On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 10:53 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

And don't forget his promise that we'll all be able to buy Hydrogen-powered cars by 2020 or so. Guess that's how long he thinks this war on terrorism

Don't get it: onboard fuel reforming with methanol is almost done, fuel cells with polymer proton membranes are already good enough (though still being optimized rapidly, particularly in terms of energy density and platinum group metal content) and GM's on the right track with their recent designs. Don't see why it shouldn't hit the markets by 2005.

It's interesting that political science has witheld one of the oldest technologies (Grove started it 1838, Mond and Langer in 1889 attained 6 A/square foot energy density; Bockris publicized it in mid-70s again) from the general public. The interesting part is that we didn't use fuel cell technology on noticeable scale by 1980...

Nonsense. What "political science" do you think was stopping Ford or Honda or Volvo or GM from introducing a hydrogen fuel cell car by 1980? Do you think it was the lack of hydrogen storage technology? Not a Poly Sci problem. Do you think it was the lack of methane fuel at filling stations? Not a Poly Sci problem. Do you think it was the very high cost of fuel cell vehicles even today (in prototype form) compared to conventional fuel vehicles? Not a Poly Sci problem. And so on, for H2 storage tanks, reformers, etc. You are generally free to develop your idea of a fuel cell vehicle and to then try to sell it to customers, modulo some minor issues of safety tests, etc. Don't let weird ideological ideas get in the way of being able to evaluate technologies objectively. "Careful with that axe to grind, Eugene." --Tim May