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."

Comments

More info at designnews.com

[bartyboy]

Design News had an article about this type of car in January. You can find it here.

A car uses much more energy!

[apsmith]

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).

Re:Just waiting for them to repeal the 2nd law

[God! Awful]

What if you could make your own hydrogen out of water, right in the garage? The technology is already available; you electrolyze water by more or less running a fuel cell in reverse.At the moment, this takes more electricity than the hydrogen would ultimately generate.

I just can't wait until they can fix that problem!

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

Let me clear this up for you

[freeweed]

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 :)

Re:Where does the H come from?

[Jeremi]

Can someone explain where the hydrogen comes from for these fuel cells? I've heard a variety of things, but no one seems to commit to anything.

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).