Wanna Ride Weird??

[Coyote]

In a way, seeing the demise of crude oil might be a good thing as it will finally kick car companies into developing other means of transportation. The only reason why fuel cells hadn't been developed was these major comglomerates believed in using the cheapest source they can and if it does run out, they won't be there to see it, let the other generation sort it out. Also, governments will soon relise if they continue to support companies that are killing the earth, they won't have millions of people to control anymore. Eventually they will push car companies into making greener vehicles, save the earth, and live like kings for a while longer. Toyota have already seen this, thats why they are trying to get ahead of the other companies in developing hybrid cars now

Ethanol/Electric hybrids I believe are the future. Ethanol is 98.9% alcohol (from what I remember) and emit a very tiny amount of harmful gases but most of what they emit is water. This looks like the greenest and cheapest power for the next fleet of cars. I'm looking forward for the change, I'm only 15 and I might live to see the earth die

[Ixion]

Trouble with ethanol, is it's shit to use, because it absorbs atmospheric water like mad. So you have serious problems with storing it (ie at the servo) or even with leaving it in your bike tank for a week. Absorbs water , and then your carb settings are totally shitted.

[Wolf]

Trouble with ethanol, is it's shit to use, because it absorbs atmospheric water like mad. So you have serious problems with storing it (ie at the servo) or even with leaving it in your bike tank for a week. Absorbs water , and then your carb settings are totally shitted.

Unless you get it as pure as possible then mix it with petrol to stop it leeching water - oops, we don't have any petrol...

I'm looking at fuel cells being a good contender for the future but at the moment they are only about 50% efficient (use 50kW of National Grid electricity to produce enough hydrogen to get 25kW of electricity out of the fuel cell) and are large and heavy.

This will change.

The sodium borohydride method of chemically storing the hydrogen until needed (released by passing Sodium Borohydride over a catalyst) seems to be the best idea so far - need a catch tank installed to trap the dehydrogenised slurry after its been used so it can be taken back to the servo and rehydrogenised for reuse, but that's not too much of a prob.

Chrysler is getting around 30 miles to the gallon of Sodium Borohydride solution with current technology - once again, that will improve as the efficiency of the fuel cell increases. Sodium Borohydride is recyclable and it's related to laundry detergent - so a spill will result in cleaner roads.

Chemically storing the hydrogen solves a lot of problems related to storage - flammability, motility of atoms, pressure etc.

Or we could just run electrical conduits through our roads and have coils mounted under our vehicles to pick up the electricity by inductance - would need a couple of batteries to get from one inductance field to another and smooth out the power, but no worries there.

Modern batteries are getting quite good power densities - consider the battery in a cellphone - small and light, lasts for ages, can be partially discharged and then recharged without developing a "memory", hundreds of deep cycle recharges before it finally craps out. Only problem - bloody expensive. A 12V version with a decent Amp-hour rating would be smaller and lighter than a comparable sealed lead-acid battery but cost heaps more. It would last a lot longer than the lead acid battery but when it did die, it would probably cost a lot more than the lead acid batteries that would be needed over the same time span.

If there were a sufficient demand for 12V, high amp-hour versions for electric vehicles, the price would be driven down - at the moment it's just not in the manufacturers' best interests.

[Lias]

Why the hell are most of those bikes in the hyperlink so fuggin ugly?

Amen. The designers of some of those bikes were on SERIOUSLY good drugs then they came up with em.