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GM's Billion-Dollar Fuel-Cell Bet
nakhla writes "Wired is running a lengthy article detailing GM's billion-dollar effort to invent a radically new fuel cell vehicle. The interesting part is that GM's engineers are no longer trying to squeeze a fuel cell engine into a traditional car design. Instead, they're building a completely new type of car from the ground up. No gears, clutch, braking hardware, etc. It's all drive-by-wire (computer controlled). Even the engines are located in each of the 4 wheels. It's a fascinating read, and the article outlines economic reasons for such a car, as well as environmental concerns and practical uses (imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car). For anyone remotely interested in the future of automotive technology, this article is very interesting."
An interesting point to note is that fuel cell cars, once mass-produced, may be more competitively priced than one would expect. There *are* federal subsidies for alternative-fuel vehicles. The reason hybrid cars are so expensive is that because they still use gas some of the time, they're technically not alternative-fuel vehicles. Stupid loophole standing in the way of progress.
Best of luck to GM!
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The Honda Civic Hybrid is a hybrid fuel vehicle (gas/electric) that looks just like a regular 2003 Honda Civic.
Now you can whine that you don't like the Civic's look, that it's too small, or whatever, but you can't whine that they're all too unconventionally styled.
The funny thing, of course, is that odds are today's hybrids are just ahead of the curve, sytle-wise. And not just for fuel economy reasons. We've been moving toward more rounded shapes for a couple decades now.
Design News had an article about this type of car in January. You can find it here.
Umm, you have any idea how much energy the average car uses up? If you drive 12,000 miles a year, at 20 miles/gallon, that's 600 gallons of oil or about 14.5 barrels, energy content = about 25,000 kWh per year (see this Conversion table). So your car is using about 4 times as much energy as your house. If you drive a lot and have a gas guzzler it's probably 10 times as much or more.
GM's idea is actually a pretty good one - it could easily be much cheaper to power your house from the fuel cell in your car than from the electric grid (high efficiency and no transmission losses, and no middle-men).
Energy: time to change the picture.
Boeing already built a vehicle with electric power and motors for each wheel, 30 years ago. It is, of course, the Apollo Lunar Rover--three were used on the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions.
(To my surprise, the LRV didn't use a fuel cell, though fuel cells were used for other applications on Apollo.)
It's called a catalyst. Or an enzyme if you're feeling biological. If you did any school-level chemistry you'd know that an exothermic (gives off more heat than it uses) reaction can have an energy-of-activation that requires more input energy than you ultimately gain.
:-)
Think of it as climbing a 10 foot wall and finding an 18 foot drop (ie 10 feet + 8 feet). You had to "climb" 10 feet to get 8 feet lower than you were. This is not a good engine, since inefficencies in the procedure (yield and heat mainly) will not gain you sufficient energy out to warrant the effort.
Now use a catalyst. This is the equivalent of one of those wall-knocking-down big balls. First you smash the wall with the catalyst, then you jump down 8 feet. Much easier, and you just gained 8 feet for next to nothing. Even with your inefficiencies, you gain energy. At least, that's the plan.
The only requirement is that the reaction must be exothermic, and a suitable catalyst must exist. The cool bit is that a catalyst is not consumed in the reaction. It just helps the reaction along - it's all down to geometry
You can play with the temperature and pressure to maximise the yield by changing the partial vapour pressure (I think - this was some 15 years ago now!)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
In a nutshell, safety and emissions regs.
Each airbag on a modern car costs about $1000, and it's against the law to build a car that doesn't have one.
Add another $500 or so worth for the catalytic converter, but at least the catalytic converter doesn't need replacement after a fender-bender.
Finally, add in the cost of designing the equipment into the car, plus the cost of filling out the paperwork to ensure that the design's approvable by all of the myriad of state and federal officials that pass judgement.
(And you can add another $4-500 if it's an SUV and it's gonna be sold in California next year. :-)
Are you a physics troll?
This is true as you said for _exothermic_ reactions, but converting water to Hydrogen and Oxygen is not exothermic. If you could produce Hydrogen and Oxygen from water using less energy than you get from recombining them you would have a perpetual motion engine. Too bad you can no longer patent such a thing.
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I don't think the article is suggesting that they will eventually consume less energy than the hydrogen will eventually generate, but if they make the process more efficient then they might get the same amount of energy back, or you might get 90% of it back. The point is, you may pay a 10% penalty to convert an immobile source of power into a portable one, but you will probably get that back because the original source of power can be cleaner and more efficient.
The power source could be wind, solar power, or hydroelectric, which have less emissions. Any of those will be more efficient than a gasoline engine. Even if it is coal, the emissions don't have to be released in residential areas. Also, since the power station is immobile, you can scrub the emissions better. You don't have to worry about the guy with a hole in his muffler and a leaky gas tank who just doesn't care about the environment.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
I'm no scientist, but it seems to me that hydrogen might make a bigger bang than diesel fuel.
:)
That's why you're not a scientist. Diesel fuel is a hell of a lot more explosive than hydrogen.
There's a reason that gasoline vehicles are allowed thru tunnels but campers carrying a propane bottle are prohibited.
Yes, and that reason is because propane is heavier than air. If the tank leaked, you'd have this nice puddle of gaseous propane floating around, never really disapating. Imagine that x1000. Gasoline fumes are lighter than air and will disapate much faster.
Although why you suddenly brought up propane when the article/discussion is talking about hydrogen, I really don't know. They're about as different as.. well, gasoline and propane
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
To be real, they could mound the four motors to the chassis and run CV axles to each of the wheels. That sounds reasonable. They could still incorporate steering and braking via the motors.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
As you say, hydrogen can be produced in a variety of different ways. Anything from fossil fuels to algae to windmills. This means that it doesn't matter where the energy comes from. When fossil fuel is cheap, your car can run on hydrogen produced from fossil fuel. When geothermal is cheap, your car can use geothermal hydrogen. The market will decide -- we would no longer be 'locked in' to a single energy source. Hydrogen is to gasoline what Java is to assembly language, if you will.
I've heard this before: imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car... what are they talking about? Cars don't generate power.
What they meant was, you could drive your car to the hydrogen refueling station, then drive it home and use it as a generator to power your house. Of course this only works until your car runs low on hydrogen, then it's off to the station again to refuel....
So what power are these cars supposed to be harnessing? Great reservoirs of hydrogen of which I am unaware?
You'll note that 75% of the Earth's surface is covered by H2O... which contains a lot of H. Of course, it takes some energy to pull the H away from the 2 O's, but that's okay, because there is a huge nuclear reactor about 93 million miles away that provides us with as much energy as we could ever need, 24 hours a day. Actually making practical use of these resources will require some engineering, but all the ingredients are there in abundance. And for the shorter term, there are less direct methods of producing hydrogen (as noted above).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You can't be very serious about promoting and advertising a car that cost more for you to produce than its retail price.
...
At least, not for long
D