I was told by a friend that Tesla made a working hydrogen powered car design and then sold it to shell why isn’t there more on this?
In: Technology
u/MiscalculatedRisk has a great comment. The one thing I would add to it is that you need to be aware of people who are “blowing sunshine up your ass”. I constantly hear about how “big oil killed the electric car”, or how we have working “flying cars” that some company is just waiting to release. Sunshine… meet butt. There is a huge difference between a technology that you can barely get to work properly by taking on huge inconvenience and risks, and something that consumers would happily use on a daily basis.
The best example of this I can think of is if I released a portable record player that hooks up to your phone. I create a USB connection to power an entire turntable and then you can listen to your favorite vynil records on the go! Of course using this for even five minutes is going to use up your phone’s entire battery, and if you actually try to move the record player at all then it will jump like crazy and you won’t be able to hear a friggin thing, AND it weighs a bloody ton. It is impractical, it is stupid, no one would putup with the drawbacks – but it is possible. When an idea isn’t so obviously stupid to the general public (though it might be to an expert in the field) people are often suckered in by marketing promises from people who are trying to sell you on something or push an agenda.
In this case the fuel cell folks are not necessarily bad people trying to snooker you. But they are over-selling the promise of their technology hoping to get research funding as a result.
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