Slashdot Mirror
The Air Car Nears Completion
torok writes "According to an article on Gizmag, Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, has developed a car that runs on compressed air. It costs less than $3 USD to fill a tank on which it can run for 200 to 300km. The car will cost about USD $7,300 and has a top speed of 68mph. About once every 50,000 km you have to change the oil (1 liter of vegetable oil). Initial plans are to produce 3,000 cars per year."
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
Brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen. Brilliant ideas which are economically and realistically feasable are a completely different story. Then, you have to match the person with the brilliant, feasable idea with someone who can make the business actually work. If you don't have all of those in place, it's a guaranteed failure.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
If this actually comes into being, there are some really neat side-benefits of this sort of thing. Principally, as compressed air is not only easy to generate, it can be generated *AND* stored locally. That means that it can be done via "renewable" energy (solar and wind) *as they are available*.
As electricity is easy to generate locally - but not easy to store in sufficient quantity - you can't really have solar panels that will always be available to charge your electric car. However, you *can* have solar panels which fill your compressed-air tank, and then refill your can whenever you need.
Overall, that means a completely petroleum-free energy source for cars. Even if you don't believe that man is behind global warming, the thought of removing most of the automotive-produced pollution has got to be an appealing thought, with the idea of never paying a utility company (gas OR electric) to refuel your can again as a nice bonus.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
SCUBA air needs to be pure and clean. You pay extra for it for that reason if nothing else. Plus, SCUBA is an expensive hobby. You don't see many inner city youth taking it up as their hobby. Face it - divers tend to have money to burn, so of course they will pay more for their air (I'm a diver too by the way). Now, air for your car - hell, it can be any ole dirty air you want it to be. You're not going to be sucking it into your lungs at high pressure, so what difference does it make? Of course it will be cheaper than filling a SCUBA tank.
Uh, yeah, it is.
Burning fossil fuels in a power plant is generally more efficient and cleaner than burning them in a small, light mobile engine. So it reduces pollution that way.
While compressed air isn't the only such storage medium that turns the vehicle-power problem into a large-scale generation problem, batteries and fuel cells are far from clean to produce. Compressed air canisters aren't nearly as dirty. And, its a lot easier to build a distributed compressed-air generating infrastructure powered by large-scale power plants than it is for hydrogen.
Its not solving everything, but if it performs as advertised, it certainly is a useful part of the solution.
I'd like to see how this car does in crash testing. Sure, it's easy to make a light-weight car that can be pushed around with some compressed air, but designing one that doesn't kill all its occupants the first time it hits someone walk across the street, let alone a Hummer, is a bit trickier. Where is this car going to be produced? India? I somehow doubt the safety standards are all that high.
300 liters of 200 bar air has an energy content of about 35MJ or just about the same as 1 liter of gasoline. Even giving some credit for higher (perfect?) efficiency and some energy recovery through environmental heating, it seems to be a stretch to suggest that any reasonable useful car could run 2-300 miles on this. Actually, the energy content is probably a bit lower since they'll need some overpressure to run the engine (maybe 50 bar or so?). And I don't really want to be sitting in the car when they fill it. The heat generated by filling the tank is pretty much equivalent to burning a quart of gas in the trunk.
[humor]Yes, I am kidding, there are ways to alleviate the heat generation like compressing outside, slow filling,...[/humor]
Actually, there's no big conspiracy. Inventors are not disappearing. There are generally three reasons why you'll hear about it then nothing else:
/. will post very "first announcement" kind of things. The actual product is years or decades away from the market, and thus there's not a lot to be said.
/.'s rather short attention span (I mean really, how often are there good followups here?) and that's what you get.
1) It's all hype, no substance. There are plenty of inventors that try to hype things to get capital that they really have no idea how to make work. Sometimes they are even out and out frauds.
2) The product is a long way off. Often
3) The product doesn't do as well as expected. Some things sound really cool and then just don't pan out. They go to market and flop.
Take any one of those and combine it with
So get some perspective, and save the aluminium for wrapping leftovers.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Thermodynically you're correct. Enviromentally you're correct. Economically and politically you're wrong.
For the forseeable future we (the US) will be getting 55-60% of our electricity off of coal and 20% off of nuclear power. This electrical power can, with this compressed air model, be used to power the whole transportation sector, instead of oil. The US is the "middle east of coal". That means more US money staying in the US, less money being pumped into a volitale part of the world that doesn't like us much, more US jobs, more US oversight of the involved companies. As an American this benefits us greatly. It benefits all Americans except for the CEOs of the top 5 or so oil companies. (This applies elsewhere too, but America has the most cars, generates the most pollution from them, and all in all is the biggest oil consumer; though China is close, maybe surpassed the US in the past year or so.)
Additionally one would assume that the air compressors would be run off of electric motors, which allows them to use electricity produced anyway they want. If you wanted to use solar panels at home and plug the car into a small compressor to recharge that would work. If you wanted to goto a service station and buy their compressed air, that would work too. Unlike hydrogen, air compressing equipment is already widespread, hydrogen production isn't there yet. Either way, you're right in that we get less out than we put in, but the transision from oil to will be like that. We are very very unlikely to find something else we can pump out of the ground and use as easily as oil.
We are now transisioning permantly from a primary portable fuel (oil) to a secondary (compressed air, hydrogen, batteries, etc). It seems that these next fuel(s) will be with us for atleast the 100+ years oil has been.
Mike Scanlon
If you have ever been to India you can see that this is infact a great idea. It sucks for America, sucks HARD, but Indian strees are swamped with three-wheeled-pull-start-lawnmower-powered Rickshaws and the air is noxious. These cars would be an excellent replacment for those and taxi companies could use the GPS features to the benefit of all. Not every invention has to only solve problems you know about to be good.
... awesome.
The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere. If they can make this work
It's sad that one can actually secure a patent on something like that.
The other thing that this "supressed technology" conspiracy fantasies ignore is the fact that there is no monopoly on cars.
... had a way to offer a vastly better product than their current product line, you'd better believe they'd do it as fast as they could, because that's the way to make money.
No, there is something much more effective. It's called High Barrier to Entry, and it is extremely effective at keeping out small car manufacturers, with expensive safety tests and regulation compliance (read, lawyers fees) etc (basically all of the lame attempts by American auto manufacturers to keep the Japanese out of the American car market by corrupting the political process). Unfortunately, the Japanese were smart enough to change their manufacturing process fast enough to keep up with the regulatory changes, and had the financial fortitude to push on through the pain.
If GM
Bzzzt, wrong, but thankyou for playing. The way to make money in the car business (like any other) is to make sales. In GMs case they do this through a dealership network. The dealership network makes almost no profit from the initial sale of the car, and nearly all of the profit through service and maintenance, in which they sell small products at ridiculous markups. When GM trialled the EV1, the dealerships realised that an electric motor has very little maintenance costs, and so there was no profit in selling them.
Second, to make cars requires a large investment in manufacturing equipment. Billions of dollars in fact. This investment is amortised over a long time horizon. If you radically change your manufacturing process to produce a better car, you lose your investment in the current equipment, something no CEO is going to be willing to explain at the next shareholder's quarterly.
There is more to business than just product.
- Nothing to see hear.
Funny thing is, solar and wind power are actually feasible energy sources in this case.
I have a 40 gallon air compressor in my garage (and a set of pneumatic tools to go with them). I could install some solar panels on my roof and a small air compressor in my garage, attaching it to the 40 gallon tank.
It wouldn't recover pressure like the 1.5 HP electric motor, but who cares? I'm gone most of the day, so the solar panels can do a "trickle charge" on the air tank. If the car's range is 200km (~124 miles) that's actually a week's worth of mileage for me! It can take all week to build up the required pressure, and I can fall back on the electric motor for a quick recharge or if I'm using the pneumatic tools.
=Smidge=
You're right that they can't really stop you from selling it. But they can convince legislature to pass laws to prevent your vehicle from being considered road worthy. They can launch a propaganda campaign, make your product look bad, and run you out of business. They can buy up your engineers, your management, heck, even enter into contracts with your suppliers. Think about all the dirty little tactics that Microsoft used, then add politics to it. Like for example, convince some lawyers to sue your product for every little defect. Or convince legislature to tighten the regulations for your product--for your parts supplier, your resource supplier, etc. Conspiracy theory? Maybe. But most of these tactics have been used before. And there's nothing preventing big companies from using them to kill off competition.
Why is ethanol so popular these days as an alternative fuel as opposed to other green fuel solutions? Ethanol is only a small (albeit a significant) step away from oil, yet it's being touted as the fuel that will save the planet. It's because corn farmers have a huge presence in DC. They saw an opportunity to increase the worth of their crop, and they jumped to get legislatures' attention. Don't ever underestimate the power of lobbying.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I really hate this myth.
Fossil fuels _ARE_ extremely energy dense and thus good for cars. But if we could loslessly transmit that energy from a big honking power plant to vehicles, it wouldn't "shift the polution", it'd OVERALL REDUCE IT. A fixed-speed generation engine with millions of users to spread load out and cost-effective pollution scrubbing is going to put out a lot less crap into the air then the equivilant number of small, badly maintained, stop and go vehicles.
Just because our current power generation comes from badly maintained coal plants doesn't mean it HAS to be that way. There are a lot of benefits to efficiences of scale.
IIRC, the advertised MPG were maximum values, which I have heard are achieved from time to time. It really does not matter, though, because Detroit is still pumping out cars with <20MPG gas mileage. Even the Prius' worst case scenario doubles that figure. So, while it is not a solution to the problem, it is certainly a step in the right direction.
As for the pollutants in the batteries, you certainly have a point. Compressed air is certainly better than battery acid for the environment. Either way, anything that makes individuals less reliant on petrochemicals has to be a good thing.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Go read your WWI history, and spend 10 minutes contemplating the meaning of 3 million dead or permanently maimed, and 3 million more wounded. Six in 10 men between 18 and 28 dead or permanently maimed. Consider Verdun, and just how tough that going was.
FFS, I'm not supposed to side with the French. I'm English. But this meme sickens me. A way of insulting the French for acting in what they perceive to be their national interest, when that does not coincide with what the US considers its national interest (and let's be very clear that the US only ever acts in what it considers to be its national interest), it just shows the originators and all those who parrot them as breathtakingly arrogant and ignorant.
And I suppose that you somehow think it's OK for you to make a general statement like this, but it's not OK for those in the US to make general statements about the French. Let's be perfectly clear here. Although the US avoids acting in ways that are contrary to its national interests, it frequently makes decisions and acts in ways that have no impact one way or the other on national interests -- just like pretty much any other country. The US has been, and continues to be very generous in many ways. Although some of that generosity has political aims, certainly not all of it does. I think you need to take a serious dose of your own medicine, lest you yourself be misconstrued as arrogant and ignorant. For what it's worth, I've heard pretty much the same joke come from the colleagues in England and Germany that I work with on a regular basis. Does that make it right? No, but it does show that US-bashing isn't the answer to the problem. Start at home and work your way outward.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?