Am I right to be skeptical about tuning?

[Carledo]

Thank you Mike! Having had a lot to do with LPG in the past, i've had the same prejudices trotted out to me for years about the safety of pressurized LPG tanks in cars! And the answer is the same, they are safer than 99% of petrol tanks. The only thing that comes anywhere NEAR in petrol terms is the foam filled fuel cells in competition vehicles. I've seen an LPG fitted Jag that was totally gutted by fire (not one I converted thankfully) The tank didn't explode and the triply redundant interlocks shut off the gas supply in several places around the car so the LPG in the lines didn't even help fuel the fire as petrol in meltable plastic pipes often does!

[cleverusername]

You're all looking at this from the wrong perspective!

Think AA Batteries

Don't worry about charging your batteries, you never 'own' them, you rent them for the duration of the charge.

Your car has a universal battery port, or ports. When the battery charge is depleted you go to a garage and swap out your used batteries for fresh recharged ones. The design of the battery is universal, much like AA's or AAA's, these are produced by a company which also takes the old depleted end of life batteries and recycles them.

Pull in, swap batteries, pay, off you go!

But as Steve pointed out a few threads back, the production of suitable batteries is an environmental disaster in terms of laying waste vast areas of land to find the minerals, and very inefficient and polluting techniques needed to refine them for use. It is extremely doubtful that the world contains enough lithium and whatever else is needed for everyone to have a battery car.

I don't see why petrol is easier to handle than hydrogen. Its just that we are more geared up for it. In fact a pressurised hydrogen cylinder is much safer than a flimsy steel or plastic tank of petrol. I saw a video sometime ago where a marksman fired a high velocity bullet at an H2 cylinder and at a petrol tank. The petrol tank exploded in a most alarming way with a big fire resulting. The H2 cylinder was punctured but simply leaked out the gas. There was no explosion and no fire.

If you spill petrol you have a messy and dangerous problem. Leaked hydrogen just blows away on the wind. Having worked with gas cylinders in my job, I think it would be most unlikely for a hydrogen cylinder to be punctured in most car crashes. Those things are strong.

You have to shoot a petrol tank with a tracer round to get it to explode, it is very unlikely to blow up if you fire a normal bullet at it.

Besides those flimsy tanks are not the safety hazards you make out. We have millions of cars on the road and they are not blowing up left, right and centre. Petrol and diesel cars under going stringent crash testing and if tanks were the hazard you make out, they wouldn't pass.

Hydrogen is more difficult to handle because of its small molecular size, it isn't just an issue of pressure. Though the requirement for pressure tanks will add to the cost.

[Carledo]

Shooting a gas tank is a bit irrelevant, unless you live in Beirut! But puncturing one (which is relatively easy) spills the petrol which is a fire waiting to start! True not all cars burn at the slightest tap (barring of course the legendarily flammable Ford Pinto) but enough do to be a BIG concern to firefighters who automatically attend most crash scenes. A handful of my close friends including the best man at my wedding are firefighters, this comes from the horses mouth!

The other point I want to make here is that production Hydrogen cars are not a fantasy or a prototyping experiment. In California, you can go into the Honda dealers (probably others by now) and buy an unremarkable looking, mid size, 4 door sedan, powered by a Hydrogen motor. James May tested one for Top Gear (that's how long ago it was) and found it good, performance more than adequate, range on a full tank in excess of 400 miles, fill time under 5 minutes, emissions, water vapour only, so effectively Zero! Even then, enough filling stations in California were selling Hydrogen to make ownership practical, the price of the cars was not as exorbitant as battery models and of course, you don't have to buy 10s of thousands of dollars worth of new batteries every 5 years or so! What's not to like?

My philosophy is, and has always been "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" and like you, I like petrol. But we are not going to be ALLOWED to continue burning hydrocarbons much longer, it just ain't going to happen. We must find another way, Hydrogen engines seems to me to be the answer, with maybe electric city cars as a sort of (possibly autonomous) self drive taxi in places where car ownership is not practical, like New York, Tokyo etc. Though notoriously militant NYC taxi drivers might have something to say about the "autonomous" bit!

One of my favourite Sci-Fi authors, the late Robert Heinlein, had this to say about human technological development.

It comes in 3 stages, the first is simple and not very efficient, the second is more efficient but complicated and the 3rd stage is refined and elegant, but by that time, it's generally obsolete! The case in point he mentioned was carrier aircraft landing, but it applies to most things if you think about it, my case in point would be steam locomotives!

Steve

[Bumpa]

I'm with Steve in almost everything he says, but the car I saw James May drive was the Hyundai Nexo. It isn't a hydrogen engine, it is an electric car where the power comes from a hydrogen fuel cell. Toyota also have a fuel cell car on the market called the Mirai, and Honda's offering is the Clarity. I have an interest in H2 fuel cell cars because my wife's cousin, Paul Howard (https://orderofbc.gov.bc.ca/members/obc ... ul-howard/), was the engineer who developed Geoffrey Ballard's genius in making the fuel cell work at their facility in Vancouver. It took them 20 years of development working on a shoestring budget, and it is all chronicled in a book called "Powering the Future" written by Tom Koppel. Their first working fuel cell vehicle was a small bus which was demonstrated in Vancouver as long ago as 1993, June the 8th to be precise. As Paul said to us when we stayed with him and his wife, look how long it took the computer to be something everyone could have. Maybe the hydrogen fuel cell car's time is about to come.

[Carledo]

I'm with Steve in almost everything he says, but the car I saw James May drive was the Hyundai Nexo. It isn't a hydrogen engine, it is an electric car where the power comes from a hydrogen fuel cell. Toyota also have a fuel cell car on the market called the Mirai, and Honda's offering is the Clarity. I have an interest in H2 fuel cell cars because my wife's cousin, Paul Howard (https://orderofbc.gov.bc.ca/members/obc ... ul-howard/), was the engineer who developed Geoffrey Ballard's genius in making the fuel cell work at their facility in Vancouver. It took them 20 years of development working on a shoestring budget, and it is all chronicled in a book called "Powering the Future" written by Tom Koppel. Their first working fuel cell vehicle was a small bus which was demonstrated in Vancouver as long ago as 1993, June the 8th to be precise. As Paul said to us when we stayed with him and his wife, look how long it took the computer to be something everyone could have. Maybe the hydrogen fuel cell car's time is about to come.

Sorry Mike, It might have been a Hyundai I saw too, t'was a long time ago and for some reason, Dave don't repeat that episode! But i'm pleased to learn that other manufacturers are climbing on the bandwagon, gives me hope that we're not going to be stuck with batteries for long, Lithium will run out long before petrol does! And Hydrogen is the THE most plentiful element in the universe!

And of course I meant a fuel cell, I know roughly how it works and that it drives electric motors, just the terminology eluded me when I was writing it!

If they are banning the sale of new fully or partly fossil fueled cars from 2035, they must be looking at 2050 or later to ban the use of those cars altogether, in order to give them a normal lifespan. By then i'll be 96, frankly I doubt i'll live long enough to see it! Even if Covid 23 doesn't kill me, the fags probably will! But I might survive long enough to build a Dolomite with a fuel cell!

Steve