article
Water-powered car to run in race in Australia
Marcia Thompson · 13 September 1990
Water-powered car to run in race in Australia
The Grove City Record, Thursday 13 September 1990, pages 1 and 3. Story and photographs by Marcia Thompson. The text of the article is in the archive as “Mid-East crisis lends urgency to development of Water Fuel Cell”; this entry adds the two pages as printed, with the four photographs and their captions. Page images from the Southwest Public Libraries' digital archive (page 3).
Page 1
Under the kicker “Water-powered car to run in race in Australia” and the headline “Mid-East crisis lends urgency to development of Water Fuel Cell”, with one photograph:
The license plate, H2OCAR, says it all. Stan Meyer, inventor of the Water Fuel Cell, which will allow an engine to run on ordinary water, is showing the laser distributor assembly which was installed on a standard VW engine in the water-powered car. The car, with #24 displayed on its side, is being readied for a 1,900 mile race in Australia in November. (photo by Marcia Thompson)
Page 3
The story continues under “CAR: Water-powered car can help solve problem of greenhouse effect”, with three photographs:
The water-powered car is going through the final de-bugging stages by Ulf Dahlstrom, left, a Swedish electronics engineer, and Steve Meyer, center, electronics and computer expert, and Stan Meyer, right, inventor of the Water Fuel Cell. (photo by Marcia Thompson)
Steve Meyer mans the switches on the Gas Management System computer unit which was recently installed on the dashboard of the water-powered car. It will control and monitor engine performance. (photo by Marcia Thompson)
Stan Meyer points to the Voltage Intensifier Circuit unit which has been installed on the water-powered car. The solar panel located above it will provide the charge to the battery used to start the car, which will be powered by water, during the upcoming race in Australia. (photo by Marcia Thompson)
The page also gives the plan for the race: the buggy rebuilt to new specifications, with new steering, brakes, instrumentation and wiring; the “two Meyer brothers” to drive it themselves during the six-day race; and race rules “written in a way to allow this type of car to be demonstrated, showing an efficient way of running the car using solar energy to initiate the process of producing the hydrogen gas on demand.” Steve Meyer: “The dune buggy is an engineering unit, an on-wheels lab to monitor the performance of the car and the Water Fuel Cell.”
The race
The race the Record describes, 1,900 miles across Australia in November 1990 with solar power required, is the World Solar Challenge, run from Darwin to Adelaide. The archive has three other accounts of Meyer and that race:
- An earlier attempt. In New Zealand in 1989 Meyer said “we were preparing a car to come to Australia and run in the solar Australian race”, and that it fell through when the sponsors' contract “boiled out to be nothing more than a deed of property transfer and a bill of sale on the dune buggy” (New Zealand 1989, part 4, at 11:14). This makes September 1990 a second try.
- The money. Jim Miller's recollection is that the Canadian investor John Gilvesey helped Meyer “to the tune of $250,000 when Stan was planning to run the buggy in the World Solar Challenge in Australia”, and that “the buggy was not ready to run by race time”.
- Afterwards. By April 1991 Meyer was telling a seminar that an invitation to take the dune buggy to Australia for a desert road race had been “a plot to steal my invention” (Spy, December 1991).
The archive has no record that the car ran in the race.
The original
Provenance
- Shelf
- Press coverage
- Page
- 1, 3
- Byline
- Marcia Thompson
- Patent office record
- grovecity.advantage-preservation.com →
- Rights
- The newspaper page is copyright its publisher and is reproduced here as a record of what was printed at the time; the archive claims nothing in it. The watermark marks the archive’s copy, not its ownership. The citation is what a reader needs to find the original.
- Caption
- The Grove City Record, Thursday 13 September 1990: page 1, with the H2OCAR photograph, and page 3, where the story continues with three more photographs.
- Citation
- The Grove City Record, Grove City, Ohio, September 1990, pp. 1, 3, by Marcia Thompson
- Publication
- The Grove City Record, Grove City, Ohio
- Transcription
- The page images from the Southwest Public Libraries' digital archive of the Record. The captions are transcribed from the pages; the article's text is in the companion entry.