| When your alternator is providing power to your electrical system, it does put a load on the engine. That's why when you put on your lights and your blower in your car, you can hear the idle change. The alternator is an accessory... it certainly does rob power from your engine... it requires power to run. The electrical system is an energy system. You can directly convert horsepower into electricity (1 hp= 746 watts). The more electricity that you draw from the electrical system, the more horsepower that must be consumed to generate that electricity. And since no system is ever 100% efficient, you will never get quite 100% results when you produce/transfer the energy... there will always be a power loss. So if you run a 746 watt electrical motor, your engine will be robbed of 1 HP through the alternator. And since that's assuming 100% efficiency, in reality you'd lose more that 1 hp to generate 1 HP's worth of electricity. Yes, you can use your car's power to electrolyze water. And yes you can burn the hydrogen that is produced. But since it takes more energy to separate the hydrogen from the water than the produced hyrogen can provide, you're only losing efficiency by adding such a system. Since you are losing energy, you can only get WORSE gas mileage. I think the flaw in your belief was that you were under the impression that the electrical system doesn't take energy to run.
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