• Question: In your opinion is there a more environmentally friendly option for the future of cars and there fuels.

    Asked by Jamima Rossica to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Jamima,
      I think so yes. I think we’ll be going all electric soon, and perhaps if we could developp better batteries and storage, we could use hydrogen fuel cells. But the problem with that as the moment it’s hard to store hyrdogen as it leaks out containers. but apparently it cannot penetrate through graphene, so maybe that’s the way forward for Hydrogen storage.

    • Photo: Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes

      Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Last year there were almost 300.000 electric cars sold worldwide, and the numbers are steadily increasing. My personal favourite though are cars driving on solar power

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Hi Jamima,

      The issue with electric cars is where the energy comes from to charge them, if it comes from fossil fuels then it would be probably more efficient to use petrol.

      If you can charge your car from renewable sources of electricty such as wind and solar, then they could be a great solution.

      It is difficult, we want to travel distances and cars and planes are crucial to that, but such as the recently started round the world by solar plane effort (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27659068) there is a great chance for this sort of technology developing soon.

      Whoever finds the long term solution to either massively improved battery storage or new ways to generate fossil fuel free cars will become one of the great scientists of Earth’s history!

    • Photo: Olivia Lynes

      Olivia Lynes answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      The problem we have a the moment is that using renewable sources of energy for cars are either really hard to transport- like hydrogen fuels, aren’t efficient enough like solar so we couldn’t use them for long enough, or they use fossil fuels eventually like electric cars. Now if we can get electric cars which are charged purely on electricity generated from a wind turbine or from solar panels that would be good.

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