http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/30/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

 

There ya go... $2.2mil a car. Real good and economical.

 

theyre not production cars

 

gotta start somewhere

 

Good way to test a technology and get real world data....And they get paid for it too!!

 

Im just still FAR from convinced that it is physically possible for hydrogen to EVER be economical... I just cant see how it can be produced and used without using outside energy, which defeats the whole point.

 

This was the Goverment bailing GM out after they announced thier money problems this week.

 

The benefit lies in not being shackeled to running cars off petrol. We can use many other resources to produce hydrogen to run cars. If either the gas prices continue to rise or we have some technological breakthrough, at some point it will be a cost benefit to switch.

 

Gas prices, nuclear war, whatever. I cannot see a viable way to use hydrogen as a fuel. It takes more energy to produce, compress, and transport to the end user than is contained in it. That means that while you can have some cool technology demonstrators, you simply cannot use it on a large scale.

EDIT: I just cant understand why the same kind of hype isnt being applied to something more feasible, like Ethanol or Methanol. Those are both renewable, and contain FAR more energy per unit than H2...

 

Exactomundo

I'm really wondering what this deal is with the Department of Defense New military vehicles?

 

if they can get this practical, it would be all that it would take to save their *** and then some. unfortunately we all know that will never happen

 

I would think it would make more sense to first figure out how to produce hydrogen economically w/o fossil fuels.

 

They say the need to find a way to make money...

I see any of these that sell GM is doing well

 

chicken or the egg

both technologies are being researched, just happens that making a car run on it aparently is easier than making the fuel efficiently

 

Nulcear (Fission) Power as employed in todays nuclear reactors.

In the short term (i.e. several decades, until we get other breakthroughs such as much cleaner Nuclear FUSION, cold fusion, or the Vulcans give us the secret of the power source for their warp drive ), Nuclear Fission could easily supply the demands for energy to split Hydrogen from H20 in massive amounts; Hydrogen which could then be stored in liquid form (a lot of folk are working on the how, as the previous poster noted) and released for combustion in a revised version of the trusty internal combustion engine. So we keep our rumbly V8s and we loose the greenhouse gasses. Everyone wins.

The latest designs of Nuclear Fission Reactors, as being built in other countries are far removed from the designs that failed at Ten Mile Island and Chernobyl. But people in this country are still very afraid of the spectre of these old reactors hanging around (understandably so). But we need to get over this and move on to better things.

Then there's the storage of nuclear waste. If the US would commit to reprocessing it's waste (enriching) to be fed back into reactors (as other Nuclear countries do), there would be significantly less high level waste we have to deal with. What is actually left over has to be stored securely and safely at thoroughly modern, cutting edge, armed and fotified containment facilities. 50 years from now we'll have moonshots capable of taking this stuff to the moon where it can then be burried miles deep down under the surface, in specially made super strong canisters placed into specially contructed silos, decaying slowly over the aeons and bothering no-one, since the Moon is dead and will never bear life.

Ok I know... nothing is that simple... lot's of details, multi-multi-trillions of $$$ of research and development by people around the world, but it's doable if the collective will can be found to make solving our clean(er) energy needs a global priority. It sure beats doing nothing, just sitting here burning more fossil fuel, fighting off crazed middle-eastern terrorists who hate us for taking their oil and just being in their countries, taking it up the @$$ from OPEC and heating up the planet for 50 more years... with all the climatic upheaval and human misery and environmental havoc that will accompany it.