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Powering the Future
Posted 3rd March 2008 at 1:43pm by M1ke, tagged as Technology | Commenting Closed

A "zero-emission" sports car with a top speed of nearly 100mph is set to be unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show.

I'm one for new developments in power and efficiency and motor vehicles have always been one of the challenges to my opinion of how things should be powered. The problem with them is that their power source is one which is difficult to effect in any sense of environmental friendliness - changes to the petrol/diesel may stop engines running, and its certainly unfeasible to fit better exhaust or catalyst systems on every car on the road. For this reason a development in engine power only affects new cars, which in turn will remain static when more improvements are released.

As seems to be the case with many aspects of technology the real solution is in centralisation. Once we have a situation where every item in daily life (as opposed to industry)  is in some way powered by electricity, every single improvement made to power generation at industry level (better filtering of emissions, more renewable sources etc.) will affect every single device or machine that we use. This car does just that because it uses hydrogen fuel cells, produced by using electricity to split water into hydrogen. Not only does the car have an excellent range, but every improvement made to large scale generation of power will benefit it, potentially reducing costs and making it steadily more environmentally friendly, without it ever needing to be "upgraded" itself. I can't wait for the day when we're all driving these things.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Green sports car set for launch

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