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2006-07-03 20:35:59 · 10 answers · asked by Mortimer Pratchett 1 in Environment

10 answers

As soon as bottled water is cheaper that gasoline. :)

Seriously, cars will never run on pure water. There is no energy available in water. As others have mentioned you can make hydrogen from water and run your car on that. With hydrogen you have two alternatives. It can be burned to drive a heat engine like our current cars or you can power a fuel cell, which creates electricity to run an electric motor. The fuel cell alternative is potentially more efficient but we are a long ways from perfecting them. Also as someone mentioned earlier, hydrogen is not the most efficient way to deliver energy to a car. Energy is lost to make hydrogen from water, more energy is lost transporting the hydrogen from where it is made to where it fuels your car. More energy yet is lost turning hydrogen back into electricity to run your car. Hydrogen in this use is just basically a type of battery and not a great one. More conventional batteries are significantly more efficient than fuel cells.

Probably a better long term solution to the transportation fuel problem is to use a plug in hybrid. You take a car like a Prius that has both an internal combustion engine (or it could be a fuel cell) and an electric motor with batteries. Add a few more batteries so that the car can drive about 50 miles on just electricity alone and an electric cord so you can plug the car in at night to charge the batteries. That allows your car to run just on electricity most of the time and if you need to take a longer trip it can run on fuel. People have converted some Priuses to run this way and can get up to 250 miles per gallon. With that kind of mileage you only need to buy gas once every couple of months. The gas could be replaced by ethanol, biodiesel, or hydrogen, which would allow us to get completely off of oil for transportation. Sweet!

2006-07-04 05:22:36 · answer #1 · answered by Engineer 6 · 0 0

Oh, I am waiting. Hydrogen technology is actually being studied in Canada, but it's not quite there yet. This is actually something I asked recently, the more I read, the more I'm interested. In Germany I think they have an interesting technology whereby the byproduct of Hydrogen (i.e. water) is collected and then broken down again. Very cool!. Almost entirely self contained though I guess that would eventually run itself out. I've worried a little about the Hydrogen technology for vehicles because being Canadian, in traffic jams and at stop lights, signs, etc., in winter I would be extremely worried of huge ice collections there from the water dripping from the tailpipes. But, if the runoff is reused by the vehicle, that works.

2006-07-04 03:52:02 · answer #2 · answered by dreamcatweaver 4 · 0 0

It's impossible to run a car off of water without first splitting the molecules to create hydrogen. Water is an incredibly stable molecule and there are no ways, practical or theoretical, to produce any usable amount of work out of simple tap water (or pure water for that matter). It takes a lot more energy to create hyrdogen gas through electrolysis then you'd get out of it through combustion as well. Chemical conversions allow us to pull hydrogen out of things such as natural gas and use it for an energy source and that is currently in operation although it's not much of a long-term cure.

You'll never run a car off of water, the science says its impossible, industry can't outsmart physics. Best bet is various hydrogen technologies that derive their power from natural gas or from electrolytic conversion through large energy producing sources such as nuclear reactors, solar power arrays, etc.

2006-07-04 07:46:17 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

A company called H tech had a hydrogen converter Major companys wanted it, It was being promoted on CNN for about 2 hours and then they shut up about it , What happened?

2006-07-04 04:14:44 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

as soon as flying pigs retrieve it from the frozen hell.

Or you mean car that uses electricity to make get hydrogen from water? That is kinda less efficient than a pure electric car.

2006-07-04 03:51:17 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

It's not going to happen while the oil companies have control. check out this site, and then you'll know people have tried before'

2006-07-04 05:30:48 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

I'll give it 3 years before the gas companies and all those gov't shmucks kill it !

2006-07-04 03:51:52 · answer #7 · answered by Jo Jo Gunn 6 · 0 0

when gas is $6.75 per gallon give or take a cent or three.

-end
i know stuff

2006-07-04 04:41:33 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

BMW did it. But, they aren't mass producing them yet.

2006-07-04 09:30:15 · answer #9 · answered by Aria 4 · 0 0

get a hair cut then i mite just ask

2006-07-04 03:46:17 · answer #10 · answered by dsfa 1 · 0 0

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