:talkingfuture.com Come and learn about the future…

Martin: Last nights Top Gear featured the Tesla Roadster and the Honda FCX Clarity. Clarkson loved the Tesla up until he found the achilles heel: charging. I don’t think that is much of a problem on a weekend sportscar but it would be a pain on long journeys or for daily use. James May drove the Honda and came to the conclusion that it is the future of the car. I think he might be right. Its a zero emissions solution whose only change to our normal habits is remebering to fill at the hydrogen pump. Removing the oil without removing anything else from the experience. There are obstacles to the take up of cars like this. First of all the price will need to come down, that will happen with mass production. Secondly, we need more hydrogen pumps, it can’t be that hard to add hydrogen to the Petrol, Diesel and LPG that most petrol stations have.

In short, I think they are right. How about you?

Thomas: Yeah, they might well have a point! Like you say, the Tesla is great as a piece of engineering and a fantastic toy for the weekend, but it’s just not practical in it’s current form. The Honda on the other hand does everything your existing car does in exactly the same way, you just use a different hose to fill it up. It’s got a very low barrier to entry. It’s not all great news for Hydrogen and the Top Gear boys though. For instance, although Hydrogen is the most abundant gas in the universe, it doesn’t hang about on it’s own under the Texas dessert waiting for us to harvest it and distribute it to our fuel stations. It tends to cling on to other elements, like the Oxygen in water, and with existing technology it takes more energy to liberate the H from the H2O than can be obtained from the resulting Hydrogen. Unless we come up with a cunning way to generate Hydrogen on demand I’ll be hedging my bets between this and an ultra fast-charge battery pack for the Tesla.