I think hydrogen is the future for cars as well. No useless bi-products.
100% agree.
Are you sure Foothead that if there was a major crash, the container wouldn't explode? I would imagine hydrogen would burn a lot quicker, and cause more of an explosion than gasoline, or am I wrong?
Foothead is in fact completely correct on this one
First off, pressurised containers have to undergo ridiculous safety checks and be stupidly strong. They just wouldn't go off in a collision - even if it was really serious. As said above you can shoot these things and they'll barely dent. The safety precautions round them are simply massive.
Secondly, even if a leak did occur, hydrogen disperses very quickly (being the lightest element in the universe.) It'll most likely disperse too quickly to render the air around it inflammable, even if if it were to go off...
...which is unlikely, since thirdly hydrogen actually has a
HIGHER auto-ignition temperature than petrol (
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-ignition-temperatures-d_171.html) so yes, contrary to popular belief it's less likely to blow.
Let's say the thing goes completely wrong and after all, the hydrogen does blow up. I've already shown that's far, far more unlikely than with petrol cars but assuming it did. It burns quickly, much more quickly than petrol. It'll be an explosion, but a near instant one (and as such it'll likely do far less damage.) Hydrogen fumes are also, well, water vapour. That's non toxic, on the contrary petrol and diesel fumes are rather highly toxic.
WOW Tommy Boy, not a lot of people know this - but the Hindenburg was stuffed full of Hydrogen and Whammy ! It went up like a huge fireworks display in one mighty puff. Poor Adolf cried his eyes out.
...and even fewer people know that the hydrogen is unlikely to have been the major factor in this explosion. The skin of the airship was made from a highly flammable material, and this would've been ignited anyway and burned very quickly. Yes, it did ignite the hydrogen, but that all escaped UPWARDS before igniting - probably burning itself out in under a minute. The actual toxic, deadly fires on the ground were caused by the flammable skin remnants reaching the diesel engines on board the airship - igniting the diesel tank and subsequently the whole ship.
Minus the explosion in the atmosphere, we'd have probably seen exactly the same result with a non flammable gas such as helium - the flammable shell would have still burned through, igniting the diesel tanks and collapsing the ship.
Hydrogen is much much safer than people think - and the sooner we can disperse these myths that everyone's going to die as soon as they drive their hydrogen powered cars away, sooner we can get onto developing a long lasting, sustainable and practical solution. Must admit it annoys the heck out of me when people assume things are dangerous and then hold progress up because of these incorrect assumptions... Please, please do some research before slagging off and trying to sign the death warrant of potentially brilliant technologies!