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UK's Loughborough Uni Demos Hydrogen Motorcycle
rolandw writes "The Beeb have a piece about Loughborough University's hydrogen motorcycle and one of the UK's first hydrogen fuel pumps (presumably all developed by their excellent Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering department). Offering 50mph, the ENV will have a range of 100 miles on a 3-minute refill of hydrogen. By-products are warm air and 'drinkable' water. It will be interesting to compare these hydrogen powered vehicles with the hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles as pioneered by such as the Morgan prototype 'Lifecar' in the near future."
What are the byproducts of producing the hydrogen?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Of course. Everyone knows Loogabarooga is the university in the Jungle Book. One invents hydrogen motorcylces and the other eductates miscreant monkeys. I can see how it's easy to get confused though. :)
One of the biggest problem with non-gasoline powered vehicles is making them reasonably convenient. It's going to be very, very hard to get people to switch to electric cars that they must charge overnight and plan their daily miles accordingly. This bike looks to be just as convenient as a scooter and almost as good as a normal motorcycle. Getting 100 miles to a tank is close enough to what most riders are used to, so I don't see that being an impediment. Ditto for 3 minutes to fuel up. The 50 mph top speed is low for a motorcycle, but normal for many scooters. Given how much more popular scooters have been recently, there is definitely a market for a vehicle like this. Plus, this is a prototype, so I bet that making a bike that tops out at 80-90 mph and is capable of sustained freeway speeds is not a huge stretch.
The only question left is how much does it cost in dollars per mile traveled? I know this is hugely dependent on how the hydrogen is created and therefore the cost of electricity, but all the green thoughts in the world mean nothing to the masses if it is much more expensive than gasoline.
Vehicle not carrying extra protective carapace gets great fuel economy. Film at 11.
If we all drove motorcycles, we would be able to power them off gasoline, because they regularly get two to three times as many miles per gallon as cars. Except that they're wildly dangerous, because they offer no protection in a crash, especially when everybody else is driving cars.
We see the same story in cars all the time: they build a car that's little more than a motorcycle, and by taking away all of the protective (and heavy) metal, it gets huge MPG. Even if there is some sort of useful advance in the engine technology it's dwarfed by just getting rid of all the metal.
So you can build a hydrogen motorcycle. So what? We knew it could be done. All you've done is to offer us a motorcycle that's very safe because you can't refuel it anywhere so you can't actually get it out of the driveway.