Actually, this came up recently on the large science forum I'm on:
Scienceforums thread on this subject
It's fairly long and involved, and somewhat beyond me (I'm no chemist). Some of the experts dug up actual papers deal with it, and woelen evidently has some colleagues trying to replicate the results. Nothing's conclusive yet.
The general gist of the thread: if the torch system works, it's very interesting due to the chemistry behind it. The car system could be useful too, in the sense that the limited, localized heat could improve engine design. It would also mean no messing around with pure hydrogen, which is good because pure hydrogen is incredibly explosive.
However, the statement that the car can run for hundreds of miles on only a few ounces of water is misleading (though technically true), since the water isn't the source of energy, but merely a respository for it. That's like me saying my car runs for 3000 miles on only a few quarts of oil; it's true, but it's not the relevant metric of performance. Electricity is being used to induce the water into an unusual state in which it holds that energy, then releases it when used to run a car or cut metal. A car running on this technology will still require large quantities of electrical energy, and very large batteries to store it, thus making it prone to many (but not all) the problems of other electric cars.
It's interesting, but not exactly the world-shattering breakthrough it's hinted at being.
Mokele