Former President Donald Trump told supporters he was adamantly opposed to hydrogen-powered vehicles — while envisioning a grisly but unfounded spectacle in which staunch ally U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gets blown to bits while driving one.
During apparently unscripted remarks at Monday campaign rally in Atlanta, Trump praised billionaire backer and Telsa CEO Elon Musk for making the "best" electric vehicles and said "there's a great market for them" despite their cost and limited range.
The Republican presidential nominee then went off on a tangent about the purported dangers posed by the relatively small number of hydrogen-powered vehicles on the roads today.
"But we want gasoline-powered cars, and we want hybrids. We don't want hydrogen," he said, according to a video posted online. "We do not want hydrogen cars because they're extremely dangerous. You're not recognizable if something goes wrong."
Trump then described what he thought might happen if Greene, "with that beautiful blonde hair, is driving down the highway in a hydrogen car."
"The problem with a hydrogen car, if something goes wrong, it's like the atom bomb went off," he said. "They'll say, 'We thought it was Marjorie Taylor Greene riding down the middle of the Turnpike but she's no longer recognizable. We found some of her.'"
Trump ended the nightmare scenario by saying, "I won't say — we love her" before asking the Georgia Republican to stand up, prompting cheers from the crowd.
Three automakers — Honda, Hyundai and Toyota — began marketing hydrogen-powered in 2015 and have sold about 17,000 in U.S., all in California, Car and Driver reported in April.
The cars are considered as safe as any others and no injuries or deaths have been tied to the highly flammable gas that powers their fuel cells, the magazine said.
That's because unlike the Hindenburg, the hydrogen-filled German dirigible that caught fire and was destroyed in New Jersey in 1937, the cars' high-pressure tanks and hardware are built to withstand a crash that would destroy the rest of the vehicle, according to Car and Driver.
