Hiya everyone! So whilst looking at some of the earliest cars, I read that in 1807, Franco-Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz created an internal combustion engine ("ICE") that was powered by Hydrogen, dubbed the "De Rivaz Engine". In 1808 De Rivaz fitted his ICE to a primitive working vehicle which Erik Eckermann (in his World History of the Automobile) calls the "the world's first internal combustion powered automobile".
If this is true, Why did we switch to Petrol with the advent of Karl Benz's "Benz Patent Motorwagen" in 1886? What did people think the advantages were of using Petrol as opposed to Hydrogen? Thank you to anyone that answers :)
Hydrogen requires energy to produce. In the late 1800s, an age when electrical generating capacity was limited, it would have been difficult to obtain in quantity.
Petrol/Gasoline was a byproduct of oil companies, who in the late 19th century were already producing kerosene (aka paraffin aka lamp oil) for lamps and heating in large quantities. Lighting and heating was the end use for the majority of petroleum until 1909. The fact that petroleum was already being produced by a large industry with proven methods for extraction and refining made it far cheaper than Hydrogen as a motor car fuel.
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan: the life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
It's been 200 years since 1807 and producing Hydrogen is still too expensive for cars powered by it to be economically viable compared to vehicles running on cheap petrochemicals.
Back then, the discrepancy would have been even greater, since, on the one hand, H2 production takes lots of electrical energy, which would have been hard to get in a time where electricity's only known use was killing turkeys for kicks, while petroleum, on the other, used to bubble out of the ground in all kinds of places and would have been about as expensive as seawater when they first figured out its uses.
