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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TODO: Insert witty sig
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.
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
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.
-Jay-
You can flick a lit cigarette into an open bucket of gas if it has sat a while, and [the gas will] put out the cigarette. It sounds weird, but it's true.
Somebody was dancing with the Darwin Award.
Table-ized A.I.
It would be good, 'cause it would turn them into x-windows
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?