Does California Mandate For Alternative Fuel Vehicles Pose A Safety Risk To Drivers?

Does California Mandate For Alternative Fuel Vehicles Pose A Safety Risk To Drivers?

Recently, a mandate for greater vehicle fuel efficiency and more alternative fuel vehicles on the bazaar was announced for the state of California. On January 27, 2012, the state’s Air Resources Board hunky-dory the Up-to-date Clean Cars Program, which sets limits on vehicle emissions for model age 2017 through 2025 and requires a greater numeral of duck egg - emission vehicles to be curious in California, among them hydrogen fuel cell cars. While the technologies for hybrid and electric plug - in vehicles are relatively acknowledged, the application of hydrogen as a transportation fuel is quite new, prompting concerns among consumers, safety advocates, and attorneys as to the risk of serious or fatal personal injury associated with the vehicles.
Under the Fashionable Clean Cars program, new vehicles will be required to exhale 34 percent fewer prevalent warming gases and 75 percent fewer mist - forming emissions. The program’s Nobody Emissions Vehicle ( ZEV ) Regulation mandates that 15. 4 percent of new vehicles on the marketplace in 2025 ooze no pollutants from their onboard power source; examples of coextensive vehicles comprehend those powered by electricity and hydrogen. To guard that infrastructure is created to accommodate identical vehicles, the regulation requires that hydrogen fueling stations are constructed throughout California.
Given that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still tolerably unusual, many consumers, safety advocates, and attorneys are concerned about the risk of serious or fatal personal injury associated with them. The lightest and most common element in the universe, hydrogen gas is colorless, odorless, and cheap. Although the Federal Aeronautics Space Administration ( NASA ) has used hydrogen as a fuel seeing the 1950s, it has only recently reached the commercial bazaar in the model of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
While on the exterior hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are cognate to other vehicles, their interior components give blessing them solitary: a fuel cell carry converts hydrogen for grins and oxygen consequence electricity, which is inasmuch as sent to the vital motor; a vehicle stores the hydrogen absurd at an intensely high hindrance; and a high - output lot stores business generated from regenerative braking, providing the peppy motor with supplemental power.
Some of the major safety concerns with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles core around the choice of a storage receptacle cue or the puncturing of the container in an accident. Since hydrogen is very light, a undersized amount will fill up a mammoth dwelling, so it is highly adamantine in the vehicles’ storage tanks to save space. If a container were to become ruptured in an accident, it could explode. When the Federal Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA ) commissioned a study on the risks associated with the vehicle, researchers start up that a large release of hydrogen or a rupture of the fuel container were the two primary safety concerns.
The risk of fire or commotion is not onliest to hydrogen, however, as all fuels are combustible, a major source of their usefulness. Their properties—and risks—vary, which is why it is important that the state determination contrivance rigorous safety testing and standards for these environmentally sympathetic vehicles.