I went to Metro’s ecovelocity show at Battersea this week to see what new ideas are coming from the motoring world. There were battery-electric cars, fuel-cell cars and frugal petrol-engined cars.
It’s just like the very early days of motoring. In 1903, Benz would sell you a petrol-engined car, Gardner-Serpollet would do you a nice steam car and Krieger could supply an all-electric model. And if you wanted a hybrid, Messrs Hart would sell you a petrol-electric car ‘in which the electrical power is generated by a 4hp Darraq motor coupled with a dynamo slung in the centre of the frame’.
Who would have thought then that the technology which would win would be the one which required an explosive fuel, to be stored and sold in every town and village in the land.
We now have filling stations wherever you want to drive, but burning petrol to get about will soon become as anti-social as burning coal to keep warm. We need to find a better way.
Cars powered by electricity are the future, but will we store the electricity in batteries, or generate it on the fly with fuel cells? That is the key question.
You can buy a battery-electric car right away. Nissan and Mitsubishi will sell you something which looks just like your present gas-guzzler and Vauxhall will, too, next year.
It is easy to recharge - you just plug it in. But recharging takes hours and gives you far fewer miles than a tank of petrol. So you would have to change the way you use a car. A petrol car can take you to the supermarket or to Newcastle. A battery-electric car can go to the shops, but it will roll to a stop if you try to drive it more than 100 miles.
There are two other drawbacks: the electricity you use to charge it will be generated by a power station guzzling powdered coal, so you won’t be quite as green as you thought you were, and the large batteries under your seat will need to be replaced after a certain number of recharges, just like the batteries in your phone or your laptop die after a time.
A fuel-cell car doesn’t have these drawbacks. Refueling will be as quick as filling up with petrol - just pump in the liquid hydrogen. And you will be generating the electricity to drive your car as you go, so full green marks.
There are two major snags. You cannot buy one yet. And there is no way to fill one up yet.
London has fuel-cell buses running silently around the city, but there is nowhere for Joe Public to fill up.
Honda are backing the fuel-cell. They have a fuel-cell car being used now in Japan and the US where there are hydrogen filling stations. There are plans to get similar stations set up here in the UK and Honda are working out how to provide you with a hydrogen-producing pack which will fit in your garage and can top up your domestic electricity while it works.
I think the fuel-cell will win.
Most people won’t want a car which limits how far they can go and takes hours to recharge.
Most of us will carry on with our petrol cars until something similar turns up.
I also think Honda are on the ball with their generate-at-home idea. With opinion turning against big power stations using coal or nuclear power, the idea of us all generating our own electricity is appealing. We need a bright spark to develop the technology to do it.
This was written in September. And lo, in October, I came across this TED talk which reveals that bright sparks are, indeed working on this. Listen here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/justin_hall_tipping_freeing_energy_from_the_grid.html
It’s just like the very early days of motoring. In 1903, Benz would sell you a petrol-engined car, Gardner-Serpollet would do you a nice steam car and Krieger could supply an all-electric model. And if you wanted a hybrid, Messrs Hart would sell you a petrol-electric car ‘in which the electrical power is generated by a 4hp Darraq motor coupled with a dynamo slung in the centre of the frame’.
Who would have thought then that the technology which would win would be the one which required an explosive fuel, to be stored and sold in every town and village in the land.
We now have filling stations wherever you want to drive, but burning petrol to get about will soon become as anti-social as burning coal to keep warm. We need to find a better way.
Cars powered by electricity are the future, but will we store the electricity in batteries, or generate it on the fly with fuel cells? That is the key question.
You can buy a battery-electric car right away. Nissan and Mitsubishi will sell you something which looks just like your present gas-guzzler and Vauxhall will, too, next year.
It is easy to recharge - you just plug it in. But recharging takes hours and gives you far fewer miles than a tank of petrol. So you would have to change the way you use a car. A petrol car can take you to the supermarket or to Newcastle. A battery-electric car can go to the shops, but it will roll to a stop if you try to drive it more than 100 miles.
There are two other drawbacks: the electricity you use to charge it will be generated by a power station guzzling powdered coal, so you won’t be quite as green as you thought you were, and the large batteries under your seat will need to be replaced after a certain number of recharges, just like the batteries in your phone or your laptop die after a time.
A fuel-cell car doesn’t have these drawbacks. Refueling will be as quick as filling up with petrol - just pump in the liquid hydrogen. And you will be generating the electricity to drive your car as you go, so full green marks.
There are two major snags. You cannot buy one yet. And there is no way to fill one up yet.
London has fuel-cell buses running silently around the city, but there is nowhere for Joe Public to fill up.
Honda are backing the fuel-cell. They have a fuel-cell car being used now in Japan and the US where there are hydrogen filling stations. There are plans to get similar stations set up here in the UK and Honda are working out how to provide you with a hydrogen-producing pack which will fit in your garage and can top up your domestic electricity while it works.
I think the fuel-cell will win.
Most people won’t want a car which limits how far they can go and takes hours to recharge.
Most of us will carry on with our petrol cars until something similar turns up.
I also think Honda are on the ball with their generate-at-home idea. With opinion turning against big power stations using coal or nuclear power, the idea of us all generating our own electricity is appealing. We need a bright spark to develop the technology to do it.
This was written in September. And lo, in October, I came across this TED talk which reveals that bright sparks are, indeed working on this. Listen here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/justin_hall_tipping_freeing_energy_from_the_grid.html
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