The first ever hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle amazingly was created by General Motors way back in 1966 and from the outside it is a fairly normal GMC Handivan with candy blue paint, Torque thrust alloys and whitewall tires!
It is powered by a Union Carbide fuel cell that uses a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to power the engine. There are 32 fuel cell modules that were connected by 550 feet of piping, two big tanks one for cryogenic hydrogen and one for Oxygen, 45 gallons of potassium hydroxide filled the modules and an electrolyte that was mounted behind the middle bench seat and weighed a hefty 550 pounds! In total the van weighed a meaty 3.5 tons, despite this the van could still reach a top speed of 70 mph and had a range of 150 miles, not that bad really when you think this was a big 60′s van.
Sadly though after the ‘Electrovan’ was finished and shown off to the press the project was scrapped because of the cost. The platinum in the fuel cell alone was worth the same as a whole fleet of vans and obviously there wasn’t any hydrogen fuelling stations anywhere. Because of safety fears the Electrovan was only ever used on GM company property and it was only seen again when it was shown off as a display when one of the first hydrogen fuelling stations was opened in California in 2000.
1 comment:
Sooooooooooo not surprised. I've had some very DETAILED conversations about the COMPLETED flying car project. There is nothing new under the sun. We fail ourselves by not investigating, reading, and kicking congressmen ass. We have so much available, it's a shame what we waste. That car drove behind a fence for the greater part of half a century. Damn shame. I mean all this ties together ..... How many troops would still be alive if we didn't have a "jones'n" for petrol? We wouldn't have a commie rat bastard in the white house if that car had gone main stream just twenty years ago. Some may think thats a stretch .... Some might be asking, "wtf is he talking about", .... But I play chess, and I see a lot of wasted moves on the american side of the board. Right on for posting this, every little but helps. We gotta stop looking and saying, "whoa, look at THAT!", and start saying, "lets use it. wtf are we gonna do with it?"
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