I ran across this article on Yahoo news.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060303...a_060303000158

Within the last few months we've heard a lot about E85. Bush even suggested it in his state of the Union. I threw the question of alternative fuels on this message board a few months before that to see what people were thinking. The majority seemed to think E85 was a dead end and was a "energy loser" or a "carrier" at best. There WAS in fact a study done that said Ethanol lost more than it gained.

In a recent post, someone brought up the so-called "mona lisa" plant, where competitor's cars are disassembeled. They also said that GM was turned off by the complexity of the Prius and didn't focus on hybrid technology.

Well, I've been thinking about this for a while before I saw this article. It always seemed that GM was not as concerned with Hybrid technology, as it was with alternative fuels. In the article, GM and Toyota are no longer going to be working on Fuel Cell technology because GM is taking it from Research to Development.

Sooooo.... While Toyota is ramping up to hybrid technology across their product lines, is GM going to introduce Hydrogen and jump the gun so to speak? If Hydrogen will be more mainstream in 2025 and cheaper than gas/hybrid, then GM will have a clear advantage over other car makers. Maybe the reason GM hasn't been developing super fuel efficient 4 cylinders and hybrid for those cars is because they have something better in developement.

 

Not true.....

http://web.camaross.com/forums/showp...9&postcount=61

 

Alright, honestly I think E85 is a viable alternative. Especially if the refinement process uses a renewable resource such as wind power, hydro-electric, or even nuclear (which is not really "renewable"). The study I was referring to was done a number of years ago and the refinement process has since been tweaked I'm sure. Before the 1st of the year, all I seemed to hear was negative comments on E85. BUT.... I'm getting away here. The focus is Hydrogen. Like I said in my original post it seems GM has been putting less stock in Hybrid, and more research on Alt fuels. (including E85)

GM has been stressing E85 a lot this year, is Hydrogen right around the corner and we don't even realize it?

 

It would only seem to make sense, neither GM or (to a lesser extent) Ford are overly concerned with Hybrid cars at this point. It would only stand to reason that they feel hybrids are not a good long-term solution, and are working toward something truly revolutionary. If they get it done, get it out reliably and practically, it could really blow the lid on the auto industry and start turning some perceptions (cough, Consumer Reports and their disciples) around. I hope so!

 

The vast majority of gas stations don't carry e85 currently. Look how long it is taking to get that moving. I really doubt we will see hydrogen cars by 2010-2015.

 

Cars should run on hydrogen. But that should be the deuterium and tritium isotopes and they should be fused together in little reactors.

 

I don't think I will hold my breath for that.

 

Hydrogen powered cars have existed for decades now - it's just a question of extraction efficiency, distribution, implementation, and economic scales tipping enough to make hydrogen cost effective enough to justify the industry moving over.

 

It would be nice to see all the tree-hugging greenies switch to GM hydrogen/e85 cars, especially after the perception of GM has been that is produces gas-guzzling, unreliable junk for so many years.

also

It'd be fun to see a commercial where GM compares it's E85 and Hydrogen powered cars to the Prius and offers data suggesting that GM's products are far more helpful to the environment than Toyota's.

 

Hydrogen will kick the hybrid *** for sure

 

hey! gas guzzling is fun...thats what makes HP! and iv only ever owned a gm and all have been very reliable machines. m friends with chrysler and ford have a different story about their vehicles.

 

Call me crazy, but I think Hydrogen is a dead end.

You've got a car with compressed hydrogen at gazillions of PSI in a high dollar special pressure vessel, that due to the size of the Hydrogen atom, will eventually leak out of the system anyway. Then, you realize that hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. Then, you realize that the range is terrible.

...Seems to me that if you're willing to deal with a 100-200 mile range, an electric car can do just about everything as well. That doesn't even account for any advances in battery technology.

 

E85 may be a net energy loser but not by a whole lot. And as said, it requires almost nothing in added cost to deploy on existin gasoline powered vehicles. Hydrogen on the other hand is a GROSS net energy loser. And if you think a Prius is complex, a Hydrogen powered platform is an extra order of magnitude more complex than that. Not to even mention the filling station/process.

Just thinkg about it. Nature did not intend for Hydrogen to exist in its pure form. If it's not bonded to Oxygen or Carbon, it's ALWAYS an ion. Which means its gonna find a "mate" in a hurry (unless we're talking like, plasma physics). And since the electrical/magnetic force is much stronger than the force of gravity, a Hydrogen ion is pretty much guranteed to find a "mate" within nanoseconds. It takes A LOT of energy and clever engineering to keep Hydrogen from being promiscuos. How Hydrogen ever made sense as an energy storage medium to ANYONE in the engineering community is something that's always baffled me.

Anyway, unless there is a new hydrogen extraction processess underway that uses energy from the sun (as in light energy), I would put out of mind any practical applications of a "hydrogen economy" and GM "leapfrogging" the competition with this.

 

I think they are storing H2 which has a net charge of 0 instead of anions and cations. H2 does occur naturally but due to its low mass it simply rises out of the atmosphere. Now lets say you find a way to store H2 without risk of explosion OR leakage, like with a medium in the 'tank.' The tank has a metal lattice structure in it so the partial charge on the polar H2 has something to form partial bonds to. That means it is safe to store AND will be safe in an accident. Sounds good to me. Now lets say you can take and use a special filter, maybe it is chemical or something, that pulls only O2 and O3 out of the atmosphere, O3 being ozone which is more than plentiful in cities with lots of smog. You simply channel the O2 and O3 into your fuel cell where it combines with H2 to form H2O or H3O+ either way it is less harmful than NH3+ and other emissions that we spew into our atmosphere every day. The electricity produced by this powers electric motors, same way that an electric car is powered.

So really what you are looking at is what is a better storage medium? Chemical or Hydrogen. Obviously GM knows something we don't about how Hydrogen because they have invested TONS of money, even now, into Hydrgen and its future.

To be truthful I don't know which is better and I don't think my opinion really matters at all. What matters is that GM is thinking outside the box and has shown off things that other manufacturers were totally caught off guard about, the skateboard storage and fuel cell system being the biggest. That is what matters to me because GM is taking a chance and doing something different which they feel will really pay off for them in the long run.

 

I want a warp drive with a Flux Capacitor in my car. C'mon GM, do it!