BMW Shows Off World's Fastest Hydrogen Car

loid_void writes "According to Reuters and others BMW unveiled the world's fastest hydrogen-powered car at the Paris auto show on Wednesday, dubbed the H2R, capable of exceeding 300 kilometers (185 miles) per hour. The are also working with Shell on hydrogen dispensing stations. '"Our drive toward the future is called hydrogen," BMW management board member Burkhard Goeschel said before the tarp slowly slipped off the teardrop-shaped body of the sleek race car.' All I want to know, does it come with an iPod hookup?"

Comments

next step...

[Coneasfast]

Hydrogen is obtained either from fossil fuels such as natural gas or by applying electrical power to water molecules. Ecologically, the problem of finding a regenerating source of primary energy remains.

let's see now if you can develop the world's cheapest car ;)

Isn't -

[thewldisntenuff]

Hydrogen pretty dangerous stuff? I mean, I know it's quite explosive....(From what I recall from freshman chem :) ) Does anyone remember the Hindenberg?

Which brings my question - how do you stablize hydrogen so it's not so explosive?.....A car accident could spell disaster if not properly contained...Or am I wrong?

-thewldisntenufff

Re:Isn't -

[DavidTC]

That's the gag. You have a gas leak while your car's sitting in the garage, you might have a mess and possibly a flameout.

You have a hydrogen leak, and someone walks in and flips on the light switch...

I hope, if they're going to do this, they're at least going to have the sense to perfume the hydrogen, like they do natural gas, so we can go 'Oh, crap, hydrogen leak' and run like hell.

I don't really understand the logic of hydrogen cars. If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant?

I mean, I'd understand if we had some magical source of hydrogen, and we didn't want to lose power though the overhead of power transfer and batteries...but we don't. We have absolutely no way of getting hydrogen, outside of fossil fuels, that doesn't use up more electricity than we put into it. I've never heard of any way even proposed to get said hydrogen.

The entire concept is completely illogical, it sounds like someone realized you can burn hydrogen and get water, slept through an enviromental film, and built a 'clean' car. Hey, I can build a car that takes a continual supply of D batteries, by that logic it's a clean car.

And I have to point out the same applies to anything, thanks to thermodynamics. Everything on earth either exists at the lowest energy state, or at least will stay there if we make energy from it. We can't go around breaking up H20 and burning the H to get power, and anyone who's ever had any physics will easily explain why.

The only exceptions are things that are ultimately powered by the ouside, such as solar, wind, water, and tidal power. (Although geothermal, while a closed cycle, is not incredibly likely to run down in any measurable time. And the same with fussion and fission.)

Not if well designed and tested

[stryders]

I wouldn't compare a giant bag full of hydrogen to a modern car engineered by a company well known for its safety engineering. Here's an older article that discusses their safety (scroll a bit) on CNN

How to keep it cool?

[Dog's_Breakfast]

From the BMW web site:

"...the specially insulated 140-liter tank for the liquid hydrogen provides a range of 400 kilometers....By cooling hydrogen to -253 degrees Celsius, hydrogen is shrunk to a thousandth of its original volume. 70 layers of aluminum and fiberglass sheets between the exterior and interior vehicle walls insure that the liquid hydrogen remains at extremely low temperatures."

What I don't understand is how they manage to keep it at such a low temperature. If the tank warmed up to the normal temperature of the surrounding environment, the pressure inside the tank would be 1000 times greater than sea level. Wouldn't that pose a danger of explosion?

Re:How to keep it cool?

[MillionthMonkey]

The 70 layers of fiberglass probably do a good job. The temperature will decrease linearly from one Al pane to the next as you go in. Of course this would imply a temperature gradient, so heat is flowing in, but very slowly (because of the fiberglass) and as the hydrogen warms up I would imagine they have a pressure regulator to let the system burp out a bit of gas once in a while. That robs the liquid of a lot of heat from the PdV term alone. My guess is that if you wait long enough all of the liquid will evaporate to the gas phase and escape via the regulator, and the interior temperature will increase once the hydrogen is gone.

"Hydrogen power" is still a ripoff. What we need are nuclear cars. That would solve the carbon emissions problem, and everyone would be nervous and drive more carefully so it would save lives too.

Mazda has a hydrogen-powered rotary

[ikekrull]

Mazda's rotary engine is well suited to the combustion of hydrogen, not least because it completely separates the intake, combustion and exhaust stages - with a piston engine there is a lot of potential for catastophic backfire, and high performance without any valve overlap (which would somewhat prevent this) is difficult to acheive.

The renesis (side-ported intake and exhaust - 'normal' rotaries have peripheral exhaust and often intake ports and intake/exhaust port overlap is employed to maximise performance at high revs, resulting in the characteristic 'brap-brap-brap' pulsing idle of a race or drag rotary engine and incredibly poor fuel economy at low revs) rotary engine doesnt suffer from this problem, allowing high-revs, aggressive induction and exhaust port profiles, along withthe light weight and excellent power-weight ratio rotaries inherently possess.

The current hybrid engine in the RX-8 only produces about 120hp when operating on hydrogen which isn't exactly stunning, but bear in mind that the original RX-7 produced less than this, while the last model to roll off the production line produced in excess of 280.

400+ HP is relatively easily acheiveable with proper porting, fueling and turbocharging of the 1.3 litre 13B engine on petrol, and with further development (or even tuning for hydrogen-only operation) it is not too far fetched to imagine the hydrogen-powered rotary performing on par or better than conventional fuels.

More info can be found:

http://rotarynews.com/?q=node/view/216

and a hydrogen--powered RX-8 looks like:

http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/frame.php?file=pi c. php&imagenum=1&carnum=1792

Nice looking cars

[InsaneCreator]

Car companies keep showing us all theese incredible looking prototypes, but why won't they sell us a car that looks the same? By the time a new car makes it to the salons it looks almost exactly like all the other damn cars you can choose from, and attaching a baboon's but to the rear end is considered to be a bold new design direction. yech.

I'm surprised to be hearing anything about this

[Phil Karn]

I'm a little surprised to be hearing anything about hydrogen cars these days. Hydrogen fueled cars were heavily hyped a few years ago when the automakers were strong-arming the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to drop its near-term mandate for electric vehicles in favor of a promise for a few magical hydrogen-fueled cars some years in the future. The scam worked: CARB rescinded the EV mandate, many working EVs were pulled from their satisfied owners, and that's why you hear so little about hydrogen these days.

The simple facts are that hydrogen is not a source of energy, but rather an energy carrier, like electricity. And hydrogen is a rather poor energy carrier at that; it's far less efficient than the electric power grid, which already exists and goes almost everywhere. Hydrogen isn't even a good energy storage medium in a car, due to its extremely low density.

The fact is that there's nothing a hydrogen fuel-cell car can do that isn't already done better, more efficiently and more cheaply by a battery EV. Just when new battery technologies like nickel metal hydride and lithium-ion were starting to prove their worth in EVs, CARB pulls the rug out from under them.

Call me cynical, but that seems to fit the facts.

The dangers of gas powered cars

[Xenna]

In Holland about 5% of all cars on the road (and the ones that get the most mileage) run on Liquid Petrol Gas (LPG). My car is one of them. LPG is used in the rest of Europe as well.

I have never heard of an exploding gas tank, the tanks are apparently so solid that they crush everything around them but stay intact themselves.

Forgetting to unplug the nozzle while filling up happens relatively often. There's a special weak spot in the tube that breaks in such cases. Also you have to keep a button on the gas pump depressed for the pump to operate. Release it and the gas flow stops. Driving away without unpluggng is harmless (except to your wallet). I've never heard of accidents with pumps.

There have been some accidents with LPG delivery trucks that supply the gas stations. I believe there was big one near a camping ground in Spain quite a while ago.

I can understand driving with a gas tank in your car may seem scary to people who aren't used to it, but we do so without worrying over here.

Of course, I don't know how Hydrogen compares to LPG for these purposes. That might well be a whole different story.

X.