Thursday, March 06, 2014

FCV

The reason why hydrogen (fuel cell) powered electric cars have the potential to do better than battery powered electric cars is that the electricity generation happens inside the car with no need to store electricity. The energy is instead stored in the form of hydrogen, which although is potentially hazardous (which is not difficult to mitigate), makes it easier and much faster to 're-fuel' the car.

The lack of heavy batteries also means a lighter vehicle and less toxic materials to manage over the life cycle. If we could increase the number of solar and wind power plants that also produce hydrogen as a by-product (an efficiency improvement easily achieved), we could also reduce or eliminate the need to use fossil fuels to create the electricity a battery-powered car would use in the first place.

Ford, Daimler AG, Renault-Nissan and Aston Martin are working on fuel cell cars. Honda has been leading the development of hydrogen powered cars and have been leasing hydrogen cars since 2008.

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