Car That Runs On Water

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

Call me a crazy tin foiled hat conspiracy theorist, but why hasn’t this made headlines anywhere else?

It’s not the first one of its kind either. There was a guy who also made a dune buggy run completely on water using a process he called “water fracturing”. His name was Stanley Meyers, who then died suspiciously. All of his materials were then seized and no one has been able to follow his research, or what little he did actually publish.

I realize that this borders on a conspiracy theory, but seriously it is getting a bit creepy. It turns out anyone who has ever come close to solving this energy crisis has mysteriously died or completely vanished and all materials are taken offline, leaving very little to follow.

Putting the conspiracy aspect aside, I wanted to actually talk about the logistics of some of the more eco-friendly cars available and their pitfalls.

The primary car that everyone is talking about is the hydrogen car. Hydrogen contains 3.5 times more power then gasoline, taking much less hydrogen to propel a car then ordinary gas, but in order to extract the hydrogen, it has to go through electrolosis, in which Faraday’s law indicates that it takes 3 times the amount of energy to extract the hydrogen then the hydrogen actually produces, thus for every one barrel of hydrogen, it would take 10-11 barrels of gas to produce, and that’s not including the cost of compressing the hydrogen into those highly volatile hydrogen containers.

Okay, so hydrogen is wasteful and volatile, but it is eco-friendly. What about the electric car?

The biggest hurdles of the electric car have historically been how far will it go and how many charges til the battery dies. With many advances in lithium-ion technology and better DC motors, a top of the line battery will last for about 100,000 miles and withstand hundreds of charges. The high end electric cars that I’ve seen will go for about 150 miles before it needs to be recharged. Sounds great!

Also, an electric car has fewer moving parts and doesn’t need maintenance like a regular internal combustion engine.

The downfall to the electric car is it’s starting price. For something basic, you could get up and running for about $10,000, but it’s limited to 40 miles per hour and 40 miles per charge. Doesn’t sound very good to me. Up the price to $70,000 and you could get a car that can go 2-3 hours and up to 100 miles per hour. Up the price to $100,000 and a little patience(one year waiting period) you get the cream of the crop, Tesla Roadster. A full two hour charge and a max of 125 miles per hour puts this heavyweight on my Christmas list for all my rich friends.

There’s something that still bothers me about the electric car though. For all its beauty and charisma, the energy still has to come from somewhere. Sure, there are plenty of eco-friendly power solutions available, but for the most part %85 of our nations power grid is still run on fossil fuels. What this means is that the power has to come from somewhere, and the electricity used to power that electric car is still producing emissions through a third party, the energy company!

So this brings me back to the water powered car. If there’s something that’s completely maintainable and reliable and uses such an abundant supply(%85 of our earths surface is water) and the infrastructure to support such a vehicle is already in place and converting a car to run on water isn’t a huge issue, then why aren’t we researching this?

-Ken Noland