Sahimo Hydrogen Vehicle Gets Over 1,300 mpg 453
Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
Not too impressive. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
It won't, it will get crushed and people will die.
Just like when any other compact car gets hit by one of those behemoths.
Hint: I don't think it's funny idiots are allowed to drive contraptions like the hummer on public roads. It makes me want to buy a nice second hand tank to even out the odds.
On the other hand, it seems that, at least, the age of the hummer is finished. Not even the Chinese would buy it off GM, for a measly 86 million.
Per liter, why is that hard? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure you can find some nice radioactive thermal generators that have under a liter of fuel in them. That will get you a hundred thousand miles per liter easily.
Re:Yeah just wait... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The real question (Score:5, Interesting)
Americans drive many more miles per year on average than Europeans, hence more chances to get killed.
Don't forget to mention that you allow sixteen year olds driving cars.
Re:Per liter, why is that hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but most cars don't require a NRC license to own/operate/sell.
Under current NRC rules, you could be held responsible if you sell the car and:
The new owner wrecks it, causing contamination.
The new owner takes it apart and manufactures nuclear weapons and/or contamination-based weapons.
The new owner sells it to people who do the above.
The new owner gets rid of the car by driving it off the local dock or into the local rock quarry.
Why we should ban hydrogen powered cars (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than what you get back out of it. You can't make this at home. But you can make electric power at home, for free.
Hydrogen fuel necessitates a distribution network exactly the same as for petrol. This is why the oil crazies in the Bush regime pumped money into hydrogen and nothing into electric, even as electric cars worked and people loved them to death.
Plus, it's unbelievably explosive - in concentrations between 2% to 98% it's explosive. So you either must have none or very close to 100% hydrogen for it not to explode. Now, when gasoline turns into a vapour and creeps along the ground then explode if lit you can get a 30 foot or more radius is vapour with corresponding explosion as the vapour ignites. And gasoline is a fairly heavy dense molecule compared to hydrogen which is the lightest molecule known, and since it's really a gas, unlike gasoline which will sit there as a liquid for days, hydrogen turns from a liquid to a gas in much less than one second.
If you have a tank with 5 gallons of hydrogen and the tank is ruptured - and eventually this absolutely is going to happen one day - then the resultant break and explosion would very much on the order of what is definitely not conducive to human life. That is, you'll be ok unless that tank goes, then you're pretty much a goner, much more so than with gasoline.
Between the fact you have to buy it from the oil barons and can never make it your self for free and is the most explosive substance known, yeah, hydrogen is great. Not.
I think if we knew what we were doing we'd immediately stop anything to do with hydrogen cars and stick to electric. Keep in mind before the oil companies paid the car companies to stop making electrics, there were more electric cars than gas powered cars on the road in the early 1900s.
Re:110 kilograms (Score:5, Interesting)
Mile per litre only matters when you actually compare it to gaoline power in an equivalent vehicle.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf [optimumpopulation.org]
The math simply isn't there. 2.3L of H2, even using our best portable fuel cells to equal 1L of gasoline. Complicate that with storage costs, refrigeration, transdportation issues (how do you pipeline something that needs to be kept as under -240 celcius or at over 930 ATMOSPHERES of pressure?) and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.
If the math was better, if we could make and store H2 for say 10% of the costs of using gasoline, then it might be worth the costs and risks to build the rest of the infrastructure, but here's another tidbit: Filling a fuel cell vehicle tank with enough liquid H2 to travel 200 miles TAKES 4-6 HOURS! (unless you're talking running a full refrigeration system in your car, and keeping the feul liquid by temperature instead of by pressure).
Well, we can't keep using gas, can we? Actually, yes... See the research from dotyenergy.com. The problem is we're using gas from OIL. This is CO2 that ISN'T in our atmosphere yet. If we could use CO2 from EXISTING sources (sequesterd CO2), and run that through an RWGS/RFTS process (in use since WWII), we can use wind energy to MAKE fule, clean, cheap, safe, fule that adds no ADDITIONAL Co2 to the atmosphere. This CAN be done for about $60-80/bbl depending on the local market. It can be made right here in your own town, the process is so safe it barely even ping on the EPAs radar (about as polluting as your local corner gas station, except a plant makes anough fuel to support about 10,000 drivers), and we could have it TODAY! (this is all proven science, not pipe dreams).
Doty has figured out how to simply put all the pieces together. Actually, he did that 20 years ago, and then spent the next years figuring out how to make each piece of that puzzle more symbiotic to other pieces, how to make those pieces more effieint, and in the end got 60 World patents issued for the technology.
All they need not is a measly $5m to build a true scale plant (instead of a lab experiment), to actually prove to the world on a large scale that the number do in fact refelct the science we've been using for 50 years... simple.
After that, anyone can buy a fuel plant (150-250m), hook it up to a small wind farm, (175MW or so), and make tens of thousands of gallons of fuel a day. Big Oil can't have a monopoly. We don't have to import fuel. It;s cleaner fuel (no sulfers or other contaminants, since we're starting with only H2, CO2, and H20.
This is a dream process. But, since it;s not a BIO-fuel; since it uses H2, but NOT as a fuel source itself; since it USES wind, but doesn't develop wind energy; since it makes gasoline, not an alternative fuel (actually, it makes ethanol, propanol, methanol, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons, which are seperated and used for multiple industries); since it's not a hybrid car technology; they don't qualify for a single current government program to help fun their first small scale plant. they need investors... (or pressure on the government to give them a grant).
Read their research (you can buy a copy of ALL of it for about $100, not $5,000 like other charge, and it's the COMPLETE process and design made public...).
I am NOT an investor, nor am I copmpensated in any way by Doty or any affiliates... I simply want this technology to see the light of day. They've asked experts to scrutinize it, and noe have found errors. They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process. This IS real, they just need money...
Re:Why we should ban hydrogen powered cars (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree completely. A few points though: We can NOT use the same ipeline systems... We either need pipelines capable of sustaining 980 atmostpheres of pressure, or pipelines refrigerated to not more than -241 celcius. and that pipeline would need to move 2.3 times as much H2 as it currently moves gasoline.
This assumes we're piping Liquid H2. If we're piping gaseous H2, and compressing it on-site of storage, or as it goes into taker trucks, then we'd need pipelines with as much as 1,000 times the capacity.
Here's an alternative that uses Wind energy, waste (sequesterd) CO2, and a 50 year proved scientific process to make GASOLINE at $80/bbl. www.dotyenergy.com. That CAN use our current pipelines and gas stations, and our current cars, and THIS gas releases NO NEW CO2 into the air than is alredy there from opther sources.
Unlimited, cheap, gas that can be made here at home, and can't be controlled by massive monopolies.
Re:110 kilograms (Score:5, Interesting)
then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing
It was a while back when I saw a demonstration of the safety of hydrogen vs the safety of gasoline (Mythbusters maybe?), but you're already driving a bomb. They shot a tank of hydrogen with a high caliber rifle, and not much seemed to happen; the gas just escaped. When they shot the gasoline tank, WOW!
As far as explosions are concerned, gasoline is WAY dangerous.
They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process
Old patents are worthless; patents expire after 20 years.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
1. The technology/designs they come up with will still occasionally apply to more traditional vehicles, so that's useful. Allowing such small and slow vehicles makes costs lower resulting in hopefully more experimental entries.
2. You aren't in it (and I'm not either) but I suspect there is a market for pure commuter vehicles. One person only, small, just needs to get the person from home to the train/bus/whatever car park (or even all the way to work, though in the US commute distances are so long that market is probably very small). Small becomes an advantage in the parking lot as well. Basically motor cycle replacements that aren't horrible in bad weather. Need to be cheap of course, since they'd be in addition to the family car.
I'm sure there are more cases for which such competitions provide useful outputs.
Re:The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
I've lived and driven in the US (mostly California, Arkansas, and Florida) and the UK (Brighton), and I'd say that urban and suburban driving in the UK is much more challenging. Though I had driven in the US for 10 years without incident, I had to take driving lessons in the UK to pass the driving test, mostly because of the smaller streets and constant need to pay attention to road conditions. In the US, you can often just assume that you can drive down a street, without having to worry about oncoming traffic, pedestrians, lane markings changing, etc. There is lip service paid to the notion that stuff will happen in front of you and you have to pay attention, but it rarely actually happens. Driving in the UK required constant vigilance.
The US also tends to have a lot more suburban sprawl with multi-lane boulevards and 40-50mph speed limits. Most of the city/country breaks I saw in the UK went straight from 30mph city to 60mph country.
On the other hand, my experience on highways and motorways is that they are roughly the same in lane sizes, markings, signage, etc. But the big difference is that in the UK, people drive roughly the speed limit, give or take 5 or 10 mph. In the US, it's not uncommon for the dominant speed to be 15 or 20 mph over the posted speed limit. I think that's a big reason why we have higher fatality rates.
Re:The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it just means that you've got more space here to be a moron without getting into trouble.
I've driven in the US, Canada, and Europe. I can confidently say that you can take your eyes off the road in the US/Canada for a few seconds, and you'll probably still be in your lane, unless you have no concept of physics.
In Europe, if you did the same, you'd have run into something in that few seconds. There was a place I saw in England a few years back where a pub actually stuck a foot or so into the road. The road was obviously built before everybody had cars, probably widened a bit when the car became common, and it was widened right into where the building was.
You can see it on Google Maps right here:
http://maps.google.ca/?ie=UTF8&ll=53.645615,-1.849557&spn=0.000714,0.001725&t=h&z=19 [google.ca]
Roads in Europe were built to provide the easiest way for foot or equestrian traffic to travel. They frequently go around hills, clumps of trees, and such, and probably follow what were footpaths many centuries ago.
Roads in North America, on the other hand, were built mostly after the car was invented, and were built in a straight line, because your car had no problem climbing over a hill.