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designwise is Mercedes, with the new butt-ugly E-Class, the ugly C, the revolting R, the shopping-trolley SLK, the outdated A-class, B-class, CLK and sad to say, CL-class.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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