Jeremy Clarkson

Good one on the Iron Lady... But I'm not convinced entirely on the hydrogen thing. If it takes as much or more energy to produce as/than it puts out, what's the point? Unless we use the sun to produce it of course. I think I'm gonna buy me some stock in a solar panel company pdq.

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Takk may not be convinced about hydrogen, but I am. Still, no one seems to be listening. And probably won't until they realize that a lot of their military hardware runs on petrol....

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could not agree more. honda is going in the right direction.

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It's time we question our transportation ethos! It's not just fuel but the automobile we should question. As the economic bust of this past year has taught us, it's time we adopt to a new form of thinking. Filling your gas tank with petrol is the equivalent to buying on credit. Eventually, both will run out! To make matters worse, our obsession with personal transportation has lead to congestion, rampant consumption and pollution. Admit it! I, for one, am guilty. I cover at least 500km's a week visiting my family every weekend. I adore driving my modified WRX, but with each km I cover - I drive closer to the end.

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What hydrogen may solve may also produce adverse consequents. More car's on the road = congestion. Even though we may have endless quantities of water available (non-freshwater) as a source for hydrogen; we only have a certain amount of Earth's surface available to drive on! Consider exponential growth of the human population. Not only are we running out of oil ? we are literally running out of terra-firm to set foot on. Am I suggesting we all stick to public transport? No. Do we give up the car? Yes. ....it's time we reinvent the wheel?. spread our wings!

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We have plenty of airspace available and sophisticated air traffic control systems. Nuclear (sub-atomic), solar, hydrogen and wind power can all be harnessed. It's the scale of each that pose a problem. How can we extract the most potential from solar power? How can we produce mass quantities of hydrogen efficiently? How can we control nuclear power at the sub-atomic level? ....can these sources of power deliver the endless thirst we have for personal transportation?! These notions may seem futuristic right now, but we need to think light years ahead. Why, you ask?.......Why not?!

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why do we try to discover, what was already discovered.. water powered car http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjQeLYhJQ_I&feature=related and burning water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2wG90QlZSU reason cars don?t run on water is MONEY, do you know what would happen to economy if there was no need for gas, no need for batteries, no need for catalyst, hybrids,.... they will make 101 excuse so that we stay in "petrol times" for the money not because we don?t know how to. even Tesla made free electricity, all he got was his lab blown up.

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Jeremy has raised an issue here that car engineers have been trying to emphasise for decades: reducing emissions with obstructive devises in the exhaust system produces a vicious circle. You put an obstacle in the exhaust, this results in reduced power - and you need a larger engine (i.e. the one that burns more fuel). Using devices like catalytic converters, particle filters and recirculation systems is a bit like making a person with bad breath breathe in what he breathes out instead of changing his diet, and this is a mild simile. Lean burn technology, in contrast, addresses the cause of the problem by making the engine actually burn less fuel, so there is fewer exhaust gases to deal with. I know only two car manufacturers who actually sold cars with engines using the lean burn technology - these are Mitsubishi with thir GDI engines and Toyota which put a similar engine in Carinas.

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@2 Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that hydrogen is the only way to go. But we have to find a way to produce H2 that takes less energy than it delivers. Otherwise, what's the point? There is no natural source for it, apart from outer space where it is abundant. That's a long way to drive, just to fill 'er up...

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Making Hydrogen requires electricity and water. Transporting hydrogen to a filling station is a silly idea, as it could easily be made on site. The problem isn't getting the hydrogen to the filling station so much as having enough electricity to make it. Places with lots of sun can rely somewhat on solar power for electricity, otherwise we are left with coal, nuclear, and hydro-electric. I prefer coal to nuclear, ludicrously, because coal isn't radioactive.

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Another option is methanol. Its more stable than hydrogen and methanol can run in todays cars. How about a nuclear power plant that sucks C02 from the air, adds water and electricity to produce methanol?

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How about a "V8 / Wankel" Hybrid?

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I truely believes Honda is the only company that is doing the right thing. They are the first company that introduce a Hybrid as a mid-term solution as they understand Hydrogen technology is still years away from being commercially ready. The amount of efforts they have put into green technology is amazing. bariummeal: with all due respect, Methanol is NOT the solution. (Methanol) 2CH3OH (Oxygen) 3O2 --> 2CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) 4H2O (Water). burning Methanol still produces CO2.

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people needs to realise the ultimate solution to our climate problem is not improved engine technology (although it can be a mid-term technology, we cant rely on it to change the future), but a entirely new energy source that can meet our growing energy need.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7496644.stm The idea of home-brewing hydrogen in your garage/basement already exists, it just needs the push from consumers to get it going!

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Hey Jeremy, I'm a huge fan of Top Gear and of you personally. But... i have to disagree with you on this one. If we wait for car companies to make their minds and actually use hydrogen, we'll be waiting for like 300 years to see that happening. Look at it as the mobile industry. Every couple of months u have a list of new phones coming out with minimal new features added, as if it's too hard for them to integrate the whole packages from the beginning. Take the iPhone for example. It's the biggest scam of all time; the first iPhone had a touch screen... wow! the 3G had 3G network support... wow! (even though the 3G technology was 4 years old but they saw that they shouldn't integrate it in the first iPhone). 6 months later... iPhone 3GS... what's new? a camera that supports video... what the hell? This is what car manufacturers do... and hybrids are your iPhone 3G. It doesn't solve your problem but it's a step forward.

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@Takk: All energy storage systems lose energy at each stage in the process so all energy technologies ultimately require more energy to produce the fuel than is released in consuming the fuel. This includes fossil fuels. The only reason that fossil fuels are economically viable is that we conveniently neglect the action of prehistoric plant life in capturing and storing the suns energy over millions of years. The same applies to ethanol and methanol technologies. Even as they may become economically viable, it still requires the crops grown to produce the fuel to capture and store much more of the sun's energy than we ultimately release in consuming the end product. The point with hydrogen technology is not only solving the logistical issues in storage and transportation, but also the issue of how to economically capture the energy to produce the fuel. Ultimately, it's probably things like solar and wind technology that will provide the answers, but that's just my best guess.

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@Jonathon102: It all depends on the source of the methanol. If the methanol is produced from fossil sources such as petroleum or coal, then yes, it's no different than burning other fossil fuels since you're releasing carbon into the atmosphere that was not there in recent history. On the other hand, if you create methanol or ethanol or other organic fuels from recently grown, short lived crops like corn or rapeseed or similar crops, that's an entirely different story. A sustainable biofuel industry would not have any net effect on atmospheric CO2 levels since the crops grown to produce the fuels would be removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate as it was released by the actions of that industry and the consumption of it's fuels. The big questions are whether such a sustainable industry is possible, economically viable and whether doing so would still leave us with enough arable land to grow food.

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Producing hydrogen is easily done. Electrolysis is not a new process. The only issue is that it takes a lot of energy to do - but as with anything, you can't get more energy out then you put in - it's simple physics. All we need is better ways to make electricity - fission, cold fusion, wind, tidal. Whatever really. As soon as can make electricity easier, we can have hydrogen. Although I still think that we can already do it, and the massive companies will kill anyone that goes public with the knowledge...

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The technology is there both to produce hydrogen cheaply and efficiently (wind turbines, tidal power and, dare I say it, nuclear power are all well-established and safe technology), but the infrastructure isn't there. It'll be very nice when Honda release the FCX, but where are you going to fill it up? At your local BP garage? But why would they spend millions of pounds implementing the facility to fill up your Honda FCX when only Honda FCX drivers will use it? It's a viscious cycle. Fuel suppliers won't put the infrastructure in until there are more hydrogen cars, and car makers won't make hydrogen cars until there's somewhere to fill them up, otherwise who will buy them? I'm very excited about hydrogen technology, and I know it's workable, but I don't think we'll see it become popular for at least another 20 years.

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@TheBassJunky Couldn't we use the same type of pump that LPG uses? I don't know the ins and outs of it... but that infrastructure is already available. Granted, not everywhere uses LPG, but there are at least several pumps near where I live that do. There's probably a complicated reason why it won't work though.

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Your central point, that hybrids are a patch over a widening crack and that a real alternative to oil has to be pushed forward without delay, is absolutely correct. But hybrids will help to eke out the oil stocks we have, buying us thinking time and softening the impact of rising oil prices. Current hybrid tech improves economy by a disappointing amount - a point you've made in the past - but the potential for the tech is much more; the Prius is the "Model T" of hybrids. Soon all petrol cars will have tech we now associate with hybrids - start / stop systems, regenerative braking, solar panels - to the benefit of economy, packaging and performance. The current feeble generation of hybrids is a necessary step in that evolution.

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my-screen-name, @ post 6, you must be the most embarassing stupid and ignorant dude on planet Earth with still capacity of speaking and typing (cluelessly, though). Water wasn't, isn't, and won't ever be a "power source" except in a water turbine downhill a dam (and even in this case the water is raised back to the mountains by the sun radiation, so it's just a momentary medium). Every single engine supposed to be running on water is just running on electricity. Why? Simply because the energy you need to put to split the H2O molecule in its components is more than you can get back from combining them again in whatever way you could ever imagine. Otherwise we would have a perpetual motion engine just under our eyes in the last, what, 300 years. Are you suggesting that all the scientists are dumb because they demonstrated the impossibility of perpetual motion more ages ago?

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my-screen-name, @ post 6, part 2 Did you hear the guy in the second video say "water AND electricity"? He is a good, honest farmer, he just doens't know how to sum up numbers on a paper as well as he is able to mill out components from solid steel. Using electricity to split water in gases and then burn them into a combustion engine ON THE VEHICLE ITSELF is something like using electricity to drive a motor that drives a generator ...

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What I find amusing in a rather sad way is that while everyone targets the cars that are pumping out greenhouse gasses, no one seems to mind that the plants that create said fuel are often in gross violation of environmental codes themselves. While they rake in billions. Hmmm.... As for hydrogen, I'm convinced it's the way to go. We just need more manufacturers going that way to help drive production prices down and put more serious research into making it efficient. The Clarity is cool and all, but I think we need something exciting and fast to make people really sit up and take notice.

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