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."

Comments

why?

[stim]

Initial plans are to produce 3,000 cars per year. Is there a reason for that? That seems to be the way things like this go. We have a world changing invention thats super cheap and safe! We'll make a couple of 'em and see how it works out. . . Or maybe theres some validity to the theories that 'the powers that be' keep this kind of thing under wraps and prevent it from really taking off, because something like this could really upset the balance of power in the world currently.

Re:Lack of good info

[registrations_suck]

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.

Re:Stupid

[DragonWriter]

The thing is there isn't just a lot of compressed air lying around. Thanks to thermodynamics, it costs more to compress the air than what we get out of it when we uncompress it. And it's probably oil or coal burning plants that compress the air. So this isn't solving anything.

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.

India

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 ... awesome.

Re:When Americans do that, it's "Outsourcing"

[GreyPoopon]

(and let's be very clear that the US only ever acts in what it considers to be its national interest)

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.