE car - it stops. Plan ahead.

Even more inefficient! Fuel cell about 60%. ICE 20 - 30%.

Good luck with having a filling station on your doorstep!

You cannot easily adapt an IC engine to run on hydrogen. It’s a terrible fuel to burn in an engine.

Tim

Programme I saw on US Public TV in the 80s seemed to imply that it would require only a simple adjustment to the carb. The advantage that programme was touting (for a hydrogen-powered car), however, was limited to that it would be safer to be next to a hydrogen flame than a hydro-carbon one.

According to several news stories from last month, Shell have closed their UK hydrogen filling stations for cars, leaving just 11 stations on mainland UK and one in Ulster. It is probably not a good choice, even if you live near on of the remaining ones. Its future is not guaranteed.

If all your journeys, there and back, are going to be comfortably within the range of the car and you have somewhere to recharge it between trips, then an electric vehicle is probably acceptable, although they will be losing their exemption from vehicle excise duty from 2025.

If, like me, you want to do occasional longer trips, I don't think the availability of overnight charging points is sufficiently well assured to rely on an electric vehicle, so my choice, should it ever be delivered (ordered last January), is for a plug-in hybrid.

Some European cities already have low emission zones for cars; mine has a green window sticker that allows me into the German ones. I can see this going one step further and there being electric only zones in the not too distant future, so sticking with the current ICE car is probably not a good long term plan.

During WW2, when petrol was rationed, people sometime used to run cars on town gas (which contains H2 among other gases), fed from a bag on the roof.

Providing you start with a direct injection petrol engine, adapting the engine is probably less of a problem than finding the space in an existing car to store enough hydrogen for a decent range.

Much the same as happens to a petrol/diesel powered car in the same situation. The AA/RAC will come equipped with 'get youto the nearest charging point' batteries no doubt.

During the petrol rationing in the 1960's, the workshop manager in our labs modified an SU carb so that his car would run on either propane or butane, I forget which. I think the mods entailed drilling out the jet and making a new, wider needle. A problem he found was that the gas cylinder tended to ice up on the outside, because the gas take-off rate was rather high. But it got him to and from work every day.

You jog along the hard shoulder til you reach a services, then buy a s*it-load of D cells.

There are mobile rapid rechargers available to breakdown services, although on a motorway, it may be safer to recover the vehicle than to sit there charging its battery up.

I would imagine there's a lot more to it than just that. The combustion product is water, so you're going to have issues with corrosion, and not just in the cylinder and exhaust system. It'll find its way into other critical areas so a different oil formulation among other things to allow for this will be needed. I don't think that's around as yet, rendering hydrogen conversions unlikely. Not sure what happens when you burn methanol/ethanol, though. I think that's more do-able than hydrogen.

A s*it-load? Surely 2 would be enough. I mean, you can run the entire grid on