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."
According to an article on Gizmag, Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, has developed a car that runs on compressed air.
Well, if you eat a lot of Tandoori, this is a great use for that compressed air.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Did half-life 2 teach us NOTHING about the dangers of compressed air cannisters?
Mexico has been using this tech for several years now, though this is a bit smaller than the taxi vans.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
this looks like the ultimate in vaporware, an as yet unavailable vehicle and runs on "air" might as well run on magic aether or unicorn blood. you can't even see air. pfft.
IC engines generate a lot of waste heat that can be used to warm the passenger compartment with little additional cost. On the other hand, IC vehicles need complicated a power hungry air conditioners to cool the passenger compartment during hot weather.
The compressed air powered car operates the other way around. Compressed air cools as it decompresses. The exhaust from this vehicle is below zero Celcius. That cold air acts as free AC. A heating system for a vehicle like this is going to be very expensive from a power consideration.
If these vehicles are not a scam then I think we can expect their adoption only in warm climates. In cold weather, I would not be surprised if the decompressed air freezes the components that transfer power to the wheels.
Seriously, how many brilliant inventions have we heard of lately, and how many of those vanish just days after being announced?
What about the far greater number of brillant inventions that vanish before we ever hear about them in the first place?!?!
If you are going to play the paranoid lunatic, aim high. There is no market for half-assed tin-hattery.
2-3 hundred kilometres - that's long downslope.
Squirrel!
So.. it costs like 5-10$ to fill a single scuba tank. Where do they get their $1.50 figure from? There is no mention of how that figure is arrived at at all.
:/
Running a two stage compressor for 3-4 hours will probably cost more than $1.50
And "Zero-pollution"? Can we have some truth in advertising please? Using the car causes pollution, plain and simple. Maybe it's 1/10th or maybe less of a petrol car but at least be honest about it and let us know exactly how much pollution it does cause. It's certainly not 0. Saying so leads to people assiming that this is some kind of crank.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
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.
The French guy who invented the car has been working on it for years. The car has been announced several times before and they are able to produce working prototypes. This counts as one of those technologies that is almost there but there is some small, pesky, won't-go-away, details that keep it from being economic. In that regard, it is similar to the plant that converts turkey guts to oil. The process works but isn't quite there.
The best thing about this car is that air-conditioning is very easy and costs no energy. As the air decompresses in the engine, it cools off. Directing that air into the cabin would provide air-conditioning with just about no effort.
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.
You know, I'm starting to get the idea that it really WOULD kill the editors to actually edit something. This is of course proof that the Firehose cannot make up for the failings of idiot editors.
Now, if there were no links in TFA, then torok would have an excuse for not knowing that this vehicle was actually developed by Moteur Developpment International, or MDI. If you visit their site you can read MDI's press release about their deal with Tata. But in fact not only the technology but the entire vehicle was designed by MDI. Not only have they been using them in Mexico (Mexico City is the most polluted city on the planet) but they've been using them for some years in Spain.
Shame on you torok, and shame on you ScuttleMonkey. The former for falsely attributing the vehicle and technology to the undeserving; the latter for not doing his job and checking the story for validity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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]
While I agree in principle, I'd be interested in the assumptions you used to reach that conclusion (e.g. how much energy it takes to move the machine a km).
The amount of energy needed to move a person that far is not that much. An average cyclist can produce something like 3watts/kg. A 75kg cyclist produces something like 225 watts; assuming he can travel at about 20km/h, we can put a lower bound on the energy needed to move a typical person 200km at 2250 watt hours.
Let's assume we have an engine that is as efficient as the rider (for setting the lower bound) and weighs as much as the rider. Lets suppose that we need twice the energy to move engine and rider the 200km. So we need 4500KWh.
Assuming that electricity costs $0.10/KWh, then such a machine would consume forty five cents to move a person 200km.
To put it in perspective then, the claim is that this car can move a person from place to place using only fourteen times the energy a reasonably fit cyclist would use.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Those are some bodacious Tatas.
Damn. I read that headline and thought my flying car was almost ready.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If you are going to play the paranoid lunatic, aim high. There is no market for half-assed tin-hattery.
But if there's a market for half-tinned ass-hattery, then I'm set!
The enemies of Democracy are
Pesky kids let the air out of your tires, just fill em back up with your fuel... or run out of fuel, fill from your tires.
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
Yes, and it's a good idea to embiggen your vocabulary at the same time.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
[..] It takes about 9.8 Watts to move one kilogram one meter in one second. [...] 27.4 kW * 12.5 hours = 343 kW-h.
Congratulations! You just calculated how much energy you need to lift the car to an altitude of 250 km (!)
Do these things go faster than light? It's the only way I can explain the fact that the first post is modded redundant.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Head on over to USPTO.gov, and show me the invention that solves the energy crisis.
How about this?
You just need to find a way to harness the cat's kinetic energy in a usable form.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
lift it, wait for the earth to rotate, put it back down.. you can probably pick up some regenerative braking energy on the way down.
It's sad that one can actually secure a patent on something like that.
-Jay-
I think the original poster meant this particular usage of the term "Dutch Oven":
A practical joke involving flatulence underneath a blanket or cover inspired by the mechanics of the "Dutch Oven".
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."
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
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?