Looking forward to it. Toyota's proven some capability in this area, not only with the hybrid Prius, but also with the RAV4 EV.

Electric Vehicles are a joke.

All hail the hydrogen atom !!

TrainRekS Electric Vehicles are a joke!!!!!!!!

YOU are a joke. Electric vehicles were more popular than gasoline in the early days, Ohio Car Company. If you electrify highways you end up with potentially limitless energy to power vehicles. Electric vehicles were not developed to their full potential as Edisons DC electricity was over shadowed by TESLA'S AC.

Where would we get all this hydrogen ??? Do you realize how much energy you require to produce H. What kind of pressure you have to keep it under to power a vehicle ?

Electric vehicles are nowhere near their potential, but the electromagnetic induction motor is a lot more practical than a hydrogen one right now. External combustion rules, NOT internal.

lol electrified highways. funny. all those long roadways with so many miles between power plants, the loss would be enormous. what a stupid idea.

"Where would we get all this hydrogen???"

Yeah the most abundant source of energy in the universe must be pretty friggin hard thing to find.

You are a joke.

what he meant was how you extract that hydrogen. a lot electricity is needed for electrolysis and compress hydrogen to liquid state.
anyways, hydrogen NOR battery tech alone will power the future of electric cars.
hydrogen fuel cells are pretty attractive for long range while battery powered cars are short ranged yet cheap to recharge and is simpler.
though i think an all electric powered car makes sense on bigger cars since battery weight wouldn't be much of an issue. its like having an SUV and remain guilt free and toyota might not wan't competing against its own Prius.

@Sandman and Thomas

Sandman, wow...

Electrified highways, the lose would be enormous? WTF?!
Ever notice all those power lines as you ride down the interstate?
WTF? Did you this those were superconductors up there or magik fairies?

And hydrogen might be the most abundant source of energy in the UNIVERSE, and fusion sure is damn cool too... To bad this is a planet and we haven't created a long term self sustaining fusion reactor yet.

I don't actually see how DC/AC (or Edison vs. Tesla) applies to an electric car? Either one would work, and DC would probably be better. (I would think you'd have less current ripple as you moved along the highway).

But my take is neither. Electric is not there, but is a great idea in theory. Once a power storage device (other than a chemical battery) is developed things would take off rather quickly. Be it super capacitors or some type of magnetic or kinetic energy storage, you need quick recharge times and decent mileage (at least 50 miles per charge with someway to go much further).

Once the energy storage side is solved the cars will come.

"To bad this is a planet and we haven't created a long term self sustaining fusion reactor yet."

"super capacitors"

@ Brian, hydrogen is about as cheap as oil based fuels like diesel and unleaded is right now. The only problem is the refueling infrastructure is not there. Check out the Honda Clarity fuel cell car...now that is the future.

Super capacitors are a joke right now, about as useful as carbon nano tubes are currently. Potential, yes. But not for many years.

Hydrogen quickly bonds with lots of other stuff. As a result, while it is the most plentiful element in the universe, most of it here on Earth is bound up in molecules of other substances. Breaking it out of those bonds requires power, usually in the form of elecricity, most often, in the USA, from a coal fired power plant.

So, hydrogen is NOT a source of energy. It is a carrier of energy from other sources, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear or oil. However, creating it efficiently, on a mass scale, is a fairly well understood process.

Once you've got Hydrogen separated, what do you do with it? It's atoms are the smallest of all, so small they take advantage of any leak in their containment systems. So small, in fact, that they actually leak THROUGH many other substances. In the process, they often react with those substances, breaking them down, causing them to become brittle, and eventually creating BIG leaks. Solutions to this exist on an industrial scale, but how they translate into a smaller, consumer scale, is yet unsure. It's not like sticking a gas nozzle into your gas tank.

Further, to achieve anything like gasolines power density, you need to compress Hydrogen into a liquid. That takes pressure, and that takes cooling. Both require more energy. Once in a liquid state you need to keep it cool. That takes insulated tanks, and fuel lines to carry it from the tank to your fuel cell or IC engine. All those are also subject to leaks and embrittlement which, again, have been solved on an industrial scale, but not on the consumer scale.

EV's? Making them work with ranges of 50-60 miles, charged overnight with the existing electrical grid, is a known issue today, which solves most people daily commuting needs. (Although supplying EVERYONES charging needs overnight would overtax most of the countries electrical grids.)

People in the midwest often have longer commutes, so EV's aren't a solution for them. People also use cars for longer trips, on weekends or vacations. Again, todays EV's aren't a solution there either.

New EV's, such as the Tesla, come closer. They have decent ranges (200 miles claimed), but slow charging times are still a problem. One proposed solution, swapable battery packs, sounds nice, but is really a logistical nightmare. Frankly, until something like a supercapacitor is made feasible, EV's seem limited to about a max of 200 miles a day, max.

So, for now, hybrids along the lines of Chevy's Volt (if it ever reaches production) are the best match. 40 mile battery only range still meets most daily commuting needs, and a petrochemically fueled backup electrical generator meets longer range cruising needs. It is, for maybe the next decade or so, the most suitable arrangement (albeit still not ideal.) At that point, maybe we'll have supercapacitors ready for mass production. Or have the kinks worked out of the Hydrogen supply chain.

Or society may have economically crashed in a massive depression, and we'll all be fighting over who gets to ride a horse?

Brian, I think you need a course in electricity 101. First, all over our cars run on, you guessed it, DC. Batteries are a DC power source, always have been, always will be. Those power lines you quoted about not losing power, well, you would be wrong. First, those power lines up the voltage and drop the current so as little power as possible it lost. We are talking hundreds of thousands of volts. Last I checked, most home/business applications run on 110v, 220v, 240v, or 480v for stuff like elevators.

Now P=IE. Which means power (wattage) equals current (amperage) times voltage (volts). So if you take your power and up the voltage through a transformer, your amperage goes down. So 20a on 110v is 10a on 220v or 4.6a on 480v. If we up that to 200,000v, you get .011a. You can run an LED off that, provided the voltage doesn't arc and short out. Our cars run off of 12v. So unless you want to have tractor trailer size cars for the transformers needed to step down a couple hundred thousand volts, a power grid for cars isn't feasible.

Now AC can step up and down, which means it is better at traveling distance, hence the reason it won the AC vs DC war to power the nation. DC, not so much. For Edison's plan to work, a power box is needed every couple blocks do to the amount of power loss associated with DC. The reason for this loss, current. Current meets resistance which equals heat. Heat is another form of energy which means power is lost. And if you have no resistance, it is called a short, which is bad. So instead of have transformers stepping down the current so loss is minimized, you have to run at 110v or 220v every where. Which also creates another problem, since the higher the current, the thicker the wire needed to carry it, which means more resistance in the cable, which means more heat, and in turn more loss. Not to mention the added cost needed for all these big power cables needed to run DC everywhere.

So unless the world wants to shock themselves to death, we won't be having power grids for cars anytime soon. Unless they rediscover Tesla's Tesla Coil technology quickly.

@ kw

Again, just look up the Honda Clarity that's already on a kind of lease/field test in California (where they have some hydrogen stations) for $600/month.

lol at Brian. English class, Science class, and get a clue while you're at it.

@ Noya

I'm keeping an eye on them, but skeptical about them, long term. Concerned about how long fuel lines and seals will remain functional in the real world.

If those problems can be solved in a way that Joe Average, who doesn't WANT to know how his car works, can drive it without care, then it's a great thing.

Pure EV, at this point, is flawed too. Which will eventually become mainstream hinges on how technology progresses. It's an interesting thing to watch happen.

Big oil would get into the Hydrogen fuel business. Guess what would happen then,$$$$$$$$$