• Question: How far away, do you think, we are from actually having these water fueled cars?

    Asked by to Jemma on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Jemma Rowlandson

      Jemma Rowlandson answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Hi!

      These cars actually exist now! They’re called hydrogen cars and it’s actually hydrogen gas that goes into your fuel tank. The hydrogen gas can be made by splitting water apart using electricity. The car are not ready for mass-production yet, so there are only one or two at Universities across the UK. They have two big problems:

      1. Making the hydrogen

      2. Storing the hydrogen

      We want to make the hydrogen from water. The problem is the materials we use at the moment are very expensive and they just don’t make enough hydrogen to power a car. This means we have to use fossil fuels instead, which are not very good for the environment.

      Once you’ve made your hydrogen you then have to store it somehow. It’s a gas so that makes it hard to store in a small space like a fuel tank. We have to squeeze it into a compressed gas cylinder. These are very expensive because they have to be very strong. This means the cars are also very expensive ($100,000).

      To make hydrogen cars available for everyone we need to be able to store lots of hydrogen cheaply. That’s the problem my work focuses on. It’s going to be a while before there are lots of them out on the road, probably fifty years or so as we work on those two big problems.

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