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Recently I finished watching a duology of documentaries focusing on the death and "rebirth" of the electric car: 2006's Who Killed the Electric Car and the follow up in 2011, Revenge of the Electric Car.

Both films were extremely fascinating for someone like me who isn't what you would call a huge car enthusiast, for one thing I wasn't even aware that GM made electric cars between 1998-2001 in California and even before that in the early parts of the 20th century, I was under the impression that electric cars were a more recent thing.

After watching both documentaries and in light of the recent 300, 000+ Tesla Model 3 reservations and companies like Honda and Toyota going down the alternative route of hydrogen fuel cell technology, I was wondering what IDWers opinions are on electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells, or rather, alternative fuels in general. Where do you guys see the future of cars?

The old GM EV1 research facility was actually here in Torrance!


Anyways, I'm still a big fan of hydrogen. It has the potential to be a cheap fuel source.

People don't realize that our current methods of producing electricity tend to be costly or high pollutant, nuclear makes a good compromise through sheer output vs waste, but nuclear has a stigma the public cant seem to get over.

As a result, the pure plug in electric car is NOT as totally viable as one might think.
People also don't understand that that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is almost always electric. The reaction(s) in the fuel cell through bonding hydrogen with oxygen generates electricity which is then used to charge a battery and/or run the vehicle.

Only Mazda has produced a vehicle capable of combusting hydrogen as the hot side/cool side nature of the wankel creates for an ideal and efficient way to keep the element dense during combustion.

I forsee and WANT a plug-in and fuel cell mix for future vehicles. Plug in during the night, fuel cell doesn't have to charge the battery. By the end of the next day, charge in the battery has gone down to 60%, fuel cell then takes over in charging it up until you get home and plug it into the wall again. Rinse and repeat.

Use a small single rotor just to charge the batteries... Endless electric torque is endless.

Maybe I didn't understand you correctly here, but I'm not sure that'd work. The basic law of thermodynamics is that energy is neither created or destroyed, only transferred/converted between forms.
To run that rotor, you'd have to feed it energy to begin with. And even assuming 100% efficiency through the whole system, all of that mechanical energy in the rotor would still merely be converted to electric potential to store in the battery. You wouldn't be getting a net gain in energy at the end, so that battery wouldn't last any longer. You'd likely even just end up with a net loss, since it's safe to assume there would be energy losses in the system here and there.

So yeah, having the powertrain charge itself under its own power and run a car at the same time isn't going to lead to the car having endless energy to run on.


How about dampers that actually convert kinetic energy in the springs to electrical energy though? Not only would the energy be coming from an external source in this case (meaning no extra work for the engine), but you could even end up with really versatile dampers that could be adjusted on the spot for different situations. You could potentially even use this for anti-roll and/or anti-pitch and still charge your battery in the process.
(Fuck, should I be patenting this already?)

You'd basically just use the small single rotor engine to power a generator to charge the batteries. It would run on Hydrogen and wouldn't be connected to the drive system at all, just would keep the batteries charged.

Would there be energy loss across the system, sure, but it would certainly be a way to use a hydrogen powerplant to extend the range of an electric vehicle.

My statement of it being endless was merely more of a contrast to traditional hybrid drive setups that will simply use the petrol engine to power the wheels when the batteries are depleted, hence a loss of the electric drive and therefore it's torque advantages. This would effectively resolve that.

This post has been edited by Spaz on Apr 24 2016, 08:58 AM

Ah, I see what you mean now. Sorry for not understanding you the first time round.

And that does sound pretty awesome when you put it like that. Not only would you be able to get that instant on-demand torque for much longer, but you could potentially even get away with using smaller batteries when you can charge them on the spot like that, possibly making the cars both lighter and cheaper too.
(And it might even make for a decent sound with that hydrogen rotary running behind the scenes)
You need to go patent this as well

I always knew IDW knew /d/rama, but I didn't know we knew revolutionizing electric cars too on top of that. When do we start flying a prototype out to the Nürburgring?