toyota under fire for hybrid technology

I think if GM's manglers--uhh managers--were a little brighter, they'd push the hydrogen car technology as fast as they could. Hydrogen cars offer better technology than the motor hybrids. For one thing, the exhaust emits water vapor, not a whiff of noxious gasses.

Hydrogen to motor hybrid isn't like SCSI to EIDE; it's more like SCSI to floppy. Or music CD to tape cassette. Remember when CDs came out, you bought the Steppenwolf and Rush CDs even though you already had the Steppenwolf and Rush cassettes. The same phenomenon could very well happen with hydros.

I was just reading about this a few minutes ago.... not good for Toyota.

------------------------------------ Mike Mangione

Except for the minor problem of not yet having figured out how to cram more than about 100 miles worth of hydrogen into a car. And not having a ready source of hydrogen, either, come to think if it.

Alcohol would be easier to manage.

Brazil, which many Americans would identify as a Third World Country, this year registered more alcohol-fueled vehicles than petroleum-fueled vehicles. Amazing how such an ostensibly poor and backward country can manage to significantly transform their energy economy so far in advance of us.

You like hydrogen fuel cells because they're full of neat tech and your children can bask in their emissions, but there are a few small issues like getting enough hydrogen in a car to go a reasonable distance, and primarily where the hell to get it in the first place. Hydrogen doesn't exist by itself, it has to be extracted and refined in order to be put to use in anything, let alone fuel cells that would require a very specific grade of the element to work with the efficiency you are waxing so poetically about. As it stands right now, the most efficient ($ wise) way to get the stuff out of whatever it's already bound up in (water) is by using existing coal-burning plants. So then what are the net savings?

Yeah, I guess, but there is a difference between kicking your feet back and dreaming sweetly of an engine that poots water and actually implementing something that can cut emissions drastically NOW. Hybrids will be the most practical solution for that for a while.

Where do you plan to get this hydrogen from? Do you know how much energy is needed to separate hydrogen from water. I'd like to know where you will get that energy.

You bring up good points. Hydrogen can be extracted using new high-tech windmills and solar energy, not fossil fuels.

They say there's more energy blowing in the Dakota winds than all the energy available from oil in Saudi Arabia.

More efficient storage needs to be developed, too, but it's all close. Very close. If Bush would have committed more than the paltry, actually stingy, 1.2 billion dollars over the

*NEXT FEW YEARS* to hydrogen car research, we'd reach the "promised land" much sooner. That's not even 1.2 billion in a year, but over several years. What a punter. Clinton would not have done that.

Bush, the oil company puppet, instead prefers blowing 400 billion dollars in a senseless war in Iraq. I betchya for a fraction of that, say 100 billion, we could develop the Earth-friendly hydrogen economy, which will come--it's just a matter of when and who's in office.

Here's an interesting article from sciencentral.com that addresses some of the valid, important issues you raise. Now if you could get the Gooberment to cooperate, we'd have this stuff accomplished within a decade, much like Kennedy set the goal of landing humans on the moon before the decade were through.

From the melting ice burgs?

mike hunt

Watch what you wish for, you might just get it. Commercial fuel cells in use today, built by GM to generate electricity for buildings, get their hydrogen form Natural Gas. NG is in short supply even though NG is being burned off at the refineries because of insufficient storage and distribution system caused by current environmental laws (NIMBY) The most cost effect way to get hydrogen into motor vehicles will be from gasoline via the distribution system currently in place, with the reformer at the gas station or in the automobile. Supplying hydrogen from another source, via a whole new hydrogen distribution system, will be environmentally almost impossible (NIMBY) to build and cost billions of dollars over many years. The hydrogen will cost five times as much as gasoline at the time, to boot.

mike hunt

I heard the icebergs are melting because of George Bush.

Except that hydrogen cars consume more oil than gasoline cars, because of the amount of energy needed to produce hydrogen. And the plants that burn oil to produce electricity to produce hydrogen emit a lot more than water vapor.

Merritt

This proves Japan doesn't innovate - they just improve on technology that the U.S. comes up with. However, this patent could become invalidated - especially with the new patent overhaul laws coming to play.

The current hybrid technology use by Toyota and Ford was developed in Japan by a Japanese electric company, in cooperation with Ford, Toyota and another Japanese auto manufacture whose name escapes me at the moment. Toyota subsequently bought that company. Both Ford and Toyota are cross licensed to the technology.

mike hunt

Bush has no "vision thing" as his visionless pappy would say.

"The Vision Thing"

Ugh, I just learned that much of Bush's 1.2 billion dollars is devoted to obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels, not renewables like wind and solar. The dirty claws of the oil companies strike again.

This is a fascinating article from Mother Jones magazine about Big Oil's attempts to hy-jak the hydrogen initiative:

I remember when Missouri Representative Dick Gephardt was running for the 2004 Democratic nomination and later campaigning to be Kerry's Vice-President., Gephardt said on C-SPAN that he would develop the wind fields of the Dakotas and other U.S. states--much saner idea than developing dirty oil fields.

Bush has no such plan.

"Laura, have you seen my vision thing lying around anywhere?"

---- "Honey, I think you left it at Camp David next to the pretzels."

Gephardt was my Rep. when I lived in Saint Louis. Good fella--I met him once during a high school "Close-Up" trip to D.C. Too bad he retired.

But water vapour is a greenhouse gas.....

cat, pigeons....GO

Would you please stop stereotyping my Japanese friends. And please don't upset Hachiroku; he's a lot smarter than you when it comes to cars.

You know, you don't get something for nothing. And I feel this way with hydrogen technology. Even if we use clean, renewable energy sources for producing hydrogen I still wonder about the environmental impact on the planet if and when most automobiles begin running on hydrogen.

The only emission is water vapor. That may seem benign until you factor in all the millions, perhaps billions of cars emitting all this water vapor. This water vapor has to go somewhere and this somewhere is the atmosphere where they will form as clouds. That may seem innocuous, but I've read how the contrails from jetliners form clouds and affect weather. Most contrails dissipate however, I've seen satellite images of contrails growing into full weather systems.

I don't know...just something to think about.

Layne

What we really need is wind powered cars. LOL

mike hunt

Aww, you fellas are regular comedians, ain't yas.

LOL, you even got me laughing at that wind turbine joke.

But it's a fact that more Americans voted for the Liberal Al Gore than voted for the brain-damaged Dubya Bush.

The majority of Americans are Liberals. You conservatives are in the minority, and usually only win elections by hook and by crook.