interview > frank > frank 14

Frank 14 (1:49)
Topic(s): Electric & Hybrid / Future Transport
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Video Transcript

With hydrogen, there's no infrastructure for hydrogen. We can't mine it out of the ground; we have to create it. There's no way to store the hydrogen. The efficiency of creating hydrogen from electricity is still at a very low—the efficiency's way too low to make it practical.

So the hydrogen bullet, if you wish, is not silver at all — it's pretty tarnished and there are other proposed schemes. There's a guy in Paris that says, well, compressed air is the way to do it. And yeah, but if you really look at it thermodynamically, it doesn't make sense at all. And most of these kinds of schemes, the so-called silver bullet schemes try to violate the law of physics somewhere and most of them and many of them strike up perpetual motion. And the key is, what we're doing is, we're using technology that is in existence in our society. We're not inventing a new engine, we're not inventing a new electric motor, we're not—maybe we're asking for a better battery—but not a new battery and that's about it. So it's not asking for impossible things that don't exist, the plug-in hybrid is essentially saying "hey, we can move towards a zero-oil consumption society today without any new technology."