Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Car's that run on water!

This is my second post of the day, but I think I need to make a comment about an ad which appears frequently on this blog. (Unfortunately I have no control over the ads except to suppress them altogether.) It's headline is "Run Cars on Hydrogen" but actually claims that cars can run on water. Anyone with any scientific training at all will know that these two conepts are more or less directly opposite to one another; chemical energy is released when hydrogen combines with oxygen (in combustion or otherwise, as in a fuel cell) to produce water, so running a car on water is not a promising idea. As far as I can tell, the proposition is to use the car's battery to produce hydrogen from water and then burn the hydrogen in the engine, which presumably charges the battery. In other words, perpetual motion! Needless to say, this is a scam.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Tony, just have to let you know I actually met someone who was otherwise a rational person who bought into the whole thing. He's even building his own water to hydrogen coverter for his car. We talked about for a while but he wouldn't be swayed, kept saying how much his mileage was going to improve.

Tony Welsh said...

I guess we all have our blind spots and if one does not have any scientific training one might still appear rational and yet succumb to the apparently authoritative web sites on the subject. But one of the first things you learn in physics is the law of conservation of energy.