Can I get it with a sunroof?
If so, you first.
Will it cost more than gas though? It costs $5 per kilogram, but that doesn’t really help compare cost to gas unless we know the relative amount it will take to get us per mile etc.
If we only need a little bit of it, then it would be much cheaper, but if we need even a decent amount, it would be much more expensive.
Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is a boondoggle - a pure scientific folly that will NEVER be practical except in the most exotic applications, such as space travel. And it works there ONLY because of its low mass, not because of its efficiency.
Go to a hardware store, buy a plastic 1-gallon gasoline tank, and fill it up at the nearest gas station. Now go get a 1-gallon dewar flask and fill it up with a full gallon of liquid hydrogen, at a temperature of -400 degrees. Forget about how hard it is to get hydrogen, how hard it is to liquefy it, and worse, how hard it is to keep it liquid, which is the only way to achieve a reasonable energy density.
Which tank has more hydrogen in it? The GASOLINE tank, by more than 50 percent!
We might eventually get to using hybrid cars with fuel cells and electric motors, but the fuel will be little different from what we use today - a mixture of light, liquid hydrocarbon compounds. The mixture might be cleaner, purer, and derived from different sources, but when G_d designed hydrogen and carbon he did a REALLY good job!
As for getting us off of the oil teat, hydrogen is a lost cause.
If you add things up, I still think that biodiesel is the best bet, for a whole slew of reasons.
To start with, it is pretty hard to beat a product that is manufactured by microorganisms, in this case algae. All you really need is fresh water and sunlight to grow it. However, you multiply your growing efficiency by adding *waste* CO2 and Nitrous Oxides (NOx) gases. So from the very beginning, you are making money—by not having to expensively get rid of these waste gases.
Algae can be grown on the small or large scale, and South of the Mason-Dixon line in the US, at least 10 months out of the year of continual production, instead of just two or three crops of corn, for example. Some algae are 50% vegetable oil, that are easy to extract into biodiesel. The leftover algae makes good animal fodder, so no waste.
So you make biodiesel. But then you can put it into existing diesel cars, trucks, boats, even trains, without making any modifications to the engine. Diesel engines are as powerful as gasoline engines, are easier to maintain, and are available right now. No new engine to be invented or made efficient.
Biodiesel can be sold in existing gas stations, so no new multi-billion dollar expensive infrastructure across the US.
So from beginning to end, biodiesel makes more sense than any other alternative fuel. It will save America hundreds of billions of dollars, we will still have powerful engines instead of weak little putt-putt cars, and best of all, we can do it *right now*.
Sure, hydrogen fuel cells might work some day. And they might give you are reasonably good electric car some day. And hydrogen companies might put up a hydrogen refueling station in your neighborhood some day. And Al Gore might be president some day. Etc. Etc.
Or you can have a diesel car right now. With a powerful engine right now. And a local gas station right now. And it can run on petroleum diesel or biodiesel right now.
Can I get it with a sunroof?
Good. Build some nuclear and coal plants and let’s switch the whole fleet to hydrogen. Give the oil monopoly as much competition as possible, I say.
It's not poo-pooing Hydrogen because of envirowackos, it's poo-pooing hydrogen as a means of getting us off of fossil fuels.
Hydrogen is a means of storing energy, not making it. The #1 source of Hydrogen for fuel cell automobiles is from petroleum.
Neither solar, wind, or geothermal electricity is anywhere near efficient enough to provide enough energy for our transportation needs, so unless I see 20 new Nuclear Powerplants per week being started in the US, I will continue to poo-poo Hydrogen fuel cell automobiles as a boondogle.
Where is the hydrogen going to come from?
There is actually an excellent source, right down at your local coal mine. When finely crushed coal is fed into a coking plant, and all the volatiles driven off, nearly pure carbon black remains. If this carbon is then heated to about 1,000 degrees F., and superheated steam is injected into the bed, in the absence of oxygen, a form of the Fischer-Tropsch reaction takes place, generating free hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide is separated and used as fuel to burn in the furnaces needed to keep the bed of carbon black at the optimum temperature, and the hydrogen is captured and compressed into the fuel tanks that will be then sold on the basis of weight, to refuel the hydrogen-powered vehicles, by the simple means of swapping out depleted tanks for fully charged ones.
Of course, one of the by-products of this process would be carbon dioxide, but remember, folks, CO2 is plant food, and part of a very necessary process by which life continues on this earth.
And doesn’t this just insure we have plenty of carrots for our supper?
Or we could just go directly to nuclear power, and use the power thus generated to hydrolyze water into its components of free hydrogen (which would be captured) and release the oxygen to the atmosphere, thus bypassing the production of CO2 altogether.
Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs first. And with what we know of atomic power and its use in generation of electricity, a great deal more energy can be extracted from radioactive elements than is now utilized.
The world is NEVER going to run out of energy sources. That is why God made us so smart to begin with.
Hydrogen as a fuel is a non-starter. To carry hydrogen it must either be super compressed (takes lots of energy to compress it) or be stored as a liquid (very cold-hence energy costly) or generated on board which means hauling around the generation equipment.
Right now there is no storage system that can hold hydrogen for any length of time as hydrogen will seep through solid metal. And any flame from hydrogen is invisible unless the hydrogen is treated with some sort of additive.
Public acceptance cannot be ignored either. Even a good idea requires a market and hydrogen has too many proven competitors.
So far there is no reason to think hydrogen will reduce our oil imports by a single drop.
Uhh, no thanks...
Quite aside from the technical problems, which I believe are able to be solved, the thorny fact remains:
Hydrogen Fuel cells are NOT “emission free”. H2 must be generated from some type of massive power plants in order to make this dream reality. Those power plants must run on coal or petroleum, as of today, and until and unless we are able to convince the envirowackos that nuclear power plants must be built as if we were in a race for our life.
“I know some on FR poo-poo such things as a hydrogen fuel cell car on pure politcal as giving into the envirowhackos”
I suspect they get their information from Limbaugh, the only person in the world who can relate information with a straight face in sentences beginning, “My friend at Exxon told me...”
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a means of storing energy.
It makes absolutely no sense to run a car on hydrogen, as there are better ways to store energy.