foxtrapper wrote: Fuel cell cars are really terrible to drive. I've driven them before (and scared a GM rep almost to tears doing it). Throttle lag is several seconds long, and the performance is abysmal. Fuel cells can only get so much hydrogen per minute from the system, and that means only so much energy available. So you go slow. You cannot produce enough hydrogen to run an internal combustion engine of any size from the process.
Presently, comparing a fuel cell vehicle to an IC powered car is unfair, its apples to oranges. The problem lies in the technological infancy of fuel cells, remember they were only achieveing usefulness around Apollo, some 40 years ago, yet funding and research on them has remained stagnant since IC has been the way to go. The fundamental problem of the fuel cell and what's holding back progress is access to large volumes of hydrogen at a reasonable cost. Someone asked aobut using Solar or some other 'clean' power source to crack water to generate hydrogen. The problem is efficencies and scale. Yes the energy reaching earth via the sun is roughly 20,000 times more power than all of humanity consumes: http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/06/14/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth/ , the problem is effiency, and space. We all know solar cells are inefficient, very very inefficient or else we'd all be using them, and they're expensive, the two limiting factors. The second is space. We'd need alot of real-estate to generate enough energy to crack sufficient amounts of water to power our cars. As much as I hate government regulation I actually think the smartest idea would be to regulate housing or commercial construction to have to have a percentage of the rooftops covered w/solar cells. Even though this would add cost to a house (small scale system at 10k), I'd personally rather see this approach, in fact when I build my house I'm planning on putting in a system just because. This would drive the price of solar cells down, and even with their inefficiencies start gaining us a percentage of the power we consume on a daily basis be generated without any environmental impact. I'm not a hippie tree-hugger, quite the opposite, smoke does mean progress, but I think that having my own power source to generate my own electricity would be cool because, hell, then the government couldn't turn my lights off when they demand that I hand over my guns...
wow, what a rant...
