Nice try, Terrapass, but David Mamet's already warned me about how you'd try to crush my independent spirit! You're no better than those crooked attorneys! (heh. see also - review of The Water Engine: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/edinburgh2003/america/waterengine.htm)

Thanks, Adam, but it is a sad commentary on science education in the US and elsewhere that your posting should be necessary. As it happens I posted in a similar vein today on my own blog (tonysclimateblog.blogspot.com) because I found that a google ad which frequently appears on my blog advertises water-driven cars. Not sure which is sillier; this or the folks who deny climate change altogether.

What about the steam-powered car?

My father actually used to have one. He got it as something to tinker with, but never did so he ebay'd it.

Now, in order to get it going, you'd need a heat source - I don't remember exactly how his worked - but still, would that count?

Adam --

I'm glad that this little farce/hoax/stupid-marketing-trick is getting the attention it deserves. When news came out that "Genepax" was producing such a car, my intuition (and awareness of the laws of thermodynamics) told me it was a farce, and to write a post on my blog (http://fivepercent.us/2008/06/17/a-car-that-runs-on-water-alchemy-makes-its-grand-return/). Yours is much more measured, and polite, but above all, your subtitle is sublime. Unicorn tears? Brilliant.

(Although the company also claims its car can run on tea, perhaps only if drunk by unicorns, or perhaps also made from their tears?)

So having dismissed the irresponsible marketing claims, what I am more curious about is: what is the efficiency of the process by which energy is released when water is added?

If these "generators" are sadly not a magical new source of energy, they are perhaps alternatives to various battery technologies using NiMH and Lithium, both of which require a good deal of nasty heavy metal to be mined from the earth. If, for example, we could actually just dig up some other substance and, with reasonable energy intensity make these devices, who knows, maybe it's an alternative battery.

Anyway, thanks for the facts, and for the good laugh which I shared with my co-workers.

Hey Adam,
You've just blown our cover wide open !
Regards and brownie points for politeness.
MM, Unicorn Chemical LLC

My husband and I responded to one of those email ads for running your car on water and paid the $49. What we got were plans to build something that my husband said might work, but it would take him months to build it, and even then, it was only part water and part gas.

On the other hand, he easily converted a 30-year-old Mercedes Benz to run on 100% vegetable oil in one afternoon for about $200. You can see our car and read about the conversion at http://www.veggiecar123.com.

Adam,

Unicorn Tears!!! Dungeon Master is not going to be happy that you've forced poor Uni into sweat-shop labor for your own evil gains ...

PETA's going to get you guys for making unicorns cry.

Re: Postings above #3 and #4-- Anything that could be easily mined and would react with water exothermically to release energy at the scale to power automobiles, would have already reacted with wate that is naturally present in the geologic environment. Thats why we don't hear about sodium metal deposits being encountered in the ground and spontaneously combusting in the natural environment.

A steam powered car is not really powered by steam. At standard temperature and pressure, steam (enough to power a car anyway) has to be produced by adding heat to water! The heat is the power source, in this case.

Veggie oil powered cars are handy for a few, but as we've seen from the price run-up of food and ethanol corn production, we're not at the scale of powering more than a small fraction of vehicles this way yet. I'm waiting for the algae biodiesel development (now in R&D) to get going soon!

I almost sent this article to co-workers that are pursuing water fuel. I'll hold my tongue until they come up with a running vehicle and then will ask 'em about the unicorn tears. A fool and his money will soon be parted. Some lessons cost money!

http://hytechapps.com/

Please people I know American people are smarter than this. Do your home work before you start making idiotic statements such as this. In a nut shell you are right water in the form of H2O is not combustible. Now think excite those molecules with electricity known as electrolysis and fracture the bond between oxygen and hydrogen. Now you get HHO gas when ignited produces many times over more energy than when gasoline is burned. By product of HHO gas when burned is only water vapor. Don't be fooled into being a blind sheep for the big oil conglomerate companies. Exercise your right as American citizen and do your home work and read. Not in the news paper or magazines or TV censorship will get you nowhere. You have the largest library in the world at your finger tips use it.

So, "Love out planet," you start with water and you end up with water vapor. Each has the same amount of chemical energy, while the latter also has additional latent heat energy. Which means the electrical energy you put in is more than the energy you get out.

Concerning these HHO-injecting devices for cars - the ones that use your car battery [which is charged by burning gas, of course] to electrolyze water, create HHO, and pump it into your air intake: from what I've been able to gather, these devices -can- actually give you a solid boost - but only on an older car with an inefficient engine. The improvements can be dramatic, and the air is alleged to burn cleaner (and it might clean the engine out, too).

However, if you have a new, efficient, clean-burning engine, it doesn't benefit you at ALL. All it does is bring those 20-year-old rustbuckets up-to-date, cheaply.

So watch out for those big claims of an extra 20 mpg. This can happen, but only in select, old, hyper-inefficient cars.

Don't believe it even for the most inefficient engine. One might as well suggest that a regular 12 volt car battery could run an electric motor to augment the engine. It could not continuously supply more than the dynamo/alternator supplies (a fraction of a horsepower) and all that energy comes from burning gasoline in the engine anyway.

Your point about the "fundamental properties of water" was extremely confused if not completely wrong. For one, fuel does not need to be flammable to in fact be fuel (e.g. plutonium in nuclear reactors - they don't burn it).

It has been shown (on NBC NETWORK NEWS) that salt water can be burned with radio waves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk

this has obviously not been researched enough yet to get it working with a motor, but initial tests show that it is a very efficient energy release. The goal would be that the radio-wave generator would be powered by an electric starter at startup, and then get enough energy from the engine to run on it's own (just like starters in gas powered cars).

I totally agree though that all the "water powered" car kits on the internet are completely useless ;-)

HHO for those who dont know is dihydrogen dioxide- the main component of chemtrails . Unfortunately it is not a very useful fuel due to it being WATER VAPOR.

Forgetting for a moment the absurdity of the concept itself, why on earth would we want to deplete an already scarce resource critical to our survival by burning it in a car? It's like priding oneself on discovering a way to run a car off of donated blood. You can bet that as soon as someone found a way to burn water (?!?) Evian and Dasani would be finding a way to control the world's water supply. Who is so desperate to drive cars that they'd die of thirst to do it? (Besides aneurysm-having, unicorn-hating pseudo-scientists, that is.)

Hello, the electricity needed to break down the water into H2 and O2 EXCEEDS the energy from burning the hydrogen.
There is no free lunch (or perpetuum mobili) !

Even if you can swallow the energy loss between the H2O hydrolysis and the energy you can get out of it, why would you want to burn what remains in an internal-combustion engine ?????
The engine itself has no more than 20% efficiency, with a good tail wind.

Can't these people just go have a beer ?

That's what I initially thought of compressed-air cars but now I think it's a GREAT idea, given an improved turbine.
I bet with the advent of air cars, there will be a state tax on the air itself and we'll all breathe through a credit card-powered air meters.

I just read 19 mostly uninformed, arrogant, reductionist, small minded postings. Most used the logical argument of incompetence. i.e. They cant see any way that burning water would work... therefore, it can't work. I must admit I felt the same when first encountering the concept. Then I did my homework, and found a rational explanation: The speed of sound in hydrogen gas is 1286 meters/sec. In air, its 331 m/s, almost 4 times slower. Now, when you mix a small amount of H2 with a fossil fuel/air charge and ignite it, the hydrogen changes the flame propagation speed, allows for more complete combustion, allows for changes in spark timing and a leaning of the fossil fuel mixture, a decrease in emissions, a steam cleaning of the combustion chamber and valves with a reduction in carbon buildup. Among other, more subtle effects, the presence of a small amount of hydrogen alters the initial stages of the unfolding combustion dynamic, altering the kinetic chemical pathway which the combustion follows. The net effect is to alter the time at which maximum heat energy is released relative to the power cycle, increasing the adiabatic efficiency of the engine, resulting in less energy wasted in the form of heat, light and sound. This is even more effective in diesel engines.
A typical diesel runs at 40% efficiency. An increase of only 4% in adiabatic efficiency will typically decrease fuel consumption by 30%.
Note that this is not simply caused by substituting fossil fuel with an equivalent amount of H2. The relation is synergetic.
Try www.water4gas.com and do some reading.

Even if one were to acccept Gazonplotz's (btw, why do all the nutty ideas come from anonymous posters?) suggestion that a small amount of hydrogen has a catalytic effect, this is very different from saying one has a water-powered car. It is not clear to me why a small amount of hydrogen would change the speed of propagation of a flame, or why the speed of propagation of a flame is related to the speed of sound, nor what a 4% improvement in efficiency means if it would produce a 30% improvement in fuel economy.

GAZORNPLOTZ wrote:
>An increase of only 4% in adiabatic efficiency will typically decrease fuel consumption by 30%.

Would you mind providing the source of your research?

Im rather interested that every one has pretty much slamed the idea?

On a local news program about a month back some people got a faily big car and added a water to hydrogen conveter in it and tested how much fuel it used compared to a car of the same age and model, their conveter one used almost 1/4 of the fuel.

Im not saying this is the silver bullet but its a good way to be looking I would have thought

Doug,
Not to rain on your parade, but people (ppl) have been trying to use hydrogen in engines for nearly a 100 years. What does that tell ya ?
Try, and try again - nothing wrong with trying.
Just don't make it sound like it's succeeded.
Regards, mm

Adam Stein!
You proved to be the dump American crushing down clean technology with a lot of crappy so called logic. When will you guys stop allowing the oil companies to rip us off if you crush every alternative technology thats is innovated? Water has hydrogen and using electrolysis when hydrogen is separated from H2O it contains huge energy which can run a car very well. I believe you know this, but are just pretending it wont work to fool us. But we're not going to get fooled, the world has moved ahead of thinkers like you. Thanks for this dumb article, just when i though Americans were beginning to get smarter you prove us wrong again.

Lots of mixed up ideas in last few posts:

1: It is quite possible that adding water to the air/fuel mixture would reduce fuel consumption. So would putting a restrictor plate over the inlet. But it reduces power output.

2. Hydrogen powered cars are perfectly feasible and now in use on a trial basis, for example in: a BMW 7 series converted to burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine; and Honda's fuel cell car (see my blog tonysclimateblog.blogspot.com).

3. Since free (i.e. uncombined) hydrogen is not found in nature) hydrogen should be regarded not as an energy source but merely a way of storing energy, like a battery. The energy isn't in the hydrogen but comes from combining the hydrogen with oxygen to form water. A similar amount of energy is needed (actually more, since these processes are no 100% efficient) to seperate the hydrogen and oxygen again. So running a car on hydrogen is by no means the same thing as running it on water.

Pls, get some education.
It takes more energy to break down water into H2 and O2 than you can get back by burning them.
And definitely NOT in an internal combustion engine.

The car that's consuming the least fuel is the car that's standing still. So there is the recipe.

Martin, hydrogen can fuel an internal combustion engine. See http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Drives/FirstDrives/articleId=117647 for BMW 7 series V12 which runs on hydrogen or gasoline. Of course, it produces water but it does does not _run_ on water.

Duh, yes people also used GASOLINE in an IC engine - to no useful end. We just fouled up the air we breathe.
It's much better to use H2 to generate electricity and power car electrically with 30-95% efficiency.
But this was supposed to be about water cars, which suck.

[Ed. -- This comment came in via email, and it seemed worth posting here.]

I've played with these things and know a bit too, thought your readers would be interested in my perspective.

1 - you can create 'fuel' for you car (or other uses) by electrolysis, which simply is using electrical energy to split a water molecule into Hydrogen and Oxygen. Burn the hydrogen and the byproduct is water vapor.

2- the HHO or Browns gas (produced by the Water Powered car systems) is extremely volatile and explosive. Great care must be built into any design using Hydrogen because the molecule is very small and can be ignited easily.

3- the Faraday constant discussion indicates that there is a tremendous amount of Hydrogen bound up in a single liter of water. The problem is that the electrolysis process is very inefficient at separating the hydrogen from the water molecule. Energy is lost to heat, resistance in the wire and much more electricity is required to produce enough fuel for an internal combustion engine than the useful work you can get out of that engine.

4 - IF the energy you use to power your electrolyzer is coming from a renewable source, (Hydro, Solar PV, wind) No problem.

If on the other hand (like the u-tube demo) you use power from the grid to run a battery charger rectifier to generate (for several minutes) and collect your Hydrogen/Oxygen mix in a balloon to run your test engine for say 20 seconds..... well I think you see the dilemma.

I don't see much difference in the Microwave approach to separating the molecule. More energy is required than the work you can get out of the 'fuel'.

5 - the on-line kits and plans that propose to generate between 2 and 10 liters of Browns gas a minute may slightly boost a cars engines efficiency but the math doesn't make it statistically significant. A 2 liter engine running at say 2000 rpm is pulling about 2000 liters per minute of gas/air mixture through the fuel injectors or carburetor. That means you can augment or offset you fuel consumption by one-tenth of one percent.

That also assumes that you can control the electrolyte (needed to allow the electricity to flow from one electrode to another) in your generator and you are not asking your alternator to power a 20 amp appliance while also providing all the electric for normal operation. Excessive electricity production will cause a drop in fuel efficiency.

I built one out of stainless steel and installed it in my 1989 Audi 100. Boosted my mileage slightly, between .5 and 1 mpg. After running it for several weeks I took it apart last night and found I actually consumed some of my stainless steel anodes. Burned (rusted) holes right through them and left a lot of iron/oxide suspended in the electrolyte.

6- Finally, a Cornish Generator will produce sufficient Hydrogen to continuously power an internal combustion engine by 'burning' (by means of an electric arc) an aluminum wire. Kind of like welding underwater. The aluminum takes the oxygen from the water molecule to make an oxide (not very healthy stuff) and releases the Hydrogen as gas.

The energy to do this comes from? batteries? charged by a renewable energy source?

7 - Try as I might, I have yet to have a truly original idea. If someone else has not invented a process already or is profiting from it in a commercial way there must be a good reason.

The cheapest watt is the watt not used. Conservation and changes in ones lifestyle have a greater and more immediate effect than any other means for purposeful stewardship of our planet.

I ride my bike to work, and when I must drive, I charge a couple of extra RV batteries so I can go off grid for a few hours a week.