Today all car manufacturers are desperately (and expensively) trying to produce a so called green car. Most of this is driven by the
So today you can buy the first hydrogen fuel cell car the Honda FCX Clarity. This technology works something like this – the fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity and water. The water goes out the tailpipe and the electricity powers a motor that drives the front wheels, to do this you go to the petrol station and fill up like a normal car, if you can find one that has a hydrogen pump. Easy but one of the most energy heavy things you can do ie produce hydrogen, hydrogen is always attached to some other element – e.g. H2O water – and takes a very complicated and expensive plant to do the separating and a huge amount of electricity power it. So until the technology becomes more advanced, the methods easier and electricity comes entirely from alternative generating methods it will take a lot of fossil fuels to produce hydrogen to produce a zero emissions car, so it’s a question of semantics really because somewhere down the line it’s polluting - a lot.
The same goes for all the battery powered cars like the G-Wiz, the up coming Chevrolet Volt and the lovely little Tesla, based on the Lotus Exige, until an awful lot of the electricity it takes to charge them comes from alternative generating methods they will still pollute.
The most mature of the technologies seems to be the hybrid vehicle seen in the likes of the Toyota Prius and the Lexus range. This is a system which the vehicle has both a petrol engine and an electric motor, the petrol and kinetic energy charging the electric motor batteries when running on longer drives and higher speeds and using the electric motor when being driven in towns. A great system that cuts the mile per gallon in fuel that car uses. But these also have their problems, if you live in the middle of the country, like I do, and most of your driving is at 90 kph you will just be using the petrol engine and you will not see any significant bettering in consumption, They work really well if you live in a town and do a little driving on the open roads. if not you’d be better off buying one of today’s highly efficient diesel cars which return over 70 mpg.
Recent legislation in France – indeed the whole EU – means that all petrol needs to have a percentage of bio fuels added to them. The new 95-E10 has 10% ethanol from the likes of maize added to it, which is fantastic, but please be aware that cars built pre 2000 may not be able to run on it, over a few tanks of this fuel it can create problems with the pipes and connectors in your engine. So if your car is pre 2000 be prepared to use 98 fuel, although that seems to be a rare beast these days.
It’s not the only problem that this fuel has, a friend recently was filling up in a petrol station in Angouleme when a beautiful new Lamborghini drove in and the driver noticed the new sign on the side of the pump “95-E10”, went to ask the attend and after some animated conversation strode back to his car and screamed off into the distance. It seems that supercars can’t run on it either
