Japanese Company Says Laws of Physics Don't Apply - to Cars
Found on Slashdot on Friday, 13 June 2008
Another in a long series of claimed "powered by water" cars, this one by a Japanese company called "Genepax," which interestingly enough does not have so much as a Wikipedia entry.
"Almost sounds too good to be true" isn't the half of it; if cars could be made which would run as "long as you have a bottle of water inside" to pour into the fuel tank ("even tea," repeats this report), not only would you know about the car, but you'd notice the long lines of people buying generators, laptops, and power tools that run on the same technology.
"The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car's tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car."
So you put water into a box, do nothing, and engery comes out? Patent offices don't even accept filing for perpetual motion machine anymore. Sure, water contains hydrogen and oxygen, but it's (thankfully) very stable. You need to add quite some energy to split it up again. And if you do, you'll end up with hydrogen and oxygen to either burn or feed to a fuel cell to create engery to move the car. It just sounds as an unnecessary extra step; and since such energy transformations are not 100% efficient, you'll lose some in the process. It might be plausible if they use some sort of catalyst however and there were some news about a rhenium based one years ago, but since rhenium is one of the rarest metals, I doubt it's useable for mass production. If they can prove me wrong, fine. But for now I will take this with more than just a grain of salt.