So that airstream concept? Yeah, turns out the drivetrain is actually a working series-hybrid fuel cell system that is already running around in an Edge prototype. And we will apparently be seeing this prototype later this month at the DC autoshow.
So this is basically the same set up as what's in the Chevy Volt with the gas generator replaced with a fuel cell. Its basically an electric car, with some kind of power source strapped on to keep the batteries topped up. What's great about this "series hybrid" set up is that whatever's doing the generating stays in a steady operating condition, constant rpm, or constant voltage and current. This means mad efficiency. This allowed ford to use a smaller and cheaper Ballard fuel cell.

It'd be sweet if we got a hydrogen powered series-hybrid Edge, as well as a regular gas powered series-hybrid Edge. With a series-hybrid, its not too much of a stretch to swap out your power source for something else, provided the logistical stuff isn't too bad, like as long as you have room for it and so forth.
That would mean basically an Edge EV with similar specs to that Chevy Volt, and that wouldn't really be all that far off from something produceable.

Here are details on the Airstream and its drivetrain:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/01...hev-funmobile/

 

The Edge is a sweet vehicle, if they introduce a hybrid model it will only sell it even more. I made a stop at a local dealer to see the purple color and vista roof and they had tons of people looking at it. My local dealers have said they have had a lot of interest in the Edge.

 

I was reading on the BMW V12 motor that runs on hydrogen...think it was in "Automobile," and I guess is not very efficient....as in....30 gallons....yes 30....of liquid hydrogen only has a range of 125 miles...it aslo had a small gas powered heater to heat the hydrogen befre cumbustion cause it is so dang cold!....I cant wait till they get this figured out, cuase the final design is going to be cool!

 

hydrogen car are never going to be produced.

 

I hope you are wrong Kevin

 

Why, Lalo? We're going to find an alternative to gasoline eventually, I'll be pleased if it's something other than hydrogen.

 

What's wrong with Hydrogen? Its abundant, its byproducts are heat and water vapor, and there' several maturing storage and distribution technologies already out there.

 

I still think it sounds insanely dangerous...but hey...if it can be done...I will gladly welcome it. I refuse to buy E85 becuase I dont want to them to give up and to stop working on the Hydrogen combustion becuase E85 does well.

 

I almost agree with Kevin. I wouldn't say i hope a Hydrogen car is never produced... If they work things out i'm all for it. But i kinda doubt its our best bet, and i hope we don't waste too much money on the technology before we figure it out.
There are MANY things that are wrong with hydrogen, and you can find out about that in many places. "Who Killed the Electric Car" is a great movie, and "The Hype about Hydrogen" by Joseph Romm from the DOE is a great book, he's also had some good articles in various science magazines and stuff.
Basically it comes down to this. Hydrogen is maybe on a universal scale, very abundant, but on our planet, its all locked up in other molecules, and it takes energy to get it out on its own. So that means its not a source of energy, but rather its a kind of battery, a place to store energy. You put energy into making it, then you get energy out of it when you burn it in an ICE or a fuel cell.
As a battery, its pretty ****ty, making the hydrogen is not a very efficient process, transporting the hydrogen is not an efficient process, and storing it is a *****.
Electricity and batteries are just so much better in so many ways... but i don't wanna ramble too much. I just thought that maybe you haven't heard any reasons against hydrogen so i should give you the heads up.

It's too bad that a lot of prominent figures and politicians don't really know understand these issues and just see "hydrogen" as a word that'll make a lot of voters happy.

 

1. Its not "insanely dangerous." There's already many safe storage, transport, and refueling systems maturing. Not the least of which are fuel cells wich use hydrogen-rich fuel instead of pure H2. When there's a global spike in demand for commercial generation of Fuel Hydrogen (see #3), storage and transport technology will be mature enough to dramatically reduce the risk.

2. The problem with the energy efficiency argument aginst Hydrogen is that it focuses on a closed, zero-sum system. Yes, you need power to extract Hydrogen such as from electrolysis or steam-reforming. And burning H2 or using it in a fuel cell won't produce alot more power than that which was consumed. But a nationwide Hydrogen infrastructure would more likely use Biomass or perhaps even commercial nuclear sources.

3. The future of power generation is Hydrogen. Sooner or later a viable commercial Fusion plant will come online and kick off a wave similar plants worldwide. All those plants will most likely use Hydrogen and/or Hydrogen isotopes as fuel, and produce far more energy that is required to generate Hydrogen with even the most energy-intensive methods. When that happens there'll be commercial fuel-hydrogen generation. So the question is: does the auto industry lead and start toward H2 while we're still fossil-fuel reliant, or do they wait until Hydrogen utilities spring up to take it up.

The shame of H2 is that noone privately has invested the dollars to drive innovation in the field, relying on government boondoggle spending to spin its wheels and accomplish nothing.

 

I definitely agree that a hydrogen as a fuel is not "insanely dangerous". I mean, gasoline explodes too! In an accident, if the tank leaks, the gasoline pools, whereas if hydrogen leaks, its way lighter than air and will harmless fly way up into the atmosphere.

But to me, all this talk of hydrogen being the wave of the future relies on there being absolutely no progress in the field of battery technology. We're already at a state where we can deliver electricity to a home, use that electricity to charge up batteries, and use those batteries to propel a car much farther than your average person drives in a day. Think of where we'll be in 20 years, when the most optimistic promoters of the hydrogen economy see mass produced hydrogen cars hitting the streets.

True, electrolysis is probably one of the least efficient sources of hydrogen. And yeah, i've heard of processes where hydrogen is produced directly from nuclear reactions, without electricity as an intermediate step, making it much more efficient overall. To me hydrogen rich fuels are also a great possibility, although i'm not convinced that method could meet the capacity required to fuel all of transportation. Either way, both of those methods require the transportation of H2, which is not very efficient considering the energy densities involved. Either you need to compress the gas to pretty intense pressures (safety issues and cost and weight of containers), or you have to refrigerate it (energy issues). Not only do you have to worry about this for the tankers, but also onboard all the vehicles using the gas. And that issue alone is at least on par with the issues of storing energy in batteries at reasonable weights and costs for the required amount of energy, as a lowly engineering student like myself sees it (i'm not trying to pretend to understand all the issues at hand though...).

I think what i see as the most attractive use of hydrogen is producing the stuff as close to the end user as possible. If we can use onboard reforming, or say a small electrolysis unit at your home or at a fueling station, you'd skip over a lot of these inefficient steps. If its electrolysis, you can use off peak electricity from the already existing electrical infrastructure to make your hydrogen, at the same time providing load balancing for the electrical grid.

About there being mass produced hydrogen to fuel fusion reactors... First of all, don't assume we'll figure out the whole cold fusion thing. They've been saying it's just around the corner for half a century. I'm still hopeful, but I'll believe it when I see it. Secondly, how much hydrogen will fusion plants actually need? I always though it wasn't that much at all. Here's how i understood it.... You fuse hydrogen into helium, if mass we're conserved, you'd get exactly 4 times the mass of hydrogen in helium, when really the mass of the helium you get is about 0.7 percent less than what you'd expect. That missing mass has been converted to energy through Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2. So 1kg of hydrogen = 0.007kg of disappearing mass = 0.007 * (3x10^8m/s)^2 = 6.3x10^14 Joules... that's 630,000 giga joules. To put that in perspective... that's about 90 Mustang GT's putting out their peak 300hp non-stop for an entire year... on one 2.2 lbs of hydrogen. (300hp = 224kW, 224*90mustangs= 20160kW=20160kJ/second, 20160kJ/second* 31,536,000 seconds/year = 6.36x10^11 kJ/year).

I know I have a pretty weak understanding of all the intricacies of fusion power, (which doesn't even exist yet!), but this is just an order of magnitude, rough calculation to get an idea of the scales involved.

So if a fusion power plant only needs 1kg of hydrogen to create this ridiculous amount of energy, the amount we would need for our fuel cells (which is a non-nuclear reaction, hence you don't get that sweet Einstein equation with the factor of (300,000,000)^2) would be soooo much more than what would need to be produced to fuel these hypothetical fusion plants, a completely different order of magnitude. Wikipedia says the average total human power consumption of the entire planet is 13.5 TeraWatts.... by my, presumably shoddy calculations, that would mean 0.0214 kg of hydrogen every second... or less than 700 tons a year to power ALL of humanity!

Okay, all that ridiculousness just to say that, i don't think its safe to say that, well, they'll be making hydrogen anyway in the future for fusion plants, lets just take some of that for our cars, cause the amount we'll need for our cars will completely eclipse how much would be going into the fusion plants.
All that being said, if we get cold fusion worked out, we're golden, our energy issues are just about forgotten, all we gotta worry about is not killing ourselves with plants that explode and stuff.

Okay, sorry i ramble a lot.
Hydrogen's cool, just don't put all your eggs in that basket, its definitely not a sure thing.