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Sahimo Hydrogen Vehicle Gets Over 1,300 mpg
Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
1,336 MPG
Still 1 short from being leet!
At 110 kilograms, how far will it fly when it gets T-boned by a Hummer?
Considering that high-school students in the U.S. have built viable vehicles that get over 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline. They should be able to do better with hydrogen.
but I'd rather see a competition that takes regular cars and modifies them to get the most gas mileage. The problem with these uber gas-mileage vehicles is that they're street legal, have no safety equipment, and don't go very fast.
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver? With an electric motor, it is more like 50-80%, depending on the type of vehicle.
You could argue that we're just shifting the dependance (and the green house gases) to power plants- but this would open a door to a 100% maintainable system, it just requires an eventual (much more eventual than current state) shift over to clean power for plants. Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars.
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
Billy Mays is going to bed. He crawls under the covers and says a little prayer...
"Lord, this week you saw fit to take Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson..."
and the Lord interrupts, "BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!"
I'm sure you can find some nice radioactive thermal generators that have under a liter of fuel in them. That will get you a hundred thousand miles per liter easily.
Electric motors [snip] have 0 risk of exploding
Yeah because lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe!
A lot safer than compressed hydrogen canisters- especially considering that the batteries in electric cars are separated to prevent any sort of massive failure. Worst case scenario one out of 6,300 cells pops, and you have to open it up and replace it.
That's the general problem when you concentrate a lot of energy in little space. There are practical differences between fossil fuel, hydrogen, urane and batteries, but the concept of accidentally releasing (converting to pressure/temperature) much of this energy is pretty much the same.
I'm surprised. Why does this 3rd place winner get this attention? If the numbers are anything to impress with, take a closer look at the winner, the Norwegian contribution, clocking in at 1246 km per 1 liter of fuel equivalents. Official Results: http://www.shell.com/home/content/eco-marathon-en/europe/2009/results/app_results_2009.html
Not necessarily. A friend of a friend (I met him, heard the stories and saw the pictures) got t-boned by a dump truck loaded with gravel which happened to run a red light at over 50 mph. He just remembers trying to hold on to the steering wheel as it pulled away from him. Luckily, the guy was seriously into racing. His car was outfitted with a steel roll cage, carbon fiber racing seats and a five point harness... he walked away with literally no bruises. The car, however, was completely destroyed (as in no easily identifiable parts left outside of the roll cage, just debris littered over the street.) He won't drive anything without race-spec safety anymore, but the truck driver isn't even allowed to operate a Tonka anymore.
Again, for all participants in Shell Eco Marathon, including the Norwegian contribution, and the Turkish one, they are allowed to use the amount of energy in 1 liter of petroleum. The unit is not 1 liter of hydrogen, but 1 liter of gas. They use hydrogen which is consumed in fuel cells, but the amount of energy in that xxx volume hydrogen equals the amount of energy in 1 liter of gas. The efficiency of the whole system is reflected directly by how far they get with the fuel they are allowed to take on board the vehicle. UrbanConcept Fuel Cell class: 1st place: 1246 km 2nd place: 804 km 3rd place: 568 km
If you're an average American, your car probably outweighs you by a factor of 10-20 (unlike this lightweight vehicle, which you might outweigh :-). So no more than 5-10% of the energy is moving you as opposed to the vehicle, and *then* you can go multiply by 30-45% depending on fuel, etc.
Also, one of the most common methods of producing hydrogen today isn't electolyzing water, it's cracking methane or other hydrocarbons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
From the article: "The SAHMO is truly a lightweight carbon fiber vehicle, weighting less than 110 kilograms."
The entire car weighs less than an overweight American.
OK, if your car is built to race spec then yeah, you'll have a much better chance. There was an F1 driver a few years back who hit a concrete barrier head-on at around 200mph and he escaped with (iirc) broken legs and a lot of bruising. They quoted his actual deceleration distance as being something like 65cm. If you're willing to spend the money, you can make cars very safe indeed - it's just that no private driver is willing to spend that much.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than what you get back out of it. You can't make this at home. But you can make electric power at home, for free.
Hydrogen fuel necessitates a distribution network exactly the same as for petrol. This is why the oil crazies in the Bush regime pumped money into hydrogen and nothing into electric, even as electric cars worked and people loved them to death.
Plus, it's unbelievably explosive - in concentrations between 2% to 98% it's explosive. So you either must have none or very close to 100% hydrogen for it not to explode. Now, when gasoline turns into a vapour and creeps along the ground then explode if lit you can get a 30 foot or more radius is vapour with corresponding explosion as the vapour ignites. And gasoline is a fairly heavy dense molecule compared to hydrogen which is the lightest molecule known, and since it's really a gas, unlike gasoline which will sit there as a liquid for days, hydrogen turns from a liquid to a gas in much less than one second.
If you have a tank with 5 gallons of hydrogen and the tank is ruptured - and eventually this absolutely is going to happen one day - then the resultant break and explosion would very much on the order of what is definitely not conducive to human life. That is, you'll be ok unless that tank goes, then you're pretty much a goner, much more so than with gasoline.
Between the fact you have to buy it from the oil barons and can never make it your self for free and is the most explosive substance known, yeah, hydrogen is great. Not.
I think if we knew what we were doing we'd immediately stop anything to do with hydrogen cars and stick to electric. Keep in mind before the oil companies paid the car companies to stop making electrics, there were more electric cars than gas powered cars on the road in the early 1900s.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Oi! I resent the blanket generalization. I'm pretty sure I _could_ fit about half an ass cheek in that thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As a sports bike rider, i say: you're probably wrong.
Besides, its a prototype. Production variants will likely compromise the economy for the safety/practicality aspects (having luggage capacity, passenger space, etc).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
They need to change the rules on these efficiency challenges. This vehicle and this vehicle are completely impractical.
The rules need to be:
1)Must carry more than one occupant in a seated position.
2)Must maintain an average speed of at least 30 mph.
Why is it that you "people" have to always dig for something to criticize in an American's post? Where did he EVER mention a monster truck? Where did he EVER get close to talking about large vehicles? He mentions a MOTORCYCLE.
Either I got trolled, or you are just looking for the situation where you can make yourself feel good by bashing Americans.
And for a post with two simple rhetorical questions to get +5 Insightful... What the fuck is wrong with the mods?
My user number is prime. Is yours?