Who needs credibility?

Click the title! (if you haven't read the last post)

Alright, so honestly I didn't do much research after I read the Reuters article, because I was really bothered, and all the water powered car websites I went to said stuff like 'fueled by pure water!!' and really nothing useful like how it works. So I *assumed* they combusted the Hydrogen, and well, you all know what happens when we assume.

I assumed this because A) Reuters did a terrific job of not giving any specifics at all. If that car actually ran efficiently it would be a scientific break through, and then they might have actually found a science dude to write a story . . . and B) because of how ridiculous it would be to break up water to create hydrogen, and then put the water back together to run a fuel cell. Oops. Anyway, I was alerted to this mistake through the Genepax wikipedia article by one of my dear friends (who is still wrong about BPA not being in all plastic water containers and other things). The article surprisingly lists references, or I would have suggested that the article was just speculating as I was. The reference is even very vague as the company seems to be, but it does mention the presence of a fuel cell, and it's possible that the water separation is not done through electrolysis, although that seems like a pretty intense scientific break-through as well. I've never heard of that. Anyone? In the end, that would still require energy of some sort.

So as I'm sure you've all figured out by now, water to Hydrogen and Oxygen back to water, in a perfect system, would end up with no net energy gain. This is what these guys are doing. The world, however, is not a perfect system, so you will lose energy in this method. Which would mean you are better off with an electric car, because then at least there's no electrodes to deoxidize or energy needed to electrolyze the water. In this setup, your car is being run by the electricity in the battery basically. It has been pointed out to me that this would be alright if someday we could use entirely wind/sun energy. That's probably true, but difficult, and today is not that day. If normal Joe had one of these cars, I feel as though he would be wasting more fossil fuels from his local power plant than he would be driving his Ford Expedition (I don't really know, I'm just guessing).

But . . . that car was really tiny . . . maybe it gets like 50 miles to the respective fossil fuel gallon. But I still wonder why it's not just straightforwardly battery powered . . . it would be loads more efficient.

My point, dear reader, is that news agencies are often stupid. And they leave stuff out! And you can never tell if they're giving you the full story, or if they are decidedly leaving something out because it's more interesting or makes them more money one way or the other, or because they were given faulty information and they didn't question it. Come on.

Here's my attempt at those funny pictures that used to be only cats . . .

Hey, what's Jason doing in the front seat? weird. Later . . . I'm gonna go look at icanhascheezburger.com