Yet ANOTHER ICE design for hydrogen from AVL, an Austrian auto tech company.  Interesting how all these companies are coming forward at the same time with their designs.  Obviously, they have all been working on them for a while, one of them (I think BMW) was ready to put it into production and announced it, then everybody else comes flying out from behind the cloak & dagger world of the design boards of industrial manufacturers to capitalize on the hype and not get left behind as Venture Capitalists start sprinkling out cash for further development of their favorite model.  BMW being one of the biggest and arguably technologically the best automotive engineering companies in the world doesn't need money from venture capitalists, but I'm sure AVL could use some extra Euros to try and compete with them.

In AVLs case they're talking 400HP as opposed to around 150 HP in the last one, which puts it right up there with the Muscle Cars of the 1960s like the legendary Oldsmobile 442.



Nobody fucking needs 442 HP for a car to drive to work or go shopping or even a vacation, the only reason for this kind of power in an engine is either for a racing car or for a semi that has to pull 20 ton loads.  That is usually done with diesel engines which are big, heavy and very robust because there is a lot of strain on all the parts of the engine and they have to last about 1M miles of use to get your money's worth out of them.  Reading between the lines a bit, AVLs engine is lightweight and uses aluminum and titanium instead of steel, so how well this engine would stand up to dragging 20 tons of beer over the Rocky mountains every day from the Coors bottling plant is an open question.  The article speculates its use in motor racing, but unless there is a consumer application also, auto racing by itself doesn't justify tooling up to build these engines.

The big question therefore is the economic one, how much will one of these engines COST when mass produced for a consumer level car, presumably at a somewhat scaled down HP rating?  All of the designs sound significantly more complex than a standard ICE gas model, and even more still than a diesel which doesn't even need spark plugs.  More strokes, higher compression ratio, higher temperatures, computer control of fuel injection,  plus having to store the fuel as a compressed gas all will drive the price tag up pretty high I imagine.  If you consider how long it has taken them to bring EVs to market at a semi-affordable price, it's hard to imagine that say even BMW could have a consumer level car rolling off the production line in Stuttgart in less than a decade.  They're also not going to start building them until the green hydrogen is being produced in greater volume at a lower price, which also will take a few more years to occur.  Timing is a big issue here, as well as in which direction the development money and the engineers are directed by the money men.  So much money and time has already been spent developing EVs as the solution to the transportation problem that they're not going to abandon that idea, which means the money and brainpower wil be divided between the two methods, which while not mutually exclusive do require differentt types of infrastructure and supply chains be developed.

So, bottom line here is that although technically Hydrogen powered ICE vehicles provide a plausible solution to maintaining the transportation systems of our modern techno-civilization without carbon and in a renewable fashion, practically it doesn't seem likely to succeed.  Just have to see how it develops though.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/400-hp-hydrogen-engine-water/1118/

The latest 400 hp water engine: better than all hydrogen and the end of electricity

RE