Jack Nicholson driving a hydrogen car ... in 1978
Here's a blast from the past.Jack is one of the few celebrities that BMW hasn't given a Hydrogen 7 to for a few days. Maybe that's because Mr. Nicholson isn't impressed with hydrogen technology in 2008. Why wouldn't he be impressed? Well, he he was cruising the streets of Hollywood using (somewhat) similar technology thirty years ago. The Chevy in question has been modified to burn hydrogen in an ICE instead of gasoline and, for extra green points, the hydrogen was made using solar power. Pay attention to how hopeful Nicholson sounds when he talks about how the political world would change if we shifted from gasoline to hydrogen. Have we made any progress in the last three decades?
Watch the video after the jump. Thanks to Nick for the tip!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Owen Hall 4:35PM (4/16/2008)
So what happened between, oh right the Republican congress in bed with Detroit.
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Mike Z 5:01PM (4/16/2008)
Umm the house didn't go Republican for another 16 Years
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steven 5:04PM (4/16/2008)
Actually, I think it was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47x9q5-C2k
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BlackbirdHighway 5:34PM (4/16/2008)
Actually, the big problem with the Hindenburg is that the skin was painted with rocket fuel. Also, it was designed for helium, but the only source was the US, and it was considered a strategic resource and couldn't be sold to the Nazis.
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KarenRei 5:47PM (4/16/2008)
"Actually, the big problem with the Hindenburg is that the skin was painted with rocket fuel"
Actually, no, it wasn't:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire2005jan12.pdf
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.pdf
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Chris M 5:58PM (4/16/2008)
"at a quarter to half the price"? Hardly. Solar cells were even more expensive back then, so the amortized cost of solar electricity was much higher, then the electrolysis and H2 compression lost half of that expensive electricity. The resulting H2 fuel would have had to compete against petrol at a price nearly 10x greater.
Metal hydride storage was mentioned, but that was before Ovshinsky developed cheaper metal alloys.
They were probably thinking of palladium, which can absorb 800 times it's volume in H2, but is extravagantly expensive with a price only slightly less than platinum. Even the latest metal hydride alloys aren't quite cost competitive for H2 storage.
But the main reason why this was quietly shelved is the extremely short driving range on a tank of H2 fuel. It appears they had filled the trunk with standard steel gas storage tanks. Considering that the "H2 Prius" conversion, using higher pressure tanks and a much more efficient engine only got 80 miles per fillup, I estimate the range was somewhere between 20 to 30 miles per fillup - battery electric cars of that era, with lead acid batteries, could go further.
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Wise Golden 7:04PM (4/16/2008)
I would be prone to guess that Mr. Nicholson was coned probably as well as many other people who might have invested with the hope of doing something good and making a couple of dollars in the process. The villain isn’t Detroit, or the Republicans (what a cliché,) but rather the people who sold the snake oil hydrogen car. Hydrogen, today, would not yet be able to meet the requirements that they are describing. I’m guessing that 30 years from now, we’ll be watching videos of famous people who have spent millions to “offset” their carbon footprint by planting trees in Kenya or wherever, who, sadly, will look pretty silly for their trusting enthusiasm.
They mean well, and so did Jack.
Stick to the facts. 30 mpg is better than 20 mpg. Those numbers will never lie.
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Jim Coblentz 2:23AM (4/17/2008)
I remember Gerald Shaflander who was behind this Hydrogen via solar voltaics.
He was suppressed by the government, thrown in jail and eventually died. He was backed by a number of Hollywood biggies but was beaten down by the powers that be. He actually had a government grant and ran postal trucks on Hydrogen.
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thejugglers1945 3:59PM (8/10/2009)
Jim
I'm responding to something you wrote more than a year ago, so I hope I'm not confusing you. Gerald Shaflander was a scam artist. His technology may or may not have had any validity, but he mainly used it to milk a lot of people of their money, including myself ($125.00) and Jack Nicholson to the tune of possibly a million. and a whole lot of people in betweeen. He was a crook and an asshole and he deserves far worse than what he got. I knew him personally. He was not a nice person cheers, brendan mcnally
Chris 7:22AM (4/17/2008)
Owen, if you had half a brain you would see that the big three and Detroit are pretty much now and have been in the DNC's corner. That explains why Michigan is in such a mess. The ultimate liberal exercise of taxing people who worked and businesses that produced to death killed the state.
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steven 12:12PM (4/17/2008)
@4: OK, just swap the hydrogen out for helium and get it to work with the BMW 7 and I'll be on board! Oops, you get helium by extracting it from natural gas so we'd still be in the same boat, or blimp, as the case may be! Some folks just need to learn how to laugh!
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