A car for the rich conservatsionist
 

invisible to the environment and you!
Invisible Mercedes brings James Bond technology to life | Motoramic - Yahoo! Autos

i will forgive the Germans for WW2 because of this diddy
In a promotion for its first production fuel-cell vehicle in Germany, Mercedes-Benz turned a B-Class hatchback invisible -- at least, from a distance, using the same idea behind the invisible car in the James Bond film "Die Another Day." See if you can see it before it sees you.

The invisibility cloak had its tryout this week on the streets of Stuttgart, Germany. To make Q's idea of an invisible car real, Mercedes employed dozens of technicians and some $263,000 worth of flexible LED mats covering one side of the car. Using a camera mounted on the opposite side of the vehicle, the LEDs were programmed to reproduce the image from the camera at the right scale, blending the vehicle into the background from a few feet away. Doing so required power sources, computers and other gear totaling 1,100 lbs. of equipment inside the B-Class.

Mercedes' point was to show how the F-Cell hydrogen fuel cell powered car would be invisible to the environment, producing only water vapor and heat for emissions. For an invisible car, it's getting a lot of stares.

Didn't read the link, but I'd rather have an electric car. The whole point being where does hydrogen come from? They get it either from natural gas (a fossil fuel) or electricity by electrolizing water. Either method is inferior to just using batteries to store electricity which has numerous renewable sources. You could use RE energy to electrolize water, but that just adds an extra step and another efficiency loss.

I agree with Daox, while the cloaking device is neat, I like my electric vehicles to be more efficient, if you produce hydrogen from electricity then the plug to wheel watt hours per mile are going to be nearly 3 times what an electric vehicle using lead acid or lithium batteries, that is a big part of why extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels is popular, skip the burning of the fuel and just use the part you want.
Anyone know what you do with the left over carbon and other by products when you remove the hydrogen from a hydrocarbon?

Iceland has a glut of water and electricity. They are hoping to produce hydrogen and ship it worldwide becoming the saudi arabia of the 21st century. There is lots of places that have excess electricity at various times of the day that could be used to make hydrogen. right now the market for it just isn't there though so the initial investment on setting up hasn't happened either. I see that as the biggest problem with the tech.

If I were a rich conservationist I would buy a house with a whole bunch of land and line my land with solar, maybe over multiple properties and grid tie it. If its in an area with good net metering laws where you get paid at the rate that customers get charged(its this way in MN) and the electricity is very expensive(not too expensive here tho), you would be rich to buy the panels but then they would eventually pay themselves off and become an income source. Doing this on multiple properties spaced far apart would allow for a disaster like a tornado to come through and not wipe the panels all out.

...then just run the car from your solar panels. You could drive a Hummer or Escalade EV and not feel so bad about it because you generated that electricity and also the revenue that the solar panel companies got probably helped their R&D to develop better and cheaper panels to be sold to more people than would otherwise buy them.

Half of the energy in a tank of hydrogen is used in compressing it, you would almost be better off compressing air (doesn't leak out of the tank as fast) and the equipment to use compressed air is much cheaper and lasts longer then fuel cells.

This car would be GREAT for speed and red light cameras - be invisible to the camera and the camera shoots for a photo but captures the image of the car behind you superimposed onto all of the sensors affixed to your car.

As for hydrogen the real tricky issue is how to transport it - pipelines have to deal with the hardening effect that hydrogen has on the metal, liquefying the hydrogen takes an inordinate amount of energy, bulk carriers have to deal with ports being reluctant to deal with such huge amounts of explosive material.

:DI would love to run my car off of compressed air, what kind of mpg would i get with a 2200lb car?

From what I've read it seems like it only takes twice as much electricity to power a compressed air car then it does to power a battery electric car, the energy to compress air to 12,000psi so that the tank will fit in the car takes a lot of energy, you of course also get unlimited A/C and in the winter time free cryogenic freezing because compressed air engines get cold as they take the energy out of the compressed air, 60 to 80 degree drop in temp at the tail pipe, leading to a nice brittle engine that requires special lubrication.
But just a rough guess, an electric car like the Nissan Leaf is about 320watt hours per mile, compressed air in that same car I would guess would be about 600 watt hours per mile and hydrogen would be 1kwh per mile.