The General Motors guys in Northern Virginia dropped by today as part of a hydrogen-hybrid awareness tour. We all got a good look at this thing; it's an SUV with a hydrogen-electric powerplant rated at some huge electrical output (and an estimated 200-mile range).
The electro-mechanical stuff is pretty well plated over with black boxes, but they showed us all the things we'd have to be careful of if we got a cut job on a highway somewhere and wanted to avoid getting blown up.
A side note; these things occasionally burp hydrogen (the smallest atom) as their expansion varies. According to the dude, if you fill one of these up and leave it in your garage for a couple weeks, it'll have half a tank of compressed H2 when you get back to it. These will be targeted at fleet operations of government and corporate motor pools, and this guy is the prototype.
The only filling point on the East Coast is in Southeast D.C. at Benning and 295, at a Shell station there. We won't be able to buy one anytime soon, pending the oil companies' willingness to distribute liquid nitrogen regionally -- unless we want to pay Praxair to drive cryo trucks to our neighborhoods.
The guy said hydrogen in its liquid state sits at almost 500 degrees below zero, and GM thinks that people would end up flash-freezing themselves or destroying others with static discharges if we were allowed to buy prototypes like the one they brought in today.
The guy driving it also answered the EV-1 recall question for me when I asked him what an old EV-1 motor setup would cost. We (John Q. Public) can't buy them at all, because they were all lease vehicles and all considered experimental.
If they make even one available for sale, he said, they have to stock repair parts for a decade and a half to comply with federal regulations. They pulled back all the EV-1s at the end of their leases in order to do R&D on a few of them and then crushed them all.
Thought y'all might like a couple shots of the hybrid Equinox, so I took a few. I have more I can post -- if there's any interest.
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