Car Of The Future

[Chris Dance]

The car of the future. Quite amazing what folk will be driving in 20 years time. Our present Prius will be old museum cars. Click link below.

http://www.flixxy.com/gm-hy-wire-concept-car.htm

[Seamaster73]

"Introduced at the Paris Motor Show in 2002, General Motors hopes to have this "car of the future" in affordable production by the year 2010."

Uh-huh.

[Grumpy Cabbie]

In 1992 I went to the motor show in Birmingham and took photos of all the future concept cars.

Not one of them looks anything like any of the cars on the road today, nor do most of them look desireable either.

Things change and so does styling and customer demands. I want to see what's just round the corner, available in the next year or two, otherwise it's just some car designers pipe dream.

[Seamaster73]

Nothing dates faster than a vision of the future. Just watch any fifties sci-fi movie.

[Phoenix999]

Hydrogen power and wired controls are not really cutting edge technology.... If this car actually goes into production I doubt it would be a success anyway. After all it is the concept of GM

[Grumpy Cabbie]

And is it me or is hydrogen flawed and over hyped? It is abundant in the universe but is also very energy intensive to produce and very difficult to transport and store.

Definitely sounds like an idea put forward by the oil companies to keep the status quo and encourage us all to visit their garages to fill up. Electricity in Battery powered vehicles is still restricted by range, but it's getting better and there are concept vehicles out there that go for significant distances on a single charge.

Interesting times ahead.

[Sagitar]

And is it me or is hydrogen flawed and over hyped? It is abundant in the universe but is also very energy intensive to produce and very difficult to transport and store.

Definitely sounds like an idea put forward by the oil companies to keep the status quo and encourage us all to visit their garages to fill up. Electricity in battery powered vehicles is still restricted by range, but it's getting better and there are concept vehicles out there that go for significant distances on a single charge.

Interesting times ahead.

You are absolutely right. Most of the commercially produced hydrogen comes from natural gas using a process called steam methane reforming. It gives more energy per kg than petrol, but is so light that it needs to be liquified to get the volume down and even then needs a tank about four times the size of the petrol tank for equivalent range. There is a lot of experimental work aimed at storing it as a hydride so that it doesn't need high pressure storage vessels, but the hydrides available currently are only about 6 to 12% hydrogen, so the storage vessel gets even bigger.

All the optimistic stuff one sees about the hydrogen economy is based on the use of wind, wave or solar to create cheap electricity in order to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis. That is a long way off. It is a pig to store as a liquid. It is almost impossible to stop it from leaking and it evaporates at quite a high rate, even with good cryogenic storage - 1% per day is often quoted. So the capital cost of storage and transportation infrastructure of liquid hydrogen would be enormous. The schemes that I have seen written up tend to be local - for the tractors on a farm for example - using animal and vegetable waste for the production of methane and steam methane reforming to produce hydrogen. I understand that there are already some farms in Germany using hydrogen for their tractors, but I cannot see it for motor cars for a long time yet.

It might work for a local cab company attached to one of these self-sufficient farms?