Everybody has one crazy uncle who, through mysterious circumstances, managed to secure the secret schematics for a car that runs on water. Maybe he ordered them from the back of an old Popular Science magazine, or even got them from the inventor himself; a man who is doggedly pursued by oil industry henchmen. Well, those plans have been leaked, to Japan. A Japanese company dubbed Genepax claims it has invented a car that runs on nothing but air and water.

The car uses their mysterious “Water Energy System,” or “WES” for short, to generate electricity from splitting water into its component parts. The deus ex machina seems to be an ingenious Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) that can do the job with a simple chemical reaction.

Details are still under wraps, but Genepax says that WES doesn’t require any hydrogen reformer, high-pressure hydrogen tank or exotic catalysts. It still requires platinum, but no more than other current hydrogen fuel cells.

The company has wired their WES system into a Reva electric car, made by Takeoka Mini Car Products Co Ltd. The car runs on a supply of water and air, fed to the WES system with a pump. It doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide.

Right now the WES system costs about $18,000 to build, but Genepax hopes to get the price down to around $4,600 through mass production.

Metal cars are so passe. The future of automotive technology? Balloons! Mysterious startup company XP Vehicles is developing a line of featherweight inflatable electric cars laced with carbon fiber. They claim the cars, developed using aerospace technology, will obtain unheard of levels of efficiency, traveling up to 300 miles on a single charge. They’ve also created hot-swappable power packs that could give the cars a 2,500 mile range.

XP Vehicles plans to sell the cars as build-it-yourself (and inflate-it-yourself) kits. But what are the advantage of inflatable cars? Besides their light weight and extreme efficiency, XP Vehicles claims they’re safer than ferrous automobiles. In an accident, they say, metal tends to fracture into flesh-shredding shards or bend around occupants, imprisoning them in a mangled metal tomb. Soft, inflatable cars distribute impacts and can’t, of course, sever anything. 

But they can pop. Don’t worry, say the engineers at XP. Their cars will contain multiple chambers and will come with several patch kits.

Link to Ubergizmo article.