UK Company Riversimple Plans a Fuel-Sipping Hydrogen Car (techienews.co.uk)

TechnoidNash writes: Riversimple has been developing a hydrogen car with the support of a 2 million grant from the Welsh government. The result of their efforts? The Riversimple Rasa. A hydrogen car with a claimed fuel economy of 0.9L/100 km (250 mpg). The Rasa can reach up to 96 km/h (60 mph) and has a range of 483 km (300 miles) on a 1.5 kg tank of hydrogen.

Comments

Re:How is this news?

[geoskd]

Caterpillar and all the other diesel manufacturers are pushing dual fuel engines.

Of course they are. It is a fairly trivial change to go from gasoline to LNG or even hydrogen. They can adapt the existing designs.

Going form gasoline to electric motors is a whole different game altogether. Instead of a host of mechanical engineers (and almost all engineers in the transportation industry are mechanical engineers), you need a cadre of electrical engineers. This basically means laying off a large percentage of your engineering workforce, many of whom are barely more than glorified autocad draftsmen, and replacing them with electrical engineers. Because this would be a whole new discipline for the manufacturers, they would have all kinds of hell trying to get product to the market, and would have to hire top electrical engineers or risk having the project fail. It would quickly mean higher costs and lower margins for the manufacturers. Why on earth would they sign up for that if they didn't have to. Electric vehicles are great for consumers (although the technology is not quite there yet), and great for electrical engineers (especially power systems engineers), but bad for established companies, and especially bad for mechanical engineers (A typical IC engine vehicle has 10,000 moving parts, of which 98.5% are in the engine, or are related to the IC engine).

People talk about an oil industry conspiracy to kill off electric vehicles, but the reality needs no such complex explanation. The simple truth is that the existing companies are not capable of building cost effective electric equipment, so they don't. It takes an upstart in the industry, like Tesla motors, to come along and force the industry to keep up or die. My prediction is that the electric revolution will kill upwards of 50% of the established auto manufacturers, and a similar effect will be seen in industrial and construction equipment soon thereafter.