<...As for the argument that gasoline is the highest concentrated power that can be put in a tank.... Gasoline is not what Nasa pumps into it's fuel tanks.

Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are powerful propellants, but the low density of liquid hydrogen makes it difficult to work with even in rockets. If the Shuttle was powered all the way to orbit by LOX/Hydrogen without the solid boosters, the external fuel tank would be immense and the Shuttle would have a lot more SSMEs than it does now. This is assuming that the resulting design could even make it to orbit.

And I'm not sure I would want to be close to an automobile full of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen! ;)

My point is this..... 100's, probably 1000's...... of billions of dollars worldwide are locked up in sustaining the petro-chemical industry...



That is an immense inertial force acting against innovative technologies designed to replace them.



True, but remember that the oil companies are only part of the equation. Automobile companies, despite dark conspiracy theories about "suppressing" magic carburetors that "burn" water, are in business to sell automobiles, not gasoline. If there was actually a cheap way to run cars effectively on water, the car companies would shove such cars out the door as fast as they could make them. And those that didn't for whatever reason would be knocked out of the marketplace by those that did.

That there is a customer demand for cleaner-running, higher-mileage cars is becoming obvious. If you surveyed any car buyer, and asked him if, all else being equal (an important point), he would prefer a car with higher mileage and less pollution, what do you think he would say? Wait and see what happens.

And you would be surprised by how innovative the technologies are that are being used in the internal combustion engine. A modern medium-sized SUV gets mileage almost equivalent to what the Volkswagen Beetle (famous for its mileage at the time) got back in the early 1970s. And it pollutes one hell of a lot less than the Beetle did.