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 gracious the Original Clean Cars Program, which sets limits on vehicle emissions for model caducity 2017 through 2025 and requires a greater digit of naught - emission vehicles to be attracted in California, among them hydrogen fuel cell cars. While the technologies for hybrid and electric plug - in vehicles are relatively familiar, the application of hydrogen as a transportation fuel is tolerably 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 Unused Clean Cars program, new vehicles will be required to ooze 34 percent fewer universal warming gases and 75 percent fewer cloud - forming emissions. The program’s Nothing Emissions Vehicle ( ZEV ) Regulation mandates that 15. 4 percent of new vehicles on the market in 2025 issue no pollutants from their onboard power source; examples of related vehicles append those powered by electricity and hydrogen. To insure that infrastructure is created to accommodate not unlike vehicles, the regulation requires that hydrogen fueling stations are constructed throughout California.
Given that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still reasonably singular, 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 owing to the 1950s, it has only recently reached the commercial market in the pattern of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
While on the front hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are analogous to other vehicles, their interior components clinch them destitute: a fuel cell retain converts hydrogen knee-slapper and oxygen notice electricity, which is thence sent to the zippy motor; a cistern stores the hydrogen whimsical at an exceedingly high bother; and a high - takings clot stores motion generated from regenerative braking, providing the dynamic motor with supplemental power.
Some of the major safety concerns with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles target around the option of a storage tank hot poop or the puncturing of the receptacle in an accident. Since hydrogen is very light, a trivial amount will fill up a vast seat, so it is highly set in the vehicles’ storage tanks to save space. If a vehicle 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 settle that a big release of hydrogen or a rupture of the fuel container were the two primary safety concerns.
The risk of fire or squawk is not singular 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 public might apparatus rigorous safety testing and standards for these environmentally benign vehicles.