Dear Mr. Musk,
You don’t know me from Adam. Even if you visit the site for my geek books you pretty much could be ignoring me, but I hope you won’t. I’m writing to you because of all the high flying vulture capital backed people in the press, you are probably the only one who would actually take a stab at this.
Both 2016 and 2017 have passed since I wrote that article, but I didn’t address it directly at you so you probably missed it. You already have some beautiful to look at electric cars, but, the electric car industry is hampered by a lack of charging stations, range of travel, not to mention the custom cables usually required for charging.
Before your electric vehicles started getting so much press, there were various attempts at producing Fuel Cell vehicles. They had an even bigger issue with where to recharge and the transportation of hydrogen.
Hopefully you had the time to click on the link and read my post hoping 2016 would be the year of the water electric hybrid. I don’t want to repeat a lot of information.
I know. The water powered car concept has been portrayed in the media as something only fringe nutters who wear Armadillo shell hats and wrap their homes in aluminum foil to keep out “their” signals talk about, but for an engineer with decent funding, it is doable today. It doesn’t require invention, only scaling down to fit in the vehicle. What I envision is, now, simply the next generation Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle people read about on Wikipedia.
Yes, Mr. Musk. Even Silicon Valley startups benefit from the Ag Bill Congress puts out every few years. In this case, a university Ag department attempting to solve the anhydrous ammonia problem the Ag industry has managed to remove the last hurdle stopping a water powered vehicle from being made. They used electricity to split water molecules in the volume required for localized anhydrous ammonia creation. By “volume required” I mean, according to what I’ve read, they sized their pilot plant to produce enough anhydrous ammonia to satisfy the needs of farmers surrounding a small rural town. If you care to read boring charts put out by an Ag department about how much anhydrous ammonia to apply for a given desired yield on a given soil type you can do so here. The short of it is that farmers apply tons to each field so we are not talking about a tiny experiment in a lab.
My initial vision was a vehicle which, while charging also had a garden hose connected (to the other side of the vehicle to avoid electrical shocks) where some of the grid current would be diverted to pull water from the 10 gallon tank, generating hydrogen which was stored in one of those cylinders the fuel cell required. Whenever the fuel cell was low and the battery was at half charge or better, part of the electric regeneration from brakes, etc. would be diverted to process more water from the tank. Yes, the water would have to have a bit of alcohol added to it for places which get cold.
Why did I consider that design? I was trying to solve the distance problem. Until you can drive coast to coast in an electric vehicle it simply won’t be considered by the general population. It needs to charge from a standard wall outlet using a standard outdoor extension cord too.
Build out of charging stations is an immense hurdle. Every gas station in the country has running water and standard wall outlet electricity, they just don’t currently charge for it.
There is a second option I’ve only considered just recently, in part because of Lockheed Martin’s Compact Fusion Reactor. One could solve the hydrogen distribution problem by scaling the water splitter and hydrogen storage into a device which fits in the back of a pickup truck and could be installed at any gas station. All it would need is standard electric current and a water line. It could have its own little heater to keep the water from freezing so it could just be installed in the lot like every other island. It would need a funding mechanism keeping the entry cost low, providing pennies per unit of hydrogen back to the manufacturer. That solution completely eliminates the large scale hydrogen transportation issue. It also solves the infrastructure issue for FCEV. Would need to have a $10,000 initial sign-up cost with service station being responsible for covering the installation cost. The manufacturer would collect however many pennies per unit of hydrogen to both cover the actual cost of manufacturing and to provide an ongoing revenue stream. The service station would then price hydrogen however they felt. It’s manufactured on-site for the cost of the electricity and water.
Americans are used to filling a ride inside of 5 minutes at a service station. The fuel cell filling island which fits in the back of a truck should be able to fill the cylinder in that amount of time. This makes the sub-500-mile range reputation of electric cars less of an issue.
Thank you for your time.
