Jeremy Clarkson

Why 90% of all cars are butt-ugly? Why don?t they all look like Astons? It?s just some bended metal! I really think that's what killed a lot of the cars, but now there aren't that many, especially if you don't have the cash to consider getting a Zonda. So with the supercars left out, I for one could only think of Ford as the only one that doesn't make an ugly car these days and having the looks of the car thrown out the window, what has the normal buyer left for consideration? MPGs and if you have absolutely no brain and believe every idiot on the news, you would probably think of buying a hybrid, because it has both, good MPG and making you an Al Gore environmental prick. But enough about the idiots, what's left for us? We want a decent, cute car! We need cars that make us happy, cars like the Focus, the 500! Between the ugly, overpriced clouds these cars are the sunlight hitting your face in the morning that set you off with a smile wherever you?re going!

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How different is Hydrogen making now compared to when they were filling Zeppelins or even the first Hydrogen Balloon flight in 1783? Bunsen Burner, water & test tubes anyone?

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I think cars nowadays are getting prettier and prettier. I think car-manufacturers have finally realised that it doesn't do any harm producing beautiful cars. I think the only big car-company that is going downhill designwise is Mercedes, with the new butt-ugly E-Class, the ugly C, the revolting R, the shopping-trolley SLK, the outdated A-class, B-class, CLK and sad to say, CL-class. Mercedes' only pretty cars nowadays are the SL, the SLR and the CLS. Useless. I think it shouldn't take more than 20 years to get Hydrogen-Fuelcell cars to be practical. If we did it with Steam and Petrol, we can do it with Hydrogen!

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i think that the most eficent way of making hydrogen is electrosis and spliting water. however clues in the name so where does this electric come from?hmmm

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"Hey, we invented the hydrogen engine just the day before oil is finished! Yeah!" C'mon Jeremy there's so many ways to produce (and use better) energy that we can reverse the galaxy rotation and save enough one to run all the cars in the world. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and is massively used in common industry, is impossible to not have a way to convert it in usable energy. There's so much technology unused waiting in someone desk, because when was developed someone said "it will ruin the economy". Well now economy is gone open those damn trays. And if possible wait just the time necessary to take the price of old supercar to 0 so i can take some of those and run them on whatever we'll use. I'm waiting the new cheap abarth 2seater. It has all the supercar quality and a small price. I'll like it even if will run with brown sauce or smashed lizards. Cheers

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>>i think that the most eficent way of making hydrogen is electrosis and spliting water. however clues in the name so where does this electric come from?hmmm<< Everything has a production cost. Oil doesn't just leap out of the ground either. California is a good place for the Clarity to start because much of its electricity is hydro, not coal or nuclear. Long-term there are cleaner, large-scale electricity-generating options like solar or tidal. Environmental impact cost needs careful calculation. Melbourne is building a desalination plant partly because water from this has a lower environmental footprint than recycling! Recycling consumes extra power in treatment - and our power comes from brown coal (is there a worse source?!). So I wouldn't be building a hydrogen plant anywhere around here - but up in the Snowy Mountains where our hydro power comes from, a hydrogen plant could make much more sense.

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I agree with all of the above the only way hydrogen is ever goingn to be cost efficiant is when it has as broader use as oil and petro chemicals. as jeremy says hydrogen cars are still at genesis there is a long long way to go before we are earning nectar points on hydrogen so at the time being we need to make more advances toward hydrogen while increasing current forms such as bio fuels, dual fuel methods and improving car design

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@Painkiller: Basic chemistry, mate. Heating water doesn't get you hydrogen and oxygen, just water vapour. To get hydrogen from water with heat you'd need a bunsen burner the size of kentucky. This push in technology, one of the biggest oomphs possible, is never going to happen now people don't have a good million to throw at crazy ideas. Which is a shame. The best things happen when people throw money at them, and let a few incredibly smart men fiddle around with physics as we know it. That possibility of there being something simple, something clear, a little formula in the distant future to make it simple to condense the hydrogen in the atmosphere so we could use it as fuel is so improbable and difficult to comprehend that you'd probably need a high paycheck to keep you in the laboratory and out of the pub. But, recession.

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@Painkiller: Basic chemistry, mate. Heating water doesn't get you hydrogen and oxygen, just water vapour. To get hydrogen from water with heat you'd need a bunsen burner the size of kentucky. This push in technology, one of the biggest oomphs possible, is never going to happen now people don't have a good million to throw at crazy ideas. Which is a shame. The best things happen when people throw money at them, and let a few incredibly smart men fiddle around with physics as we know it. That possibility of there being something simple, something clear, a little formula in the distant future to make it simple to condense the hydrogen in the atmosphere so we could use it as fuel is so improbable and difficult to comprehend that you'd probably need a high paycheck to keep you in the laboratory and out of the pub. But, recession.

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It may be possible to make hydrogen through certain chemical reactions and processes, as quite everything else is made, oxygen for instance and even whiskey. Thinking of Zeppelin though remembers how hydrogen explodes when in touch with air. Prototypes and can be totally safe and controlled and therefore expensive, but how cheap and safe altogether can you make a lot of fuel stations with tons of ultra-pressurised hydrogen in it?

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@pw4 Electrolysis does not necessarily need electricity. It simply means splitting particles and get ions instead. If you put salt in water you have an electricity-free electrolysis. Obtaining hydrogen from splitting water could happen with hydrolysis, but I don't know how difficult can it be.

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I think hydrogen power could to be made available to the public sooner than you might expect. My guess, is that all the oil companies will want to be on that train in order to maintain their presence in the energy business...therefor we would soon see a BP (...or Shell, or whatever...) hydrogen station near our homes. The point here is in taxes...How can our lovely Governments maintain a high tax on something so "Green"? What is keeping hydrogen from our cars are not the oil companies, but our incompetent politicians... :S

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Hybrids by Toyota, hm, people there have a sense of humor to embarass rich polit-correct show-off customers like they do with Prius and new Lexus thing which has 2.5 liter petrol engine to propel generator, instead of propeling the car itself without load of betteries, motors, rotors and what-not. Guys at Mercedes have a sense of humor too, yes, germans do have got some wits but they embarass japanese. New E-class coupe with Cx=0.24 simultaneously crossed Prius and newborn off the map. To laugh at ones who'll buy them now is to laugh at mentally impared (it's not good, Johnny, they're are people too). Hats off to Mercedes and here's my point, there's still a lot of space and directions to improve cars. It's not only the engine. It's materials, adhesives, methods of welding, construction, aerodynamics to make them lighter stiffer, economical and still quite fast. Just let petrol be! Shock doctrine at work becomes a little old...

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Good example on inovations on car design the Lotus Elise ECO made from hemp and solar panels on the roof to power interior electrics use some of these methods on family cars and surely things are going in the right direction. That in mind from previous experience with self combusting lotus`s you could attract hippies for miles if that baby goes up but what a fire man!!!

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What about the people on Youtube that are playing with splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen via Brown's gas and are using it to power their cars and save petrol? This is all based on Stan Meyer's ideas and isn't that impossible to do, as the amateurs are doing it already. get the voltage and frequency right and it doesn't even use that much electricity and filling your car with an electrolyte solution is a lot safer than using liquified hydrogen. I would suggest that the motor industry spend a little bit of money on this, instead of a lot of money being wasted on develping the next generation of Toyota Pious.

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I think a lot of new cars look great! Which is odd.. Since it should be more and more difficult to make a car look "special" now.

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Thanks for reading it. I've mentioned this elsewhere but 1st generation hybrids like the original Prius were good for only one thing, developing technology. The new second generation Prius and Insight... no wait, they've had ten years to move forward and they've done nothing. I know Mr May has been telling you about how H2 generators can put power into home or street micro-grids. That's one way of looking at things, but it does require small PEM electrolysers. In the case of those you do away with one round trip, but create another in the opposite direction. The main issue is that I chose industrial electrolysers for their high efficiency - getting close to 80% in some cases - while the 'home' PEM versions are struggling to reach 40%. That's on mains power and they really don't like variable (renewable) inputs. So if Mr May wants automotive FCs acting as home generators the hydrogen is going to have to come from a filling station.

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Continued... You mention that we don't have H2 infrastructure. True. We do have natural gas infrastructure though. A number of very experienced materials and gas engineers of my acquaintance are arguing whether current infrastructure can handle H2 without embrittlement. What could be done is create the H2, convert it to CH4 (which is an exothermic process), then either strip the carbon out at the filling station or on the car. Carbon neutral - and no oil or other fossils involved - with the additional benefit that if the catalyst is on the car there is far less compression needed than with vanilla H2. VERY expensive though and with the usual efficiency caveats - maybe possible or desirable beyond the next couple of decades. Hope you and the rest of the team keep up the good work, and thanks again

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P.S. I was sorely tempted to use the 'soft porn' but the 'nazi sharks' had to do. Quite possibly the most interesting title for a scientific paper I'll ever be able to use :-)

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Hydrogen is an inefficient energy carrier. Portraying it as a wonderfuel isn't much more accurate than the eco-friendly image of the Prius. There are only two ways to make it work well, neither of which are currently possible: i) Devise an entirely new way of seperating hydrogen from something else, ideally water because there's a lot of it. This new way would have to be many times more efficient than any currently existing way. ii) Have such a vast surplus of electricity that we can waste lots of it splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. What we're looking at presently is generating electricity to get hydrogen from water, storing the hydrogen, moving it to filling stations, storing it there, then using it in a hydrogen fuel cell...to generate far less electricity than we started with. At least the government could tax hydrogen as heavily as it taxes petrol and diesel, so they'll like it.

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Mr Clarkson, Excellent article. Instead of "Brevity is the soul of wit", perhaps we could say "Subtlety is the soul of wit." Be that as it may, you have used the best summary sentence in the history of journalism: "We used to dream about shagging a supermodel, whereas now we've sort of grown up and realised that, actually, we'd be better off dreaming of shagging the girl next door."

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The only real issues with hydrogen are storage and extraction. I remember reading an article a while ago on how genetically modified algae were being used in america (experimentally) in tubes of water, and rather than just create energy from light in photosynthesis, they had been modified to make just enough energy to survive and use the rest of the captured energy to split the water to make hydrogen... the only thing we need is some form of catalysis to make the energy we need to put in less than we get out in a fuel cell or by burning it.

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Hydrogen is the future. Might not be the immediate future but in about 15-50 years time (depending on how foresighted governments are) it will be the fuel running economies. It is no more energy to make hydrogen than it takes drilling into sea beds for oil and gas. Hydrogen is also a byproduct of many chemical industries like the fertilizer industry and goes to waste there. If all those industries alone could just save up the hydrogen being released instead of letting it go to waste, that alone could contribute to a significant proportion of hydrogen we'ld need. Also many renewable energy sources could be used to make hydrogen like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal etc. This will reduce the energy problems of the world significantly if not completely solve it.

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Hydrogen alone is not the answer. What's the answer is a combination of all of these "future" ideas and technologies. Hydrogen along with biofuels from algae and waste disposal sites along with renewable energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, geothermal etc. will solve the energy crisis. The renewable energy sources can be used to produce hydrogen which would run all of your city cars and probably even homes and offices. The biofuels can be replaced for gasoline and we can still drive around (or watch) sports cars indulging in the visceral experience of the noise and power of carbon occasionally without getting completely rid of our beloved ferraris and lambos! This is the future or atleast this is how it should be.

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Hydrogen is not the future. The only function that hydrogen has is that of an energy carrier, like petrol or ... like a battery. All the car of the future needs is a replacement energy carrier. It needs an energy density like petrol and it needs an infrastructure. This is where electricity comes in; we only need a way to store it. Why convert it to hydrogen ? Why not just store it in a battery ? And .. what will give the humble battery the edge on hydrogen is the amount of money being spent on battery development vs. the amount being spent on hydrogen storage development. (It's not just cars that need electricity storage (eg laptops and mobile phones)). Goodbye hydrogen, hello battery. And oh yes, hybrids are the first step in the right direction. (And oh yes, why throw energy away when braking, why not save it for later).

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Batteries are a lot more environmentally polluting and they aren't capable of storing much energy. You don't want a car that when driven with the AC and radio on, runs out of juice in 50 miles. Worse bit you can't drive it for another 6 hours before the batteries can get fully charged back again. Also you're forgetting over time batteries lose their energy so they can't be kept for long term stores. Storing energy in a battery for transportation is not much more efficient than converting it into hydrogen for transportation. And again you're missing the big proportion of hydrogen we already waste in industries that produce it as a byproduct. Tapping that along could strengthen the hydrogen economy quite a lot.

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Batteries is a very short sighted solution to the energy crises. It won't help in the long term. Battery powered cars have been around for years (G-Wiz) and they've gotten nowhere. Even the Tesla is not any major leaps ahead of the dreary G-wiz. Whereas the Honda FCX works just like a normal gasoline car. It has a range of over 200miles on its tank. Takes only about 2-3mins to fill up at a hydrogen filling station and produces enough power to run a whole neighborhood while something like the G-Wiz can barely produce enough electricity to power up its own electronics and AC. Oh and also to mention the 100% reduction in CO2 emissions by the hydrogen car.

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Transmitting electricty over wires is far more efficient than using it to split water to make hydrogen that then needs to be moved to wherever it's needed. No-one is talking about dismantling the national grid and storing electricity in batteries for transportation - where did that idea come from? The Tesla Roadster, which isn't particularly good and uses 20-year-old battery technology, has double the power output of the Honda. Where did you get your comparison from? Battery technology is still developing - take a look at nano lithium titanate batteries. 50 miles range? Only when thrashing it on a track. Battery-powered cars wouldn't be much use for track days, but that's hardly the point. Battery-powered electric cars don't emit CO2, so where do you get the idea that a fuel cell electric car gives a 100% reduction in comparison?

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Lithium titanate batteries can be charged in a few minutes - the issue then becomes supplying enough power to the car. A charge time of about 5 minutes for a 40KWh battery pack would require about 500KW, and that's a big deal. Reducing the weight/charge ratio of batteries would make it possible to swap battery packs at a charging station, thus removing charging time as an issue for drivers. Drive in, swap discharge pack for charged one, drive out. The pack charges at the charging station on normal industrial supply, ready in a few hours for another car. Both hydrogen and batteries have advantages and disadvantages as energy carriers. It isn't at all clear which will be better and at present neither are good.

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The thing that everybody seems not to understand about hydrogen economy is that you need energy to get it. Biggest difference to oil is that you used to get oil just by digging a hole in the ground. Now you need more effort than that, but still you get more energy than you use so you net energy. Hydrogen is quite the opposite. Every current useful mean to produce hydrogen consumes more energy than you get in the hydrogen, so you get net loss. So how do you cover that net loss? Remember, in US alone about 70% of electricity (http://www.howstuffworks.com/hydrogen-economy4.htm) is created burning fossil fuels. My guess is that the whole world combined the number would be closer to 80%. And that is what everybody is trying to replace with something. There are methods that are less energy intensive than electrolysis, but they still don't beat the net loss and they produce in too minute quantities.

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Yes, i absolutely agree you're putting in more energy to split water to get hydrogen than you get back in the fuel cell. But this is still one way of solving the energy crisis and we can't just dismiss it off as uneconomical. We will run out oil pretty soon or atleast its gonna become pretty uneconomical to use it in the next few decades. Drilling oil out of deep sea beds takes a lot of energy and soon it won't be economically feasible. Also the environmental impact of burning carbon fuels (or any kind) is quite devastating (and will be more so if we continue on in the future).

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I said it before, Hydrogen is not the answer and its one answer. Hydrogen works great as an alternative fuel for vehicles. Its easy to transport and to refuel your car just like you'ld do with your gasoline car. I mentioned many times before that a lot of hydrogen is already being produced as a byproduct in many industries like the fertilizer industry. And there are a many more ways of producing hydrogen than just electrolysis alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production) many of which don't require much human energy input. Also a lot of electricity can be got from wind, solar, hydro etc. energy sources too which is tapping in free energy to create the hyrogen, so although it requires more energy input than you get output, there's still a lot of energy around to form a stable hydrogen infrastructure. And its 100% co2 reduction when you produce the hydrogen using clean renewable energy.

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Lastly a note on battery and electric power straight from a grid. I do believe this is the best and the most efficient way to power cities. But firstly what needs to be done is to create better transport system in the city so that people can take electric trains, tubes, trams, buses etc to work instead of driving to work. Or maybe on a more radical idea, something the brilliant James May came up with, it actually would be quite interesting to have cars that you could like drive onto a motorway and then the individual cars could tap into an electricity grid on the motorway (like the electric train does) and use the electricity from the grid to power the cars around. Much simple told, this would require a lot more technologies (like those cars that drive themselves ones) to keep the cars moving uniformly so that they don't drift off and lose the grid causing chaos on the motorway. If done properly it could also solve the traffic congestion problem which is and hugely growing problem.

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So to wrap it up, this is what i believe is the best way to go around. Every city should have their electricity grid powered by their local renewable energy sources. This can be complemented by producing more efficient technologies to reduce the energy consumption so that the relatively less energy produced by the renewable power plants can be enough to power the cities and its electrical infrastructure. Hydrogen is good for vehicles outside the cities local grids and it could replace gasoline without a massive infrastructure rebuild. Bio fuels (along with the remaining fossil fuels) can be kept for those visceral fun bits (F1 racing, track days etc.). Battery power sounds good, it just doesn't cut it (maybe buses but not cars) . I don't think I'ld be keen on traveling across the sahara or to the north pole in a battery powered car. Finally if solar, wind etc doesn't seem enough to power the planet even after us reducing our energy consumption to the max, there's always nuclear!!

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I wouldn't be keen on traveling across the Sahara or to the north pole in a hydrogen fuel cell car either, as you wouldn't be able to refuel. The inability of battery-powered cars to cross the Sahara or reach the north pole doesn't convince me that they can't cut it as everyday cars. Right now they can't, but neither can hydrogen fuel cell cars. Technological advances could make either very practical, although batteries would be much more energy-efficient and a highly efficient distribution system already exists for electricity. So there's no need to build a new infrastructure at all. The big technological problem is simply that currently existing batteries are much too heavy.

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Thorium cycle energy amplifier reactors seem very promising on the nuclear side of things and there's an odd but apparently very effective new take on wind power being developed in the Netherlands - kite farms. That is already at a prototype stage and the prototype works as planned. It's generating electricty right now. Maybe we can generate such a vast surplus of electricity that wasting it on hydrogen by hydrolysis won't be a problem.

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Batteries does sound good too but both Hydrogen and Battery have their good bits and bad bits. Batteries are too heavy, they run our of juice relatively fast and take too long to recharge (apart from those lithium titanate ones which is still very new technology). Whereas hydrogen is easier to transport across and fuel cells (which are still in relatively early development stages) are capable of producing large amounts of energy and easier to top up. Also batteries are a little environmentally damaging. The kite farms idea is slightly ridiculous though. It'll take a lot for a kite to reach the jet stream. I think we'll properly find out which technology wins out when we actually give them a proper go. Problem is no one's giving them a proper trial!

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Oh and also it wouldn't take a lot to create a hydrogen infrastructure. You've just gotta add hydrogen stations at the existing gas stations. For battery powered cars you'ld need to set up charging stations too which i will agree is gonna be easier than setting up hydrogen stations. All the power stations will need a makeover pretty soon anyway as the oil and gas become uneconomical and they will have to switch to alternative sources.

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Hydrogen isn't easier to transport than electricity, particularly since we have a very good national grid already. Are fuel cells less enviromentally damaging than new battery technologies? I don't know. I think we should be looking at both, because at the moment it looks to me as though both have serious problems that require major breakthroughs. With batteries, it's effectively weight/charge ratio (not charge time, which needn't be of any importance). With hydrogen fuel cells, it's obtaining pure hydrogen at a reasonable cost. Overcoming either problem would make that the most practical technology. The kite farms are a little ridiculous, but they do work. They don't need to go as high as the jet stream - that's the ideal, but they look viable at much lower altitudes. It's certainly clean power, renewable until the sun destroys the Earth, and it's simple (which should mean cheap and reliable).

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Hydrogen is gonna be easier to transport around than transporting around charged batteries, thats what i meant. And i'm pretty sure there are much more energy efficient ways of producing and tapping hydrogen out there. Electrolysis is just the simple straightforward one everyone knows about. There are also algae and bacteria that produce hydrogen. It is also produced while burning fossil fuels and also given off as a byproduct for many industries. So we are already producing a lot of hydrogen, we just need to find ways of trapping it and not letting it go to waste. As Jeremy mentioned up there, the technology is just at Genesis and still has a long way to go. About the kites, i think the major challenge would be to synchronise them properly and keep them from falling back to earth. I think taller windmills would be a simpler step forward.

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Taller windmills cannot work even on paper. They can't be made tall enough to make a difference without taking up too much space and too much material, and the resulting weight would also be a problem. Algae and bacteria produce hydrogen compounds, not hydrogen. The "stagnant water" smell, for example, is hydrogen sulphide. Can you provide a figure for all this byproduct hydrogen you refer to? Because it seems strange to me that it's being ignored by every advocate of hydrogen. I think it's negligable amounts. There wouldn't be much transporting of charged batteries. Mostly just swaps at a station, so transport is a few yards from storage at most. New battery types can take many more charge cycles without significant loss of capacity than Li-ion batteries, so they wouldn't need replacing with new from a factory very often.

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We can't afford to bet everything on the possibility that maybe a fundamental breakthrough will make hydrogen practical. Both technologies are still in heavy development - batteries may be old tech, but until recently there wasn't any significant pressure for development because Li-ion batteries were good enough for all the jobs batteries were being put to. There wasn't any money in multi-KW lightweight fast-charging battery packs, so there wasn't much reason to throw money at developing them.

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Jezza you are a genius, you're subtlety is astonishing, anyway I am from Romania, of all countries, and i see you're show on the internet, but it's by far the best thing since the world became colour. Sorry but my english is not that great, but i bet you understand. But enough with the prazes because it might get to you. I have a proposition for you, I bet you can;t cross Romania in whatever a car you like before those 2 sidekicks of yours :P can get from UK to Bucharest by plane. What do you say ??? PS. The future sounds grim for most of the big manufacturers, we may soon see that famous brads will find their demise, and cars we now think common might, in the future, be like the obscure classic of today

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Yeah someone from romania, im from romania moved to america, ihate america and i want to move back. Anyway, Ford and all of there american rivals are awful car makers, and if cars like the Nissan GT-R or any Lamborghini start to disappear, you can forget it. Wether you like good MPG or not, im sure lamborghini and all will eventually make fuel-efficient cars that arent preposterously ugly. VW made the Blue-sport, which is a good start, but exotics are alwaysin style, but im tired of american companies stealing looks. Every new 08-09 Saturn looks just like any opel. And Dodge stole the europa model for some unkown reason, but it has to stop. Yeah cheers to spyke46, hope to see a race like that on the next topgear.

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i have looked at nearly EVERY comment here, and i don't understand a bit.

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A-4RON-24, I know what you mean. I fully agree that the Clarity is a step in the right direction. But, as someone who grew up in Southern California during the '60's (now living in England) and whose father was an auto mechanic, I wonder if I'll still be able to drive when the industry finally produces an alternative fuel muscle car.

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I think designers have gotten lazy to be honest. I am prouder of my mark 1 ford than the cars around now. despite its simplicity and trust me we are talking bare basic. Air con is either window up or down. Heated windows meant the passenger had to breath heavily and as for seat belts.. well if you ate to much at christmas you had to sit in the back where there werent any. But the look of it is a claasic every would reconise it and ask what engine was it the mexico model etc. Now adays I look at cars and have to check the badges on half the mid range sallons to work out whoses is whose in design. To be honest the clarity and a couple of other cars are the future of design internally and externally. Asthetically beutiful and cheaper to run. Please make more of these or i am going to have to seriously start looking at saving for a morgan for something to buy

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A-4RON-24, apologies I was trying to be subtle :-) 'Nazi Sharks' - Google it or the link is here http://www.claverton-energy.com/download/289/ further apologies that the formatting isn't great but I was in a hurry to get it uploaded before the Detroit motor show (and check out Paul Horrell's Barack Obama blog from November for part of how it all started) Cheers

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Honda???? Am I missing something? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_7

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beeeeeemer. The Hydrogen 7 was a lovely piece of tech but totally unrealistic as a full production vehicle fleet - requires too much energy to get the H2. The paper on the link above gives you the energy figures

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Yes but, Clarkson claims, both in here and during the forecast, that Honda was the pioneer. Which it wasn't. BMW was running Hydrogen cars in Germany long before Honda. He seems to forget to mention that. Wonder whether he would do the same if it was Ford or Aston... "... Honda has bagged a left and a right on the big problems facing modern society. It addresses the question of what we will do when the oil runs out, and it shuts up those who would have us believe cars are melting the ice caps. In short, and with all the subtlety removed, the Clarity means we can sleep a lot more easily..."

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beeeeeemer yep hydrogen could only work due to the extra efficiency of a fuel cell (which is partly why the Clarity costs about $1million a pop) PLUS I think that May has been telling him about micro-grids and how a fuel cell car can provide a street's electricity (quietly compared to internal combustion). BUT if you've still got the paper plug 40% instead of 70% into the electrolysis figure and see how it works out - not pretty reading. Daimler, GM, Honda, Toyota and many other research groups and companies have been working on fuel cells for years. Think Clarkson is giving the Clarity credit since it's the first one in limited production on the road. Here's the thing though - BMW in the 1990s gambled that the others wouldn't be able to make the breakthroughs necessary to make fuel cells cheap enough and last long enough to compete with internal combustion. So far they've been right, but I have no idea for how long.

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Cheers Luckyman, on the link of "NaziSharks" i learnt quite a bit =)

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Hi everyone! I totally agree with the first comment on this page. All back ends of cars are sooo ugly! It looks like the designers just couldn't be bothered anymore. Astons are soo amazing all over, it actually looks like the designers were willing to design and were just hurrying for their dinner!

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You know when police guys put the blues 'n' 2's on? We have these crossroads near where I live, and one day I saw this police car go past us, and he turned left, then we followed him and he turned his lights off.

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Jeremy you talk about everything.

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I think there is a slight problem with hydrogen fueled cars. If you mix hydrogen and oxygen together, isn't that extremely flammable? I don't think I would want to be in a car crash in a hydrogen fueled car, too risky.

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wait vanguilex- isnt gas extremely flammable? man i wouldnt want to be in a car crash in a gas powered car, too risky. its a car crash, its ALWAYS risky, no matter what. and hydrogen and oxygen is water, so not the most flammable thing on earth.

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wait vanguilex- isnt gas extremely flammable? man i wouldnt want to be in a car crash in a gas powered car, too risky. its a car crash, its ALWAYS risky, no matter what. and hydrogen and oxygen is water, so not the most flammable thing on earth.

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A-4RON-24 you're very welcome, glad you enjoyed it. vanquilex, FerrariBoy; H2 has a smaller ignition range than gasoline (think one of those cheap compressed gas cigarette lighters where you have to fiddle with the output switch before it will light)so it's safer in liquid or gaseous form. It's also very highly compressed so it needs a very strong tank (otherwise think about what happened to the shark at the end of Jaws) so to be honest the tank is more likely to survive any crash than the vehicle occupants. Compression is expensive so researchers are looking at all kinds of storage options including carbon nanotech. Cheers

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I think there is a problem with h2 cars. I dont know how much water do they produce, and in what form (liquid, gas), but if all the cars would be h2 cars, all the cities would be flooded with water. It is also possible, that above the cities, there would be a huge cloud, and it will be constantly raining.

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i can i agree more with this article.

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Thanks luckyman for helping me with my worries about Hydrogen cars. mpetya, all I know is that they get H2 from water so it counterbalances any water produced. Maybe they would obtain it from rainwater.

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The car was invented more than a century ago and we still didn't found other was to power our cars other than oil???? you don't actually beliave this do you JC.??? How many people get their pockets filled up out of oil???? Fact, some people need oil to make money, fact people are stupid enough to beliave they are saving the world by driving a prius, fact we dont really care about the environment its just ''trendy'' nowdays to say we care.

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Regarding the X6's Panameras and so on cars that dont actually make sence, again I say, people are stupid and manufacturers and their marketing divisions work on that. They make us beliave we need something we don't really do, people just move where the wind is blowing. Mercedes came up with the CLS which is the same as an E-Klass but is smaller????why do we want the CLS then???? cause it looks better, same thing you could say about the X6 towards the X5.

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So why manufacturers are doing this, ''refixing'' for the worst of all models? Well, I beliave it comes from the fact that as we are ''developing'' we are becoming more and more a ''fast food society'' a bit like the americans, we dont want our cars to last for 10 or 5 or even 3 years, we have them for some 2 years and then buy another one so why do we care so much about reliability of a car anyway??? Every manufacturer builds their cars to have a lifetime of 7/5 years, but we only keep them for 2/3 years, so how does a manufacturer keep his customer from going to another brand because his car his old??? Make a new car out of the current one...

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JC, do you actually read any of the comments???? just out of curiosity Best Wishes

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Woah!!! I was so busy posting this http://focusmag.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8881079123/m/93110412 I completley missed Mr. Clarksons great words of wisdom. And................ he is right, hydrogen is just not going to do the biz. No, its all going to be about bio-fuel. And to cut a rather long story short, (check the link for more if you want or ask James May) A new 'virtual institute' the UK Sustainable Biotechnology Centre has received a £27 million grant to develop a workable process to produce bi-ethanol from agricultural waste with 100 grams of straw yielding as much as 19 grammes of ethanol. And, we can add a little bonus to all of this as the Ricardo Petrol Division work on a new generation of ethanol powered engines that promise to be even more efficient that current petrol engines and more efficient even than current diesel units. So, when the oil runs out? I'll take one of those please.

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hmm. I think of u three as the good (the hamster, thoughhes cute too. of course) The bad (jezza) the ugly (cpn slow. I do agree, jezza should be there but he is pretty evil. and totally cool.)

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Excellent article Jeremy !! i was only reading about the Abarth 500 today an d yes it sounds very exciting.(and much more in my price range than a Zonda which i really do love).

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for the time being I'll take Richard's blue motion Polo, which of course we can't get here in the states, boring but at 70 mpg, better than any hybrid. Lambosareforeva, hate america? fine, get the f*** out now and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way

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the car the average bloke will choose won't be based on hydrogen versus biofuel versus anything. it's based on what makes you look and feel cool. i'll stick to the ferrari, thank you very much.

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This period of time is the most exciting in automotive history ever. Because the concept of all future cars will born very soon. I'm looking forward to see the 'Supercar of 2020'.

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I'm not sure BMW design is getting any better, although I can see it getting more sophisticated. I think BMW has started to wear us down over the years. BMW design has become (perhaps always was) a thing upon itself. The difference now is, because we have accepted them as good cars, we simply go "Ah, its a BMW, that's why it looks a little funny." more often. Ze Germans have always held an, er, slightly idiosyncratic vision of what the future should look like. We can't blame them for believing that in a perfect world there will be a place for the X6. But what will the rest of that future world look like? The words, warm & fuzzy do not come to mind... www.theflyingdutchman.co.za

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Dear Clarkson you should stop calling Hammond Hamster he is not short , you are just tall.

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OK, honestly, most of the stuff about hydrogen has just gone right over my head. I'm only 14 and have just taken my GSCE chemistry exam, so splitting water is quite complex to me, but I thought a lot of chemical reactions (eg metal acid --> salt hydrogen) gave of hydrogen anyway. Is there no way of collecting hydrogen that way?

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I did put plus signs between metal and acid, and salt and hydrogen but they didn't show up.

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Alicia6166 I was just reading one of Paul Horrell's blogs and came back here to check on something. In the unlikely event that you come back too, then - Firstly good question, I've asked worse myself and I'm a postgrad. The main issue with what you propose is that these reactions are between purified forms of the compounds, and you need energy to get that purity before you can then get the hydrogen. The overall energy cost is therefore higher than if you just electrolyse the stuff from water, and much higher than if you reform it from natural gas. Yes it can work (and I think some people do it, though in a lot of cases they just waste the hydrogen); no it can't work cheaply on a big scale. HOWEVER there are people working on H2 extraction from waste products, usually using either sunlight or some form of biological reaction. Wiki is a decent place to start if you want to know more Hope that answers your question ok Cheers

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Thanks luckyman. That has helped a lot :) I appreciate it.

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