Bikes & Cars...

We learned the other day that hydrogen-fueled cars release only water as a byproduct. Could you take that purest of all tailpipe emissions and fuel another car with only water? No, for two reasons: first, that hydrogen car would take forever to produce enough water to fill the tank, and second, cars can't run on just water, no matter what the Internet says.

Actually, if you Google "water-fueled cars," you'll find as many sites touting the idea as debunking it. Treehugger has a pretty good explanation for why it probably won't work; namely, the first law of thermodynamics. You remember -- it's the one about energy not being created or destroyed.

The Museum of Hoaxes is also suspicious of the efficacy of a water car, given that you'd have to split water into hydrogen and oxygen -- a difficult process -- and then run the car on H instead of H2O. Which we already have, so it's not much of a breakthrough. The best part of this debunking, though, is that the guy with the powder that turns water into gasoline admitted he got the powder from spacemen from Neptune. 

The reason the Internets are all abuzz about the water car is the introduction of a supposely viable model from Japanese company Genepax. CleanTech Group talked to representatives of the company, who could not reveal "the core part of this invention," nor could they reveal a timeframe for mass-producing the car, or how long the system would last, or when more tech information would be available to the public. That's a lot to take on faith.

Here's the 1m 14s video from Reuters of the Genepax tootling about on H2O. If it works as great as this guy in the video promises, we're all golden. But it's still too soon to take off our goggles of skepticism.

The idea of water cars is as old as gas crises. Check out this story in the New York Times (login required) about a man in California who was running his car on water -- in 1981. 

Image by atomicshark.