If you're tired of spending money like water on gas, maybe you'd just rather spend money on water, period.

That's what you'll be doing if a Japanese firm has its way.

A company called Genepax, dedicated to finding ways to turn water into power, has unveiled what it calls the first practical car to run solely on H20. The firm claims putting just a litre of water from any source - tap, rain or river - is enough to keep its automobile going for 60 minutes at a respectable speed of 80 kilometres an hour.

And forget about finding a gas station when you're running on empty. 'The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,' Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told a local Japanese broadcaster after demonstrating the test vehicle in Osaka. 'It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars.'

According to the company, the water gets poured into a tank at the back of the car and uses a generator to break it down and convert it to electrical power. It's a completely different approach from the big automakers, who are looking at fuel cells that run on hydrogen as the next power source. Ironically, they emit water from the exhaust, not use it to run the vehicle.