Petrol pricey? Japanese invent car that runs on water
Fri Jun 13, 2008 5:53pm IST
TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water -- rain, river or sea -- was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).

"The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time," Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

"It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars," he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit -- not consume -- water.

(Writing by Chika Osaka, editing by Miral Fahmy and Chang-Ran Kim)

Why not power a house? A city? Why just a car?
It would revolutionize the world!!!!!

From "Treehugger.com":


How this Water Car Probably Works
One thing that helps fuel the conspiracy rumors surrounding water cars is that the media run these segments where they show "water cars" actually driving around, and it all seems to work, and then we never hear about them again. People figure that Big Oil (or the Illuminati, whatever) is suppressing the technology. The reality is more mundane: It is actually possible to make a car look like it runs on water without breaking the first law of thermodynamics. The way it's usually done is with metal hydrides. These react with water to produce hydrogen, which is then used to power the car. But since these hydrides will deplete with time, they need to be replaced and so they are actually the fuel, not the water. And you can be sure that more energy will go into producing them than will be taken out, making them an energy carrier, just like a battery.




[Edited by - nalod on 24-06-2008 09:18 AM]

Bad idea, good to create different forms of energy but with water shortages all over the world, the last thing we need to do is using what water we do have to run our cars.

Also wasn't this invention done years ago?

why not potatoe batteries!