In the words of Ron Burgundy:

"Don't act like you're not impressed!"

I can't believe you don't know who Günter Verheugen is..
Who's this Brad pitt fellow?

The Hindenburg... ran on hydrogen

Ah, a wonderful myth. The Hindenburg's hydrogen did not run on hydrogen. The hydrogen wasn't even what you see exploding. It was a static spark, which ignited the diesel tanks. Hydrogen doesn't burn yellow.

Hundreds of people die every year from natural gas and petroleum explosions and very large numbers are injured and/or die every year from gasoline fires. Moreover, untold billions have beens spent remediating gasoline contaminated groundwater, pipeline spills. To count this against the theoretical possibility of a mythological risk of hydrogen fires is just absurd.

Hydrogen is the perfect fuel...

...for people who can freely spend other people's money, or who have more money than sense.

Those of us who don't have money to burn, or don't qualify for freebies, will tend to choose forms of energy that are more economical, safer, and GREENER than hydrogen.

What's greener than hydrogen? Almost anything, including coal and gasoline.

I think hydrogen is clean, but the methods we obtain it aren't. We still use coal and gasoline to produce it. We need 2 find a more "green" method. If we could pull it from water (H2O) that would be bad ass!

Actually, as far as the Hindenburg goes, the reason it burned so quickly was due to the metallic paint that sealed the outer skin. In case you want proof, check out last season's Mythbusters episode on it.

And yea, the engines ran on diesel, not hydrogen.

Let's all remember that hydrogen is not an energy source, it is only an energy storage system. The only true goal of hydrogen powered transport is to remove emissions from the tailpipe of the transport. As with all these systems (e.g. batteries) there will always be the environmental impact of fuel source used to charge the energy storage system. Right now, this would mainly be coal, nuclear, natural gas and hydro. The hope is that someday these source fuels could be replaced with more environmentally benign sources.

So really, hydrogen should be compared to batteries, or perhaps ethanol and biodiesel, but definitely not gasoline and coal in terms of its environmental impact and safety.

Let's all remember that hydrogen is not an energy source, it is only an energy storage system.

This is one of those oft-repeated things that has no meaning. Petroleum is not an energy source, either -- it's just storing accumulated solar energy, aided by gravitational energy applied over long period of time.

These should be sent to everyday people. Better to see how the average consumer can use the car, get hydrogen, and let the public know... Let the celebs buy their own!

Isn't water vapor one of the most efficient greenhouse gasses (outside of say methane)? The only reasonable argument I have ever seen relating Carbon Dioxide to climate change, is that it leads to the generation of more water vapor. Would we not be shooting ourselves in the foot hoping to solve global climate change by changing emissions over to water vapor? Am I missing something?

I thought BMWs ran on money.

Hydrogen is lighter than air - when it escapes it dissipates immediately and rises away. While flammable, hydrogen can't "get on" you like liquid gasoline which can continue to burn you while in contact with you. Concerns about hydrogen fires should be one less negative about the "fuel" as a system. And when we start using solar or wind or even a hydrogen power system to produce hydrogen as an energy source, we'll be able to eliminate petrofuel that much more quickly.

"However, there is a long tail-pipe problem as with electric cars, in that producing the hydrogen uses a large amount of energy. In truth, these cars will do little to reduce the emissions of daily transport, but will at least create cleaner air for cyclists and pedestrians."

Oh?

http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/twentyfirstcenturycar.pdf

Some facts:

the skin of the hindenberg was coated with a chemical akin to diesel fuel. friction from movable parts on the airship caused sparks that ignited this coating. that's what made the hindenberg blow up -- not the hydrogen powering it.

hydrogen EVAPORATES when it comes into contact with air which it would certainly do in a crash that affected a fuel cell -- unlike petrochemicals, such as gasoline, which do not evaporate and may EXPLODE if an accident damages the fuel tank in the presence of heat from the engine, etc.

Mike Strizki has designed two real-time hydrogen converting cars and a golf cart (one of the cars was made in collaboration with Ford Motor, the Genesis). These cars make hydrogen as-needed and don't require a fuel cell -- so the whole (non-existent) "problem" of storing the so-called "flammable" hydrogen has been solved. see http://www.hopewellproject.org/index.html.

I wonder if all these celebrities will continue being enthused about the Hydrogen 7 when they find out how bad the fuel economy is (15 mpg on petrol, 4 mpg on liqid H2), how hard it is to find liquid H2, how expensive liquid H2 is, how much H2 evaporates each day, and that there is almost no trunk space due to the 30 gallon H2 dewar flask.

Of course, it's possible that some celebrities might not realize these problems exist, as they have their assistants take care of refueling the
bmw fuel pump, paying the bills, loading the luggage, and even driving.

Still, I doubt they will make any protests when the lease ends and BMW takes them all back to be recycled.

"Oh?"

http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/twentyfirstcenturycar.pdf

Although I'm not about to state anything on the actuall fuel efficiency of hydrogen, as I'm not an expert, it's usually a bad idea to base your information about a product on a report that was paid for by the makers of the product. I reviewed the report and between what I didn't understand and what seemed straight forward, I didn't note any flawed logic or misinformation. And any unscientific assumptions were rather superficial and possibly founded, i.e. the assumtion that sports cars aren't used for long commutes. An arguable assumption, although Tesla probably knows a thing or two about who uses sports cars and why, but they didn't source their info. The apparent volitity of the report aside, never trust biast reports.

And as this is my 1st Treehugger post, I'd just like to add about the post button slogan "Post an intelligent and civil comment" You can incourage civility by condoning rudeness, but you can't incourage intelligence by condoning stupididy. That doesn't breed intelligence, but silence. As a side note, the statement "no such thing as a stupid question" is not quite true. The smartes people started out asking lots of stupid questions, and those that have never asked a stupid question probably never learned anything. I know, I'm intentionally misinterperating the meaning.

C'mon folks, didn't you ever play with a bunson burner? All gases can burn nice and clean or dirty and yellow - including hydrogen. (Take a look at the MythBusters episode on the Hindenburg if you don't believe it.)

Meanwhile, when will you all stop blathering on about hydrogen being clean? Where do you think we get hydrogen? It comes from reformulating natural gas over nickle at very high temperature with steam to produce hydrogen, plus vast amounts of CO2 that are simply vented off into the atmosphere. Production of hydrogen and subsequent use in automobiles produces more CO2 than cars run directly on natural gas alone. Thus anyone who says hydrogen is good for the environment doesn't know the dirty little secret environmentalists don't want you to know.

Note too that the cars run on gasoline. Guess how often they'll get run on hydrogen. This is just a "feel good" campaign by BMW with complicit movie stars in the fraud of "hydrogen as fuel."

Bear in mind this is simply a "step forward". It isn't designed to be mass produced. You need trend starters to start a trend. That's why BMW is only loaning a hundred of these to famous people like Brad Pitt because guess what, some people actually worship these people! :)

I think hydrogen fuel cells are a better solution though..I have a feeling the only reason BMW aren't looking into those (they are planning on releasing a hydrogen IC only car later) is because you simply can't match the performance of IC cars and BMW have a certain performance pedigree that they probably want to maintain.

When people say hydrogen is a way of "storing energy" rather than being an actual fuel you can't compare it to petrol out of context and say that petrol is also a way of storing solar and gravitation energy (which doesn't reaaally make sense..). Both are fuels, and both have the potential to release energy by oxidising them. It's just that in hydrogen fuel cells hydrogen isn't really used as a fuel but more for it's other chemical property (i.e not how it burns easily).

Hydrogen is the way forward though, we just need to start producing it using nuclear power, waves, tide or wind..or maybe giant hampsters on giant hampster wheels...