Water Powered Japanese Car Demo’d
Water Power Japanese Car Demo’d
TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.
Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water — rain, river or sea — was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).
“The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,” Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.
“It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,” he added.
Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.
Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.
Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit — not consume — water.
(Writing by Chika Osaka, editing by Miral Fahmy and Chang-Ran Kim)
Editor’s Comment: Too Good To Be True!
Sounds a bit on the “to good to be true” side. Seems to me that you require energy input, in order to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water. Will watch this one to see what develops, but to date, there’s been no proof shown.
More on Alternative Energy Vehicles including this Water Fuel Cell: Alternative Energy Vehicles
Stumble it!
Filed under: auto
the real question is ” energy can neither be created nor be destroyed” under ordinary conditions. ( I am not talking of nuclear reaction). where does the energy required for the breakdown of water come from?. Hard to beleive until the real scientific principles involved are unveiled
Agreed… it takes a lot of electrical power to separate hydrogen and oxygen from H2O. A fuel cell then combines these two elements and uses the energy released to power an electric car. Not sure where the “water” car gets it’s power from???
The technology sounds highly questionable but considering the massive amount of potential energy contained in water there’s no reason to assume the premise violates the 1st law of thermodynamics. It’s only a matter of finding a way to release/harness this energy with some level of efficiency (as we currently do with fossil fuels). Maybe Genepax found the way. Maybe it’s a hoax.
Agree that a few more details on the power plant are needed. If this is true, isn’t it a perpetual motion machine? Why not capture the water vapor coming out of the tail pipe and put it back into the fuel tank?