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Just another typical prototype car moving the mass market from Honda... or is it?
Well actually no this is not the replacement to Civic.
This is Honda's claim to being on the forfront of car technology and helping the environment.

So what exactly is so different about this car. We already have the Honda Hybrid which is a Petrol-Electric car, this saves alot of the environment with almost zero emissions. Well Honda have taken this a step further, and turned almost zero emissions into zero emissions, infact the car is so clean it actually exhuasts pure oxygen in steam form.
Basically the FCX runs on H2O, which as most here will know is just a fancy way of saying Water. Though a technique that has been around since the turn of the century and no doubt anyone who has done High-School/GCSE math will know called 'Electrolosys'.
This is a method with which you can seperate Water into the combustable Hydrogen and breathable Oxygen.

Oki, so maybe this technology isn't new, and maybe Honda are not the first to make a working version of this.
What Honda will be the first to do however, are to be the first to get the engines output to a reasonable level. Infact the top speed has been clocked at 120MPH, although you'd really have to push the car to achieve that; you will be able to get a reasonable top speed of 100MPH, roughly what most other 1000cc Hatchbacks are capable of.
The next first is actually having this car in production.

It will be the first mass-marketed Hydrogen powered car in the world, unlike the short lived Vaxhaul HydroCar which only made it to a limited UK market.
As it runs off water, this means that refueling does not require you to find a special fill up station, and being able to run 220miles on a full tank it also means that it's MPG is actually roughly what you would expect from a car around 10years old.

Another factor that might be in this cars favour is that it is aimed at the entry-level market. Which means it should hit the US/UK/Japan markets at roughly what you'd expect to pay for a 1.1 Hatchback. ($12,000/£7,000/¥1,750,000)
As it is also not what you'd call a sporty performance car, don't expect insurance to be exactly high either.

In all Honda seem to have a very well planned ouy car which I have no doubt will go down very well with the British and Japanese markets. As the American market is still more for larger vehicles, i'm not sure it'll appeal to alot of them, but hopefully with the 2 main markets secure and a european version to follow sometime in late 2005, it looks like we can finally own a car that we can drive all we want without worrying about insanely expensive fuel prices or that we're damaging the environment.

(might also bring a few suicides by monoxide poisoning down)

Honda FCX

you will have to turn off any pop-up blockers to view the site.

It may be zero emisions but that doesn't mean it's better for the enviroment. Hydrogen powered cars are a good idea but what no one seems to remember is that the electricity for electrolysis has still got to come from your power supplier which will probably run off coal and gas. This means that you still put a load of Carbon Dioxide etc into the atmosphere. The other thing is this car is probably not as energy efficient as a combustion engine either because through every energy transfer one goes through a certain amount of energy is lost as a useless form such as heat. This means the more energy transfers one goes through the less engergy efficient it is.


For a petroleum powered car:

Chemical energy (petrol) -> heat energy -> Kinetic energy

For this car

Chemical energy (Gas or Coal) -> heat energy (heating the water) -> Kinetic energy (Hot steam turns the turbines) -> Electrical energy -> Chemical Energy (In the form of Hydrogen) -> Heat energy -> Kinetic Energy


So this would be a great envromental car IF we used a renewable fuel source to power our homes.

Jim somehow i think you've missed a few science classes.
Petrol and Diesel cars still require Electricity for the process...

For a Petrol/Gas what happens is the petrol is squirted (like an aerosol can) into the pistons where it is compressed with air and a spark ignites this in time with the piston.
Diesel work similar only they use a constant heat source so once compression has hit it's peak there is a more violent reaction.

However BOTH engines still must be cranked to start the process manually, hense electric starter motors

The standard car once it has started uses an onboard generator often attached to the drive shaft that connects to what is effectively a dynamo generator which supplies power to the car whilst it is on and recharges the battery.

Car batteries like most batteries are no actually charged from a power station or something, it is a pure chemical reaction of materials... although the mannor in which a car battery has power cells within it so that once the original Sulfuric Acid power runs dry you can use the Dilute water with Nitrate packs to recharge using Direct Current.

Now there are also generators known as ElectroMagnetic Generators; these work much in the same way as a Dynamo, only difference being that you use a Standard electrical input to power 2 electro magnets which are positioned either side of another magnet (of the same type) which is in turn attached to a small shaft.
You must manually push the magnet to start but once spinning it will perpetually turn due to the magnetic fields, it produces enough electricity to take over the battery in powering the magnets which keep it turning.

The whole process can be again done with a battery which as i've mention uses natural chemical reactions to produce the electricity.

This car happens to use such power supplies... it is 100% clean. Hell it belches out Oxygen which means its actually BETTER for the environment than a bicycle. Especially as there is no refining process required for water, so no industrial machines chugging away at it.

Think about it, the only time this actually has technology being used which *could* harm the environment is when being built in the plant, but Honda are based in the south of Japan; in a city which is entirely powered by a Solar Power Station.

So only the materials themselves are actually harming the environment to make. However considering your cutting around 50% of the pollution from production and 100% from return use; think about it for a section.

Chemical energy come in more forms than just Fossil or Petroleum based. Ever had someone show you howto use a Potatoe or Citric Fruit to create enough electricity to power a small lightbulb?

At the end of the day the main pollutant from cars is thier everyday use.
1 Car being used every day for an hr trip to work and back for a year = the output of a powerplant for a day.

This might not seem like much but there are over 1Billion Vehicles on the road every day. Not all are fuel economical either.
This is ontop of the current pollution.

So even IF and that's a big IF the battery to start the process within the car is powered at a station; it wouldn't be any different from any other car on the market as it stands, and that 1hr or so it takes to fully charge the cells is a pittance in price compared to years of pollution from petrol/diesel.

And actually Coal isn't actually anywhere near as bad as Petrol as that fossil fuel only releases around .01% the Carbon Dioxide that Petrol does, and that is the ONLY thing it releases; where as Petrol releases around 20 different toxins and gases all of which are deadly.

A moderate ammount of Carbon Dioxide is necessary for the ozone, and the plants feed on it.
They don't however feed on Carbon Monoxide or such gasses.



just exactly what the hell does that have to do with a car?

any cut in emissions is a good thing.

LOL predicted A* in all three of the science GCSEs (I'm doing Triple award instead of double) that I'm taking next month. What happended was I didnt read about it as I couldn't be bothered to turn off my pop up blocker . I therefore assumed it was just another hydrogen powered combustion engine, instead of reading about this new the niffty fuel cell method. I therefore assumed you would electrolyse some water to get the hydrogen and use this to fuel your car.

My arguments are still valid though, where do you expect to obtain the hydrogen from? You can do one of two things, electrolyse water or get it from using a catalytic reformer on a hydrocarbon. Either method will produce carbon dioxide as electrolysis requires electricity which will probably come from a coal burning power plant and a reformer leaves a biproduct of carbon dioxide.

So there will be CO2 emmisions no matter what it's method is. The only way of stopping this is to use a renewable fuel source to power electolysis.

What so you just snap your fingers and a battery appears? The chemicals used in the battery are manufactured or processed at some point which requires energy.
I don't know what Nitrate packs are but why would you add them to a lead acid battery? The only thing you should add to a lead acid battery is distilled water to replace that lost from evaporation.
To recharce all you need to do is reverse the current. See
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:Wkd8MGjlvaUJ:www.chem.uidaho.edu/~honors/pbacid.html+lead+acid+battery+reactions&hl=en



I think what you have there is a perpetual motion machine and we all know what the laws of physics say about them



Using chemicals that took energy to manufacture.

A hydrogen fuel cell is only as environmentally friendly as the energy used to obtain the hydrogen and the energy used and enviromental impact of the cells manufactuer.

Jim just for information, I happen to have a 2+2 Masters in Physics and a Minor in Chemistry.

Winch the generators i'm talking about are in use daily. In-fact in germany the largest coal mining machines in the world purely run on that form of electromagetic generator.

if you wish to create one for yourself then actually it is quite simple.
i'll do a quick sketch up to explain it, i'm sure you can find the household objects to try it for yourself; and create enough power to keep a small torch going.

Put simply though... ALL ENGINES require electricity to run from the get go; the one exceptions are those that do not produce a reaction suchas Wind Mills, Water Mills or such.

Also Jim, what the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours about Eletrolosys? What is produced from the process is Hydrogen, Oxygen and Ionised Oxygen a 1:1.50:0.50 ratio's
Ionised Oxygen when it interacts with normal oxygen becomes harmless and is what causes the evapouration.

The process is used in Space Shuttle flights because it produces NO TOXINs which is pretty important for something where you can simply open the door and get fresh air :-p

No matter what angle you try to look at this car, it is more ecomonical to produce and a HELL of alot more economical to run.
Just like Honda's Hybrid Car; they're not using out of the ordinary technology; they're using a standard car design with a different engine.

The switch in terms of production costs and economical impact are roughly equal to if they changed the production to say a diesel version of a petrol car.
Which means it is the END environmental impact which is important.
Especially as the development pollution might be around equal for a car in the first year on the road; but most cars will run for upto 20years loosing thier ability to keep emmisions in check.

This car however suffers from no such problems.

blah blah
space shuttle
blah



This is all very nice, but if this is really the technology we should be using, I think Stanley Buick would have come up with it already.. I mean.. seriously.

No offence Raven my old mate, but what relevance to anything I said is there in this sentence? I know what happens when you electrolyse water and I know the products of electrolysis, I was stating that this fuel cell requires hydrogen to run and where do you expect to get this hydrogen from except via electrolosis or the catalytic break down of water?

You also explained how the internal combustion engine works which has no relevance to anything I said either. I think you were refering to my energy transfer chain things which were meant to show the transfers the energy must go through to get the energy in the form we want it which is why I left the alternator charging car's battery out of the equation as it runs the ignition and doesn't fuel the car (and also it'd make the diagram bloody confusing to read with arrows hooking around etc). I obviously didn't explain this clear enough and for that I appologise.

It probably is better for the enviroment though like you say because you don't pump out half of the noxious chemicals that you get with petrol.

I love all these heated scientific discussions don't you?
Incidentally what branch of physics do you have a masters in because I was considering studying physics at university after my A levels?

The relivance of what I said in what is produced during Electrolosys is because you said:



Now there are two ways to have taken this. Somehow you believe that Electrolosys produces Carbon Dioxide which is just flat out wrong,
or you believe that in order to create the electricity to produce the Electrolosys you need a power terminal, connected to a power plant.

Currently within the UK there are 45 Coal Power Stations, 4 Nuclear Power Stations, 5 Wind Farms (each producing the equivilant of 5 Coal Power Stations) and around 10 more power stations using Hydro or Solar Energy.
So even from a power terminal, due to the National Grid; ALL electricity produced is combined and syphoned to useable points. This means only 50% of the energy your using produces Carbon Dioxide, and as I've mentioned earlier CO2 is not actually as harmful to the environment as the other Toxins found without the burning of petrol.

This would of course be provided that the car battery was originally charged by a power station. Which just again isn't true, as batteries use the chemcial reaction energy of the acid and nitrate to produce electricity... the finer the blend of these chemicals the longer the battery originally lasts.

The reason rechargable batteries don't last as long is because it doesn't rely on nitrate to produce the reaction required; instead they use Distil Water (effectively pure water will work too like melted ice water but for better longevity you need deionised distiled water) which combined with power cells full of acid the water will conduct and charge with electricity the acid stores and aplifies it.

Of course that are only so many electolites that will react with the ions before it becomes useless, but still no reaction lasts forever; even Hydrogen Fusion<->Fission produced by the Sun.

So really your assuming alot of things here.
Especially in your original diagrams; Because from what you show, you believe that Hydrogen engines require electricity supplied in this dirty fashion; whereas standard petrol engines don't.

The Hydrogen engine uses around the same ammount of power for the Electrolosys as the 4 Spark Plugs do over an hour period.
Infact the faster you drive your petrol car the MORE power it requires to create the sparks to ignite the fuel.

So again your diagrams no matter how you look at it are just plain wrong.

And my field of physics is Atomic (Quantum and SuperString) & Astronomy.

Oki, heres my idea...

Everybody uses nuclear cars and boats and planes. All the waste products are given to your local military base that send it to NASA, who then launch it to space and land it on the moon, to stock pile it for when we get attacked by aliens (or when we attack them). Only problem would be when people crash and whole city block would be whiped from existance. Would fix some of the over population problems though.

Lol, saw something funny today. "Oxygen is necessary for life". Lol. Oxygen is a nasty substance. When plants first started emmiting oxygen as a by-product of photosythesis, it killed a very large percentage of the creatures on the planet. However, as animals evolved, they became resistant to it and eventually dependant on it.

@Raven



You do mean science don't you ? Cos if you didn't, then you people have very strange math classes



I love confusing people by talking about quantum theory

Is that a new Microsoft thing?

I think this car would be very good to have around, but too good to be true. Not that I don't think it works. I just doubt cars running on water will sound good to the people winning money from petrol.

yeah i ment science, and Quantum Physics isn't hard... Super String is because there are still 5 Theories each are right in thier own way. So you have to use different theorum for different tasks, only one of them actually fit each other.
The only common thread is the string theme, which technically isn't a string at all.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/electrol.html
Nice page that will tell you about the chemical reactions in the electrolysis of water. Which is pretty much exactly what jim says is happening.



What you are descirbing is just a standard generator, however you said this earler.



That isn't true, once the magnet is spinning it will stop unless you supply current(motor) or use energy to turn it(generator). If what you said was true and it can produce enough electricity to keep its self going then it is a perpetual motion machine.



Yes but how do you manufacture the chemicals? Chemicals require energy to manufacture.



http://www.electricity.org.uk/default.asp?action=article&ID=10
Generation capacaty by type in Uk.



Lots and lots of batteries don't require distilled water or nitrate.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/battery.html
Carbon-zinc batteries for instance, non rechargable and as you will see from that page no distilled water or nitrate is envolved in the battery or the reactions.
There is not nitrate involved in lead-acid batteries either. Infact I can't think of any popular batteries where nitrate is envolved at all. Distilled water is not required in all rechargable(accumulator) batteries either.