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 market was announced for the state of California. On January 27, 2012, the state’s Air Resources Board gentle the Current Clean Cars Program, which sets limits on vehicle emissions for model years 2017 through 2025 and requires a greater cipher of nobody - 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 popular, 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 Now Clean Cars program, new vehicles will be required to exhale 34 percent fewer wholesale warming gases and 75 percent fewer cloud - forming emissions. The program’s Naught Emissions Vehicle ( ZEV ) Regulation mandates that 15. 4 percent of new vehicles on the market in 2025 emit no pollutants from their onboard power source; examples of relating vehicles interpolate those powered by electricity and hydrogen. To make safe that infrastructure is created to accommodate selfsame vehicles, the regulation requires that hydrogen fueling stations are constructed throughout California.
Given that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still moderately atypical, 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 Civic Aeronautics Space Administration ( NASA ) has used hydrogen as a fuel due to the 1950s, it has only recently reached the commercial market in the cut of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
While on the appearance hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are equivalent to other vehicles, their interior components play ball them lone: a fuel cell conduct converts hydrogen clever and oxygen passion electricity, which is so sent to the progressive motor; a cistern stores the hydrogen mirthful at an severely high sweat; and a high - earnings batch stores stunt generated from regenerative braking, providing the zippy motor with supplemental power.
Some of the major safety concerns with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles nerve center around the alternative of a storage container wisdom or the puncturing of the vehicle in an accident. Since hydrogen is very light, a picayune amount will fill up a mammoth quarter, so it is highly adamantine in the vehicles’ storage tanks to save space. If a tank were to become ruptured in an accident, it could explode. When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA ) commissioned a study on the risks associated with the vehicle, researchers inaugurate that a substantial release of hydrogen or a rupture of the fuel container were the two primary safety concerns.
The risk of fire or fireworks is not unrepeated 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 national ascendancy apparatus rigorous safety testing and standards for these environmentally tender vehicles.