Hydrogen powered RC cars!

[Asso_man!]

Let's have a close look at the future guys I am working for the aluminium industry in Europe and am in charge of monitoring some beverage can recycling initiatives. One of them is called "Chaque Canette Compte" ("Every Can Counts" in the UK) and aims at recycling beverage cans that are not recycled at work, in the streets, at events etc.

In this context I was offered to participate to a 24H RC enduro race at a technical school in the North of France where the "Chaque Canette Compte" team was present to sensitize young people to recycle their cans.

All cars are totally hand-made and they all have the same specs and chassis (pan cars with no diff) and are fully made out of aluminium. All parts were machined at the school by elder pupils and handed over to the youngers who had to build them piece by piece over a year. As you can see below the design is very basic and may appear as "agricultural design". The fact is they are actually very reliable though quite heavy and hence not very well performing, especially for an enduro race.

Anyway, I arrived there an hour before the first laps and offered my services to set up the "Chaque Canette Compte" team car. In return I was offered to make the very first laps with the car, that was really fun! Most of the drivers were not very skilled as this is not a hobby for most of them. Some laps were more looking like stock car races than anything else.

Now comes the best part of it: one of the cars participating was actually hydrogen powered! Quite amazing I must say and it was performing really good too. Parallelly, there were some stands showing off latest technologies and education material. One of them had a Traxxas fully converted with a hydrogen battery and I was able to test it for a few minutes. Power was really good and autonomy is comparable to a good LiPo battery. It is easy to recharge as you just need a hydrogen bottle. The only drawback is the price: around 4000 EURO to make the conversion (lol). This is of course just an example of what can be achieved with this new technology and is in no way aimed at selling hydrogen powered rc cars. Still, it is quite cool to see this in person. Here are a few pictures:

The carpet race track:



The "Chaque Canette Comte" car:




The hydrogen powered Traxxas:






One of the hydrogen powered pan cars:

[Lowgear]

I do know that Hydrogen powered kits have been around for at least 4 years now as I posted about it over on ClodTalk back then.

http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/hobby_rc.htm

[jon burrows]

I've seen some toy grade / science project RC hydrogen cars on eBay For around $125. I was going to buy one just to mess around with.
But the pics that you posted are really pro grade and really sweet! Could definately see a rc10 b5 hybrid ?

[midse]

We entered an inter school solar rc car distance challenge when I was high in high school. We built it in electronics, metal and automotive classes. The auto teacher was also a commercial pilot and started our states first aviation class, we got to fly aircraft and build r/c planes. It was really fun.

[EvolutionRevolution]

Too bad hydrogen is manufactured from that rare good, H2O, that also is a primary resource for humans, and that gets harder and harder to find and might be the reason for wars in the near future (sure, there's a lot of water on planet Earth, but most of that is salt water not suitable for consumption unless the salt is removed, which is a very expensive process).

[Lowgear]

Well hopefully by that time it will be cheaper to remove the salt from the water.