Water Cars vs Gas Cars

Using water to power cars is an idea that has been around for a long time, and some of the first internal combustions engines designed back in the 19th Century actually utilised water as a fuel. Although it was to be combustible fuels like gasoline that led the way in motor vehicle evolution, many engine designers have continued up until this day to develop technologies that try to take advantage of this cheap and abundant natural resource.

The most successful way of using water to run an engine is to break it down on a molecular level and extract the hydrogen compounds. Water itself is a stable chemical compound, and does not create enough higher energy on its own to run an engine. Hydrogen however is a highly volatile gas, and produces plenty of higher energy when combusted to run sophisticated modern engines. As early as 1807, the Swiss inventor Francois Isaac de Rivaz developed an internal combustion engine that would run on a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, known as HHO or Brown's gas. He extracted the HHO from water using electrolysis, but he could not extract enough fuel to power the engine successfully. In 1813, after a few design modifications he carried out was to be the first test drive of a car powered by an internal combustion engine and managed to travel 100 metres without stopping.

This electrolysis technology has not advanced much to this day, and is still the only viable way to power an engine with water. However as Francois Isaac de Rivaz discovered it is impossible to extract enough HHO energy from water to run an engine alone, and so today's designs still rely on the addition of conventional gasoline in order to power the engine effectively.

So when we are talking about water cars, we are actually talking about hybrids, cars that run mainly on conventional fuels, but that also utilise the hydrogen from water to improve engine efficiency and mileage.

It might be tempting to consider that steam cars are vehicles that run on water, and there have been many successful steam car designs over the years. However steam power is very limited, and technically it is not the water itself actually powering the vehicle. The way steam power works it to use water to transfer the heat energy from the fire under the boiler to the pistons. In this process no energy is being released from the water itself to power the engine, it is merely a vessel to transfer the energy from the higher heat source, the coal or wood, to the engine. The fuel is the material being burnt, so steam engines are not water-fuelled, but technically coal or wood-fuelled.