Tuesday 3rd September 2002

Th!nk Scrapped

Ford blow $123 million on leccy cars

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[phil r]

Hmm conspiracy theorists will love this, a company appearing to provide an alternative to petrochemical propulsion being closed down by one of the big three (of course at the command of big oil) or am I being paranoid?

[CarZee]

The car industry have said they can move over completely to hydrogen cell based cars in less than 25 years.

"No no," said governments, "just keep on making petroleum fuelled vehicles more efficient - we'll be using them for 50 years yet."

One wonders then, what the *real* motives of governments (including ours) is. Doesn't take long before you start to wonder at the influence oil companies have. In the US it's as obvious as it is over-arching, but here it's slightly les obvious, but there nonetheless.

[mondeoman]

Very simple - Government (and I don't mean the current incumbents, but the Whitehall Mandarins behind the scenes) and big business (of all shapes and colours) work together to shape our world.

Hydrogen-cell based vehicles would (eventually) be able to run on water - the Government have obviously not yet worked out how to tax water for travel purposes (seeing as you can get it from your tap at home). With petroleum, they can continue to tax the travelling public and maintain a revenue stream... I think

[sidevalve]

Perhaps Ford will get real now and stop ppropagandising us with fictional bullshit about global warming, whose only purpose is to give them a 'clean' image and make them sell more car. Vomit...

[smifffy]

Ah, but this where Darling and his wonderful plans for GPS based taxation come in. No longer can he tax the fuel that powers our cars, so he'll be forced to move to the "we'll tax you on road usage" argument, hence his current fixation with it.

It's not unusual, I went to Norway a couple of years ago, and they don't use GPS but they do have small devices which they place in their windscreen so they can drive through toll booths and get automatically charged via an account. GPS is just a more technology driven way of the same sort of charging.

That's not to say that I agree with it, or I would if we actually got decent roads and a road building strategy to put us on a par with the rest of Europe. I can feel a rant coming on, so I'll stop there.

[stevenrt]

While it's true water can be used as a source of Hydrogen, it's not the case that you could simply fill your car up with the tap at home and drive around - the energy necessary to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water has to be supplied first - and the government will be quite happy to tax you for that energy even if it is from an electrical socket in your garage.

Interestingly Iceland is positioning itself as a world supplier of "green" hydrogen by using their abudant geothermal energy to create hydrogen from water.