The North American Mazda used in the Motorsports team last year has decided to convert from gasoline to zero-emissions hydrogen, and would employ technology already pioneered in Japan by its parent company on a special version of its RX-8 rotary engine sportscar! The only thing this car was lacking was the economy of fuel and with that sorted this vehicle is bound to create raves. The newest alt fuel RX-9 will run on normal petroleum fuel and proffer the performance expected from the Mazda Rotary engine and in case you need to save the fuel all you got to do is switch to the hydrogen mode and all your woes of wasting excessive fuel is taken care of. So the clean credentials will come from hydrogen and when you want performance you can go back to gasoline.
We all know that the rotary engines are smaller, quieter, and with low vibrations, low weight and quietness they would be ideal for a portable range. However we ought to know that wrestling hydrogen from water through electrolysis takes tremendous amount of energy. If that energy comes from power plants burning fossil fuels, the end product may be clean hydrogen, but the process used to obtain it is still dirty. Agreed that the car going green is a good move but I really wonder about the efficiency, because it’s a known fact that hydrogen cars don’t perform better than the gasoline version. It’s senseless to come up with an alternative if it isn’t better than the former version. Also driving a fuel cell car with hydrogen extracted from natural gas or water could produce a net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and fueling a hydrogen economy with electrolysis would require 4.2 trillion gallons of water, roughly the amount that flows over Niagara Falls every three months. The car’s supposed to go on sales around 2012 and might be an impressive deal for some. But the next time you read about a hydrogen car give it a thorough check because what you think could be the greatest innovation might not actually turn out to be one, so stay green but stay wise!
Via: InventorSpot
