Down with gas guzzlers! Students build lean, clean machine

By

Olivier Roubin

Cutting carbon emissions by cars is vital to slow global warming, but we still need to figure out how best to do that; we met one group of students who've built a car that's winning prizes for going huge distances on tiny amounts of clean fuel.

There's a race on to stop cars wrecking the planet by burning petrol and diesel. One solution is to fit cars with electric batteries, but this isn't straightforward. For now, batteries need charged every few hours and charging them up takes a long time - much longer than filling a petrol tank.

At Nantes University in France, Romain and his friends in the engineering school have been working on a new kind of concept car that does two things differently.

Thirsty? Not this car

First, it works on electricity but not with a battery. It uses a "fuel cell" which creates electricity using liquid hydrogen. Depending on how the hydrogen is produced, this can be a very "green" fuel and a car can be filled up with it as fast as with petrol. And instead of emitting planet warming carbon dioxide (CO2), all it produces is... water.

Second, Romain and his team are working to make their car, called Cityjoule, travel as far as possible on as little hydrogen as possible. They've just won a major prize for getting Cityjoule to cover over 1,000 kilometres on an amount of hydrogen that's similar to just one litre of petrol.

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Prizewinner

To give you an idea, the cars you know today travel only about 10 km on average on a litre of fuel. So Romain and his pals are going 100 times further.

Vehicles already use much less fuel today than they did years ago when big old cars were called "gas guzzlers". But Romain's Cityjoule makes even the leanest motor today look greedy.

You're never too young to have ideas that can change the world. So come and take a look at Romain's car in the WoW! News app and discover your own "superpowers" to help get us all moving in a much cleaner, greener way!