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."

Comments

1336 MPG

[Anonymous Coward]

1,336 MPG

Still 1 short from being leet!

Re:1336 MPG

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's all good - true leet hackers start indexing at 0.

The real question

[AntiOrganic]

At 110 kilograms, how far will it fly when it gets T-boned by a Hummer?

Re:The real question

[Djupblue]

We don't have that problem in Europe, especially in the richer countries. In Holland it is very popular with cars in sizes from smart cars and a bit larger. Then again fuel here cost about $6.5/gallon. And even while driving much smaller cars than north Americans do we still have less people killed in traffic here in Europe. You are doing something wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

Re:The real question

[Atario]

Joke's on that Hummer -- it'll be shattered by the massive hydrogen explosion.

Re:The real question

[EdIII]

Aside from being a bit judgmental, you obviously didn't read the article did you :)

I've seen electric Barbie jeeps that are bigger than that thing. The average Slashdotter could not fit half an ass cheek in that thing. This thing is merely a prototype to demonstrate their technology, and not an attempt at a practical car at all.

Re:The real question

[clarkkent09]

If you are referring to the first column in that table, it's a bogus comparison. Americans drive many more miles per year on average than Europeans, hence more chances to get killed. Second column "Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km" is a better comparison and US figure very much in line with west European averages. An even better comparison would take into account the average speeds involved in the accidents as I bet US average speeds are higher (much wider roads on average and more highway driving as trips are generally over greater distances). Yes, I know about autobahns but still in general I think that's true.

Note: I live in the US and drive a small fuel efficient car so don't mistake me for an SUV lover, I just hate misleading statistics

Re:The real question

[lxs]

Americans drive many more miles per year on average than Europeans, hence more chances to get killed.

Don't forget to mention that you allow sixteen year olds driving cars.

Re:1300 MPG

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!"

Per liter, why is that hard?

[Rakishi]

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.

Re:Not too impressive.

[Tontoman]

Gases are compressible. Gallon is a measure of volume. Theoretically, highly compressed hydrogen would give you liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen compressed occupies 3 times more volume than gasoline for the same energy. http://www.planetforlife.com/h2/h2swiss.html

Re:Electricity Hydrogen

[MadKeithV]

Electric motors [snip] have 0 risk of exploding

Yeah because lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe!

Re:Electricity Hydrogen

[moniker127]

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.

Shell Eco Marathon, 1246 km on 1 liter

[skeffstone]

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

Re:Not a good measure

[skeffstone]

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

110 kilograms

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:110 kilograms

[Simon Brooke]

you're modded funny but what that means is that the incredible mileage of that car will be cut in half with one overweight passenger, and two people on it will make short of the mpg promises

The solution is easy. Make the land-whale run behind. Then you get incredible mileage and he loses weight!

Re:110 kilograms

[Sandbags]

Mile per litre only matters when you actually compare it to gaoline power in an equivalent vehicle.

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf

The math simply isn't there. 2.3L of H2, even using our best portable fuel cells to equal 1L of gasoline. Complicate that with storage costs, refrigeration, transdportation issues (how do you pipeline something that needs to be kept as under -240 celcius or at over 930 ATMOSPHERES of pressure?) and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.

If the math was better, if we could make and store H2 for say 10% of the costs of using gasoline, then it might be worth the costs and risks to build the rest of the infrastructure, but here's another tidbit: Filling a fuel cell vehicle tank with enough liquid H2 to travel 200 miles TAKES 4-6 HOURS! (unless you're talking running a full refrigeration system in your car, and keeping the feul liquid by temperature instead of by pressure).

Well, we can't keep using gas, can we? Actually, yes... See the research from dotyenergy.com. The problem is we're using gas from OIL. This is CO2 that ISN'T in our atmosphere yet. If we could use CO2 from EXISTING sources (sequesterd CO2), and run that through an RWGS/RFTS process (in use since WWII), we can use wind energy to MAKE fule, clean, cheap, safe, fule that adds no ADDITIONAL Co2 to the atmosphere. This CAN be done for about $60-80/bbl depending on the local market. It can be made right here in your own town, the process is so safe it barely even ping on the EPAs radar (about as polluting as your local corner gas station, except a plant makes anough fuel to support about 10,000 drivers), and we could have it TODAY! (this is all proven science, not pipe dreams).

Doty has figured out how to simply put all the pieces together. Actually, he did that 20 years ago, and then spent the next years figuring out how to make each piece of that puzzle more symbiotic to other pieces, how to make those pieces more effieint, and in the end got 60 World patents issued for the technology.

All they need not is a measly $5m to build a true scale plant (instead of a lab experiment), to actually prove to the world on a large scale that the number do in fact refelct the science we've been using for 50 years... simple.

After that, anyone can buy a fuel plant (150-250m), hook it up to a small wind farm, (175MW or so), and make tens of thousands of gallons of fuel a day. Big Oil can't have a monopoly. We don't have to import fuel. It;s cleaner fuel (no sulfers or other contaminants, since we're starting with only H2, CO2, and H20.

This is a dream process. But, since it;s not a BIO-fuel; since it uses H2, but NOT as a fuel source itself; since it USES wind, but doesn't develop wind energy; since it makes gasoline, not an alternative fuel (actually, it makes ethanol, propanol, methanol, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons, which are seperated and used for multiple industries); since it's not a hybrid car technology; they don't qualify for a single current government program to help fun their first small scale plant. they need investors... (or pressure on the government to give them a grant).

Read their research (you can buy a copy of ALL of it for about $100, not $5,000 like other charge, and it's the COMPLETE process and design made public...).

I am NOT an investor, nor am I copmpensated in any way by Doty or any affiliates... I simply want this technology to see the light of day. They've asked experts to scrutinize it, and noe have found errors. They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process. This IS real, they just need money...

Re:110 kilograms

[mcgrew]

then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing

It was a while back when I saw a demonstration of the safety of hydrogen vs the safety of gasoline (Mythbusters maybe?), but you're already driving a bomb. They shot a tank of hydrogen with a high caliber rifle, and not much seemed to happen; the gas just escaped. When they shot the gasoline tank, WOW!

As far as explosions are concerned, gasoline is WAY dangerous.

They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process

Old patents are worthless; patents expire after 20 years.

Re:Yeah just wait...

[fractoid]

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.

Why we should ban hydrogen powered cars

[rs79]

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.

Re:Why we should ban hydrogen powered cars

[locofungus]

Hydrogen doesn't explode unless well mixed with oxygen. Normally it just burns. (Burning hydrogen is almost invisible so there is a risk that someone might not notice that a leaking hydrogen cylinder is burning) The R101 didn't explode. Neither did the Hindenburg. In fact, despite the hydrogen in the Hindenburg completely burning in less than a minute most of the passengers and crew survived (the diesel continued to burn for a long time afterwards)

Secondly, it's much lighter than air. This means that leaks and flames go upwards, unlike a gasoline spill that spreads out over the ground while it burns.

If the fuel in the Hindenburg had been uncontained gasoline rather than hydrogen it's hard to see how any of the people on board the airship could have got clear in time (and I'd have expected lots of people on the ground to be killed as well)

Tim.

Re:this thing, motorcycles, and safety

[FesterDaFelcher]

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?