A physics teacher and a group of students at Central High School in Phoenix, AZ have built a pickup truck that runs on hydrogen that is generated on the vehicle from water and sunlight. It's really an interesting project.
An article about it was printed in today's Arizona Republic newspaper.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1001hydrocar01.html
More info can be found on the club's website at www.centralphysics.com.
That is great. I never did see how far the could go and the cost.
Ok the system has enough cells to produce 320 watts, enough to produce enough hydrogen to go 1.5 miles in a day plus now they compress the hydrogen to 100 psi which will take the truck 2.5 miles. A 3000 psi tank would take the truck 80 miles. I would need at least 3000 psi to get back and forth to work. It would take nearly 17,000 watts of solar cells to get me to work and back right? Solar cells are around 5 bucks a watt , so about 85,000 dollars. Say I drive 20,000 miles a year and get 25 miles a gallon in my pickup, 800 gallons, 1600 dollars. So it would take 53 years to pay back the cost of the solar cells alone, assuming gasoline stays at 2 dollars a gallon, if it went to 4 dollars a gallon and solar cells droped to 50 cents a watt, the payback for the solar cells would be less than 3 years.
What if they used a 2 cycle engine?
