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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.
Here it comes, the world's newest hydrogen-powered automobile... there she is... the technicians are attaching the hose... OMG!!! OH, THE HUMANITY!!!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Umm, getting a machine to run on pure hydrogen fuel was never a challenge. Supplying the hydrogen to the machine, especially via the user, now that's the challenge.
A car with the range for highway driving, which is incapable of traveling at highway speeds...
It's got a top speed of 96 km/h, while typically highway speeds here are around 120 km/h with a speed limit of 100... Do you really need a car with almost 500km of range if the anemic top speed effectively limits it to surface streets?
As it's including all repairs and fuel, it's pretty competitive to petrol based cars.
That's even before going into all the additional benefits like the rather cool and off-beat looks making it a talking piece, the zero-emission part (besides being an obvious environmental benefit it's an issue in certain cities that have pollution taxes or severe restrictions on emissions), and the fact that you can brag about having something very special that no-one else has.
> put in like ten of those fuel canisters in there
Hydrogen is very light, even when compressed. The current 1.5Kg tank probably fills the complete rear end of this car, you won't get 'ten of those ... in there'.
That's a classic problem with hydrogen in cars. Low energy density.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Because adding that much weight (fuel cans, armor, bigger engine) wouldn't completely destroy the fuel economy... nope... not at all.
Its not even that good fuel economy. Hydrogen has an energy density approximately 3 times that of gasoline. So this thing gets the equivalent of 80 mpg. I have a Mitsubishi Miev, and that gets the equivalent of 110 mpg and while it looks retarded, it can seat 4 full sized adults, and still make it up a hill. Or you could go with a Tesla that gets the equivalent of 70 mpg, and can seat 4 full sized adults and still reach mach 1. Riversimple has developed a market failure, nothing more. There is no hydrogen economy. There will be no hydrogen economy. The sooner people stop trying to come up with inferior alternatives to electric cars, and spend their research money improving batteries instead, the sooner we can get on with the future. Electric cars need a small improvement in battery technology, and some economies of scale. Hydrogen cars need a hundred billion dollars in infrastructure. I shouldn't need to point out that it is never gonna happen.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
In the past I have used the Chinese e-Scooters and found them great fun, and at about USD $400 very practical in China. Unfortunately the performance and quality wouldn't cut it in most first world cities.
A few minutes ago the guys from Gogoro turned up here (a major Tawian factory) showing off their SmartScooter. The guy's English wasn't great but I gather it is about a 6KW motor with a top speed of 95kph. I rode up the street, the performance feels like somewhere between a 125 and 250cc motorcycle. At about USD $3K it looks like a very practical and affordable city vehicle. At that price I think I would buy one tomorrow for my city commute if they sold them back home.
Looking at the shape of that hydrogen car I suspect the SmartScooter has more carrying capacity too. Sorry hydrogen, you are too late to the party, your not fooling anyone around here with your vaporware.
Whoever wrote this is (willfully or otherwise) ignorant of the driving conditions on UK motorways. Driving at 60mph is basically impossible - you either have to get in the slow line behind the lorries and go slower, or get in the middle or fast lane and drive ~80mph. Yes, the speed limit is technically 70mph. In most part of the country, nobody gives a crap.
So the range is nearly irrelevant; the car is unsuitable for motorway driving so you won't be taking it any distance at all.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/12/3621136/tesla-elon-musk-hydrogen-dumb/
As Musk explains:
“Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism. It is not a source of energy. So you have to get that hydrogen from somewhere. if you get that hydrogen from water, so you’re splitting H20, electrolysis is extremely inefficient as an energy process. if you say took a solar panel and use the energy from that to just charge a battery pack directly, compared to try to split water, take the hydrogen, dump the oxygen, compress the hydrogen to an extremely high pressure (or liquefy it) and then put it in a car and run a fuel-cell, it is about half the efficiency, it’s terrible. Why would you do that? It makes no sense.”