You get a sense that the Post senses the oversell of this hydrogen car when you see the word hype used in the headline. The story, however, is less skeptical.
The Ford Edge gliding along the George Washington Memorial Parkway doesn't have spinning rims or a booming sound system. The bling in this SUV is the technology. The vehicle runs almost silently. It needs no gas and releases no polluting exhaust.
The devil is in the details my friend. Two million dollars to produce this SUV. Can you even imagine the pollution produced in all of the processes involved in that cars production. A car like this is merely pushing its pollution back a step. The pollution will now be expelled in the extraction and manufacturing processes involved in producing the hydrogen and batteries. The hydrogen in particular will probably require a lot of power and natural gas feedstock for it production. And this doesn't even consider the building of a completely new infrastructure to deliver these new products.
I think we are not yet thinking clearly about our problems here. The article notes that we will have to "leap high technological hurdles" to make this work. That is probably an understatement. There may not be enough energy left to get us over the top.
[Link: WP: The hype over hydrogen cars - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com]
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