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100-MPG Air-Powered Car Headed To US Next Year
An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Mechanics for word on a New York automaker with plans to introduce a US version of the air-powered car, with which India's Tata Motors made a splash last year. Zero Pollution Motors plans a sub-$18,000, 6-passenger vehicle that can hit 96 mph and gets over 100 MPG, using an untried dual engine — the air-powered motor being supplemented by a second (unspecified) engine that would kick in above 35 MPH. The company estimates that "a vehicle with one tank of air and, say, 8 gallons of either conventional petrol, ethanol, or biofuel could hit between 800 and 1000 miles." The vehicle could be introduced to the market as early as 2009.
What happens when we run out of air!??!??
which is totally what she said
Those are some rather extravagant claims for a technology that appears to be about half thought out (what if we put an engine of some kind on an air car!). My gut reaction is that they pulled that MPG number and top speed straight out of their ass.
I read the internet for the articles.
How much does a gallon of air cost?
A bit different than the usual 'hybrid' gas/electric design.
I'd like to know how the air tank would be refilled, though. I mean, gas stations already have air compressors for your tires, but would that put out enough pressure to fill the tank in your car?
Or will this strictly be an 'around town' sort of car, and you'd have to rent something for long trips?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
We steal it from Druidia. Better get working on Mega-Maid.
For an additional $5000 the car comes equipped with a politician and a special adapter to route all the hot air into the tank.
Why do they have to make the friendly cars so damn ugly?
I think the only way they'd get past the "burp-car" or "fart-car" stigma would be to start offering them as rental cars - let people drive them around a lot. Then they might have a market. (Unless they just come in at $2500 - then they'll sell a billion of them)
meh
did you mean "100-MPG Hot Air-Powered Car Headed To US Next Year"
Ape 1: SPACEBALLS?!
... there goes the planet ...
Ape 2: Oh shit
In considering the environmental impact of a particular vehicle, there are a number of factors to consider:
There are probably more factors, some very difficult to isolate. And there are safety factors - gasoline is flammable, but easy to detect if it starts to leak. Hydrogen, on the other hand, you would not notice at all until your car decided to emulate the Hindenberg.
Zero pollution is a good goal, but unless all of the factors are considered, it's just marketing hype.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
I bet it'll be butt ugly too.
However, what kind of air? Clean air, high oxygenated air, polluted air?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
... then I think I'd be willing to buy one. Although I really don't like the way they look. Still, I could suffer through the faux-Jetson design if it's a genuine 100mpg driving experience.
I do dread the inevitable tech support calls, though.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
and a litre of your best snake oil, sir!
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Small cars that use little fuel are great. And in cities (where most people drive), it doesn't matter if it only gets a few hundred kilometres (did someone say miles? what are they?), as that is more then enough to get you home again.
As for speed, again, if you are driving in a city, there is no need to drive more then ~60 kilometres an hour (~30 miles an hour I think).
(Of course, I still prefer my (push) bike, bikes are a heck of a lot safer then cars, imagine if everyone had a bike instead of a petrol guzzling car. There would be a lot fewer accidents. Of course, sometimes you need to carry more stuff or more people, simple, just ring up your local car sharing co-op!)
I wank in the shower.
I [ used to } hear they run at 100+ audio decibels.
Governments really need to regulate green washing such as this companies name.
Those have to be like 8" rims. With tires that small, cruising at 96 MPH would be a bit of a white knuckled experience. Any bump or divet in the road is going to feel like you're hitting a curb in a car that light with that small of wheels. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see what this vehicle can do in the real world, but 1000 miles @ 96 MPH is either a purely hypothetical calculation, or a Dyno run.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This gives a new meaning to the word "vaporware" :P
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Everything I've heard so far on the topic of air powered cars leads me to think that compressed air is a pretty bad way to transfer energy. What do we burn to create the energy to compress the air?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
How can they claim the numbers they're claiming without trying out the engine first?
"Using an untried technique of dropping a squirrel into the gas tank, we're able to get 100 MPG on our vehicles."
Uhh...
Arrrrrr, Matey!
I had an air-powered car years ago! :)
So, if I eat a lot of hot chili, have my whole family eat a lot of chili, trap the resulting methane gas, and add that to the air tank, would I be able to boost my mph to say 150 mph?
Cattle ranchers could make a huge boon in trapped methane.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
OK, I know I'm somewhat immature for my age, but a product called Tata is just one I will never be able to deal with without snickering like a teenage boy.
I will pluralize that sucker and use it all the time. "Oooh, look at the Tatas", "we've done extensive market research, and we're just not sure America is ready for Tatas", "Man crushed under Tatas in garage".
I'm sure I could come up with lots more, but that would deprive someone else from trying.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We need a paradigm shift in transportation, because it causes so much climate change.
My immediate family is lucky, economically--we live in New York and don't need a car; but that doesn't exempt us from the environmental consequences of the internal combustion engine.
But even environmental consequences aside, the rising cost of oil has put the squeeze on the rest of my family who aren't fortunate enough to live in areas where public transportation is available/reliable/efficient. When you consider the relative share of annual income that they pay for basic transportation versus mine, it's dramatic how high such a fundamental cost of living is in the United States.
So, ask yourself--how competitive can an economy remain when it spends such an out-sized amount on such a basic service? It should be driving the costs of transportation down to the level of a utility and investing the surplus in cutting-edge technologies.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
OK, so you use an electric engine to drive a compressor which then drives the wheels. Or - even worse - you'll use a gasoline engine to compress the air. It's true that you'll get "zero pollution" while driving, but this vehicle is going to use significantly more energy than a vehicle that uses an electric or gasoline engine to drive the wheels directly. And that means *more* pollution, not less. There is a reason that we don't use compressed air to anything larger than toy cars and rockets - it has an incredibly low energy density compared to a tankful of hydrocarbon-based fuel.
This is yet another "clean energy" idea that preys on the naieve.
>>For an additional $5000 the car comes equipped with a politician and a special adapter to route all the hot air into the tank.
:)
That's a rip off - around here, you can buy a politician for a lot less than $5000.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I would love to be able to buy one of these mini cars for around $2500-3500 but I can't see the US/CDN governments being too happy with them, especially local governments with the loss of money from gas taxes. A few things could happen here with the introduction of these cars. Gas prices will go up for everyone to compensate for lost tax revenue or new non gas taxes will be introduced to compensate for the lost tax revenue from gas. So in the end we will not save that much.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How heavily compressed is the air in the storage tank, and how rugged will the tank be? Think about the consequences for both cars if this thing gets rear-ended or sideswiped hard enough to rupture the tank...
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
TFA is long on hype, but severely lacking in details. And contradictory, or at least misleading. It refers to the Air Car as "gas free", but later states that is uses a "supplemental energy source" for speeds over 35 mph and that it can take "conventional petrol, ethanol or biofuel". Maybe that's not strictly speaking "gas", but until we have a biofuel refueling infrastructure, that means good old pump gas.
There are also a lot of unanswered questions about the pressurized air tanks. How much pressure will the tanks be under? What happens if a tank ruptures? How are the tanks filled? (If you have to fill them between trips, then there will be an energy cost associated with that, probably not an insubstantial one.) How easy are they to service/replace? How much energy is required to manufacture/remediate them?
As with so many other "green" solutions, we may ultimately find that the real energy savings aren't all they're cracked up to be. Don't get me wrong -- I applaud anyone working to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. I just believe we ought to think more critically about what we're buying into.
Where does the energy to compress the air come from ?
In this house, we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Even on the face of it, putting in 8 gallons of gas + a huge amount of energy and getting back 800 miles does not mean 100 mpg.
If that were the case, a purely electric car that let a thimble of gas evaporate in the back would get 1000s of miles per gallon.
We don't even need to argue about whether this is really going to come anywhere near its claims (it isn't), safe (it isn't), or actually efficient when you consider the energy that it takes to compress air (it isn't).
We can just end at how stupid their claims are and move on.
I saw this on the television and thought it looked pretty cool, pun kind of intended.
Arguably one could compress one's own air in the garage with a wind or solar powered compressor and fuel the thing for "free." Certainly that would be an option for some (in windier areas) people and even filling stations. Otherwise, of course, we're just moving the pollution from the streets to the power plants that then have to power all of the compressors.
The thing that kicked the idea for me is that the car seems potentially impractical for those of us that live in temperate regions. For a large part of the year, our vehicles need to generate heat for the passenger compartment. In your typical gas-powered motorized vehicle, this is heat taken from the cooling system. Sure, the old VW Beetle had an electric heater in it, but anybody who had one in sub-zero climates can tell you that they don't always cut it. It's probably the case that the improvements in seat-based heating and technology in general will make the heaters more useful. Perhaps the size of the cabin will help. It also needs to be considered that the light-weight construction of the body may not allow for an awful lot of insulation.
Along the same lines, those tiny wheels wouldn't make it through the snow. A 75HP motor seems like enough to power some larger wheels, but what's the torque like, and how much impact is that larger drive-train gonna have? And once you start adding that bottom weight, how much is that going to force changes in the rest of the car, and will it spiral out of control such that the power plant is no longer sufficient?
In warmer areas, like I'd like to move to, it seems a very practical commuter vehicle. I have to imagine someone has thought of routing the exhaust through a cooling system, allowing the engine to cool the cabin without needing an environmentally unfriendly air conditioner. On good paved roads the tiny wheels might only be a hindrance to top speeds, where larger wheels might be needed for rougher roads, like those with cracks and potholes. (Yeah, I may have a thing against tiny wheels...)
There is also a safety factor. In places where everyone drives small cars, this will fit right in, but in the US, too many SUVs and large sedans compete for the same road as these. It'll probably be the same as with motorcycles; they're safer when you get a bunch of them together than individually ripping through traffic. Once there's a lot of them on the road, this should shift so that the small cars will dominate, and the larger ones will be the exceptions.
Heck, someone should suggest to "reverse" the HOV lanes and force the big vehicles over there, allowing the smaller vehicles to have the other lanes; which could probably be narrowed, and would be less congested as all of the vehicles would be shorter and everyone would be closer to their destination by the time the traffic jam started .
End the FUD
Say instead we took the same car and replaced the engine with a small 1.2 litre diesel. Now calculating in the cost of the compressed air and comparing it to the cost of diesel to go 1000 miles which is cheaper?
May even debate which is greener considering that the compressed air didn't jump in the tank itself
Is there a drivable prototype of this thing? Has anyone from Motor Trend or Auto Week ever had a good look at it? For any real car, the prototypes precede volume production by several years.
Accusations of fraud are flying between the Air Car people.. Apparently there are two Air Car groups, and they don't get along.
Tata Motors has nothing on their web site about the "air car". They do have a page of their concept cars, and the Air Car isn't on there. They're coming out with the Tata Nano, at $2500. The Tata Nano is conventionally powered. There's an electric version of the Tata Ace mini-truck, and those should be coming to the US this year. But there is no Air Car or "City Cat" from Tata that I can find.
This looks like vaporware.
-whoopie cushion accessory sold separately
-refried beans encouraged for every meal in order to foster alternative energy adoption
-beano announced as an enemy of energy responsibility
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think Spielberg built a huge PR hill to climb for the litigious American market. Ever see Jaws? As Mythbusters showed, in the extremely unlikely event that an air tank ruptured, it would typically expirate rather explode. It would be difficult indeed to make the tank explode, but that's the image I have.
A twist on that by which the energy industry could rake in profit is by declaring it unsafe to use compressed air. Instead only compressed CO2 or Nitrogen should be used, to avoid fire hazard.
O'course, that kind of undermines efficiency for braking, which should best be done by compressing air. Maybe they could use two tanks and use the difference in potential (pressure) between the two in a closed system.
sigs, as if you care.
and told her that i liked her tatas
she slapped me
why does she hate fuel economy?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What? You don't watch Stargate-Atlantis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Point_Module
--
Sig: A model airplane company in Iowa
...Could be Elvis Costello!
Personally, I am far more interested in what Musk is up to. He is trying to work with the big 3 to get a low cost electric car out the door by 2010. This would be something that is in the range of $20-30K, and with a similar distance to the roadster of 200 miles (very doubtful that it would have the workmanship or the performance of the white star, let alone the roadster). To me, any one of these would be worth it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But, more importantly: Can it fly?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
I can't wait for the lawsuits when the oil companies try to put a tax on air.
The election will be over by next year.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I understand that they make these cars to be aerodynamic but do they really need to be so damned ugly? I would rather drive a car at 35mpg on only gas than be seen in something like this (and many of the other "high mpg" cars.)
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
If you look at the total efficiency of this, it will be far less than doing a straight ev car. U have the same powerplant and line losses of an EV. But the air approach moves the motor off the car onto land. Then it throws in a tank and a mechanical engine that powers with a heavy lose of efficiency. The EV simply adds a battery/capacitor.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why do some of the dumbest comments get modded up like that?
I wish them luck for success but I too am feeling skeptical. Here's why:
>>400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg. Pretty goddamn good for a 6-passenger vehicle.
Yeah, but notice they say "six passenger vehicle" and not "vehicle with six passengers." BIG difference.
With very low-hp automobiles, the extra weight of even one passenger can have a tremendous impact upon performance and economy. (I drive a 40hp 1964 VW Beetle so I know from whence I speak). Driven alone, my car actually performs as well as most modern cars. Add a couple passengers and suddenly it's sluggish and MPG falls into the mid-20 range.
>>Say we halve what they claim for most practical uses (city driving), you still have 400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg.
Judging from the tone of the press release (they don't seem to believe it) the 95mpg figure doesn't seem likely at all. And if we take half that figure, 50mpg as you suggest, it's still better than most gasoline vehicles, but roughly on par with turbodiesels. But we need to consider this a bit further. Because low-hp vehicles are greatly impacted by laden weight, if we were to take this 6-passenger vehicle and add a couple passengers I think we'd see that 50mpg figure fall further, possibly into the range of traditional gasoline vehicles which puts it well BELOW that of turbodiesels! It takes approx 35 hp to maintain 60mph in a vehicle with average aerodynamic drag. This vehicle has approx 75hp equivalent. That leaves 40hp to accelerate a vehicle with up to 900 lbs (6x150) of passengers plus the weight of the car. Subtract parasitic losses such as alternator (headlights, heating??) or a/c compressor drag (-5 hp) and it's anemic at best. Meaning it will struggle on hills, and passing on the interstate will be difficult.
Disappointing, but it helps us realize just how efficient a fuel-injected, turbo intercooled internal combustion engine is.
Everybody likes to point out that EV comes at a cost, and always ignore that EV will slowly pick up the energy from AE or nukes, which have very limited emmisions. A decent page is here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"What's the third one on her back for?"
"Slow dancing..."
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Now let's do the math for how many miles you can go on a 4000 psi tank. The pressure in a firing cylinder is about 2000 psi, so assume you can drain the tank to half-empty. A typical engine cylinder is about 500cc. At top=-dead center it's about 1/8th of that, say 60cc A BIG storage tank could be 60 liters. So you could fill up an engine cylinder 1,000 times. Most engines do about 2000 RPM in top gear at 60MPH, one cylinder firing for every revolution on a 4-cylinder engine, so you can go, hmmm, half a mile on a very expensively compressed tank of air. Not terribly impressive.
If they're heating the air charge to increase the volume/pressure then I suppose that efficiency would increase as ambient air temperatures decreases, but what does this automobile do to provide passenger cabin heat? If the heat extraction from the burned fuel is efficient (and I imagine it must be) then waste heat is unavailable for the cabin.
This is one of the substantial (and as yet to date, unsolved) issues for an all-electric car serving in anywhere other than a tropical climate -- at some point you must provide heat to the cabin. Electrical resistance heat is incredibly inefficient, heat pumps are efficient above about 30 degrees F (though they are nearly worthless below that temperature), and further heat pumps have a very low thermal output (e.g. it would take FOREVER to warm a car on a 30 degree F day).
This car might succeed in Southern California or Florida... maybe texas, but seems impractical for anything other than summer use in the majority of American states. (Even the southwest -- you can die of hypothermia in the desert at night.)
It's a shame, because I'd love to have some more options for transportation other than gasoline engines.
(BTW, I never knew about electrically heated VW Beetle seats and I've been restoring them for years. I suspect that's some aftermarket "solution." The Beetles (and all aircooled VWs & Porsches) capture heat from the outside of the exhaust manifolds.)
It will definitely keep you fit. I believe the vehicle will also have a hole in the floor so you can supplement the engine with some legwork.
What? You don't watch Stargate-Atlantis? What? You do?!?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
From their site: http://zeropollutionmotors.us/ "ZPM will begin taking reservations in early 2008 for US deliveries of the Air Car in late 2009 or 2010." Then there is the little matter that Tata can't actually export to the US at this time as they have no distributors and aren't Department of Transporation approved. Who knows how long the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations testing will take?
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
"There's this dude and he invented a car that runs on water, man!"
They used to have the (now defunct) site zeropollution.com. I was psyched by them then, but am still waiting for their ideas to materialize.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000601224638/zeropollution.com/zeropollution/index.html
...a time travel machine powered by peace juice!
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Compressed air is a terrible way to store energy. There's about 250 times less energy in compressed air than in gasoline. Do the math. It's impossible to make a useable car that is powered solely by compressed air. The energy just isn't there.
It's possible, however, to make a working hybrid gasoline-compressed air vehicle. But as far as the hybrid component goes, batteries are a much better candidate.
The car in TFA is based on the MDI AirCar, which is a greener version of the Moller Skycar. In other words, a scam. Whenever the company needs money, they write a few press releases, and some naive investor falls for it.
The company has allegedly dozens of licensing deals all over the planet. But not a single production vehicle has been built. It was supposed to be coming out "real soon now" 10 years ago. In 10 more years, it will still be "right around the corner".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sounds like a load of hotair. Speaking of which, doesn't that contribute to global warming?
Nice Total Recall bit... If you don't pay the tax, they can always throw you out the airlock, and then your eyeballs will pop out down to your knees...
High pressure air is dangerous -- what happens in a collision? With a gas or diesel engine, with modern fuel tanks, there is the chance of a fuel leak, but even if that happens, there is no guarentee it will ignite -- cars don't tend to blow up like in the movies.
On the other hand, a ruptured high-pressure air tank will (depending on it's design and the nature of the collision) either turn into a projectile, or else blow out shrapnel with considerable force. I am interested to hear about how these do in crash tests! Granted, this is most likely a solveable engineering problem, but still, it needs consideration. The good news is that in a collision, if the tank is breached, at least you wont be charged an environmental cleanup fee for leaked fuel! In my city I think you get a bill for around $600 to $1000 that is not usually covered by insurance.
More Caffeine. NOW
First off, I am extremely doubtful about "zero emissions" part.
BUT, it would be interesting to see if they are actually doing something like using compressed air as a means of energy storage - instead of charging a battery like in a typical hybrid.
Batteries are not very good at soaking in large amounts of energy in short amounts of time - exactly what happens during regenerative breaking. But me thinks it would be significantly more efficient to absorb that energy spike as compressed air via on-board compressor.
If that gives them better fuel economy than gas-electric hybrid then this would be the thing to watch.
When I read the title I thought 200 MPG on air? How do you measure miles per gallon on a vehicle that doesn't use fuel? Like how would you measure PSI in a tire that is solid rubber? How do you even measure a gallon of air? But then I saw that it's really a hybrid. Perhaps you could kill two birds with one stone (hopefully figuratively) by running a car on compressed natural gas so that some of the power comes from the gas escaping into the engine. Of course another name for it would be "bomb".
I live and work in Montana & Alaska, and wonder would there be any efficiency loss at low temperatures? How would these air engines work at -40[c|f]? Also, since they are decompressing air, creating a chilling effect, would this cause additional problems at low ambient temperatures?
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
rj
I was shooting for the national average ;)
If anything, the pollution will be markedly worse with such a vehicle - just not on the roads. Remember, all that stored energy has to come from somewhere. By introducing not only a more complex mechanism to drive the car, but presumably a much HEAVIER mechanism (how much does a tank full of enough compressed air mass to drive a car weigh?), you have decreased the well-to wheel efficiency of the vehicle significantly.
This is like outsourcing production of high-polluting materials to countries where pollution isn't really controlled and saying the problem is fixed. The problem isn't fixed, it's hidden. Come on people, this is high school physics.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
There is no shortage of hot-air there? Right? And the car runs on hot air right? So putting two and two together Washington DC will supply enough for the whole country. Supplemented by the state capitals...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged a few years ago (never finished it due to disgust with its content). Right before I put down the book, I remember some sort of air-powered engine being proof that "anything was possible with capitalism." Anyone here more familiar with the book?
1. You spend energy to compress air. Air heats up, heats up tank, tank cools back down to ambient temperature. Significant energy lost to waste heat. 2. You make your air-car go. Air decompresses, cools down a lot. Significant losses to efficiency. Problems with icing. 3. Your air car stops after half a mile. Your 6-person vehicle doesn't have enough compressed air tank space with current technology to approach the energy density of standard batteries, let alone hydrocarbon fuels. 4. *PROFIT*!
... but the company's PR seems to run really well on hot air.
Ironically, for a compressed-air engine, the opposite is true -- releasing compressed air naturally produces cool air (which is generally how A/C units work, I believe). So, cooling is much more efficient for this sort of engine than the alternative -- burning fuel to produce electricity to power a compressor. You may not even need a fan, since you already have air moving in this design.
Since this car would have both an internal combustion engine and a compressed-air engine, I would guess you can get either heating or cooling fairly cheaply. I do agree with the rest of your post, however.
Did someone say moose test?
...it is near the end of the video.
I come here for the love
People who NEVER drive. Slap a solar panel on top to power the pump, and then it can sit in my driveway for eight weeks until I have to go pick up some furniture. Yeah!
I don't know about the realities of this car. My question is why does it have to be so butt ugly? I'd settle for 80 mpg and a little more esthetics.
Maybe, with enough pop bottles, we can finally get that flying car we've been promised
Have gnu, will travel.
I am appalled that you drive a 1964 car that, when loaded with two or three people, "falls into the mid-20s" for MPG. Your 40yr old car has the same fuel economy as my co-worker's brand new Acura RSX with similar passenger capacity. As an engineer who worked hands-on with development of hybrid electric SUV conversions in college and a hybrid owner, I find it disgusting that the best and brightest engineers at GM, Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota can't seem to make a car do any better than 75mpg in the extreme case (Honda Insight) and 30mpg in the average case, despite their ability to do essentially the same thing 40 years ago.
I am not so naive as to believe they've been sitting around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses all this time. I realize that they have been striving to make the engines cleaner and more powerful. My concern is that we as a global society are focussed more on petty, self-serving ambition than collective growth. Instead of demanding better safety ratings, zero emissions, and low fuel consumption, the consumers demand leather seats, sunroofs, air conditioning that could nearly refrigerate the occupants, stereo systems that rattle windows in adjacent buildings, and the ability to surpass the speed limit from a dead stop in under five seconds.
Who are we racing? What are we trying to prove, and for what? I am disappointed with myself when I take the easy route and drive my hybrid to work instead of cycling. Are we so by our culture of acquisition and domination that we have forgotten to consider the consequences, that we don't care what world we leave to our children? There is an old native American proverb (which I admittedly learned from playing Civilization 4) that seems appropriate here:
"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children."
Sadly, I think I'm preaching to the choir...
I hear that all you have to do is tap your foot and wave your hand under a bathroom stall to get a politician to blow.
At least compressed air isn't. The energy comparison for this kind of car versus the conventional kind would have to include what ever energy was consumed to compress the air. Of course this may still be greatly beneficial and could at least divert from use of liquid petroleum products to electricity (which might still be coal, but could be solar or wind as well)
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
A little fact ''THEY'' don't like us to remember... Diesel, not the fuel, but the guy who invented that particular engine... designed it to run on hemp oil... a very efficient way of producing energy with little or no waste by-products. in fact the fiber from hemp makes superior denim and paper without all the chemicals used in what we get now. the pulp left from crushing the hemp seed for the oil is a source of excellent calories for and trace elements far better for you than any of the Genetically modified grains the big chemical peeps would like us all to be eating. wake up .. don't let them tell you hemp is pot..it just isn't so...
I bet a lot of you didn't realize that your fore fathers would never have made the trip across the oceans to the new world .. without having that barrel of hemp seeds with them...they used the fiber for clothing , rope etc and the seeds for oils for eating .. they sure would be shocked at the reaction they'd get if they landed in N America today..lol
HEMP WILL SAVE THE WORLD don't fall for the petrochemical/paper from trees bunch
check the facts your self ...but of course steer clear of any government site.. they just tell lies.. like ''reefer madness'' remember that one ?
I can see this being more useful in Europe then in North America where people generally are more spread out and therefore have to drive further to get anywhere. Until an alternate energy vehicle can use it's non-petroleum motor for speeds over 65mph, for over 100 miles it's of very limited use most people in my area (SW, Pennsylvania) where the a lot of residents travel up to 60 highway miles one way just to get to work. With the amount of steep hills in this area I'd be driving on the gas engine almost exclusively anyhow. This is why Hybrids are having such a hard time entering the market in this area. If I'm only using the electric/air/whatever motor to pull out of my driveway and get me to the main stretch it's not really doing me any good.
I have the same problem.
I have a 81 nissan diesel pickup that gets 30-40mpg and I'd like to get a replacement someday. It isn't fast or anything, but I can move large things around and not waste fuel. There simply isn't anything close on the market anymore. I cringe to think about how much technology has advanced in the past 25 years and we've gone backward as far as fuel efficiency goes.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Oh my God, it's hideous. Why do they have to make e-cars so damn ugly?
Repeat after me: There is no air car in production today. The whole air car concept is a joke because Slashdot readers explored the difficulty of compressing air efficiently. The Tata Nano referred to in the article runs on a conventional gasoline engine (a two-cylinder, 623 cc rear engine producing 33 hp/24 kW with rear wheel drive). Even it is not available for sale yet, according to Wikipedia.
Can we have a moratorium on air-powered cars or is this a Slashdot inside joke and I'm revealing myself to be a newbie?
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Compressing gases is one of the most energy intensive things in any chemical engineering process, so I'm not sure this is all sensible when the entire process is taken into account -- it may deliver better gas economy, but drive up your electricity bill by 300 dollars/month. Combustion engines are essentially creating compressed air using a chemical process to drive the pistons of a car. Taking that process, moving it to a power plant and adding a couple more conversion stages doesn't sound like it's going to be more efficient.
Excellent observation about cooling! Boyles' law, IIRC. Yeah, A/C may be "free" in this case if they put a heat exchanger at the point where the gas is throttled. (Actually, the cooling effect may be so pronounced in humid conditions that the metering orifice may need to electrically heated in order to prevent "icing", which was a condition that carburetted automobiles dealt with 30 years ago...) Two steps forward, one step back. Hopefully we won't have to adjust the dwell on the distributor or gap the dynamo.
>.Since this car would have both an internal combustion engine and a compressed-air engine, I would guess you can get either heating or cooling fairly cheaply.
Ah, but there's the rub. From what I read, I don't think there is an internal combustion engine. Unlike current gas/electric hybrids which use the gasoline for propulsion, in this case they're simply burning the gasoline (or other fuel) as a source of heat to improve the efficiency of the compressed air charge.
This guy has been making noise about this for 20 years. It's as close as the aircar that other guy keeps promising REAL SOON NOW.
..am I the only one who thinks this is just funny?
They are an official competitor. But do they actually get anywhere close to 100 MPGe? Especially during their fuel burning phase, which will necessary during the race? Nobody can tell because they haven't released enough information. For more information check out the X Prize Cars page: http://xprizecars.com/2007/12/mdi-inc-and-zero-pollution-mot.php
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Getting astronomical "MPG" out of a hybrid is no trick at all.
If I make a hybrid car that runs on 99% electricity, and 1% gasoline; that car could probably get 2000 MPG easily. But would it be fair to assume that such a car is more economical, or better for the environment?
If a car is a hybrid, we need to consider total non-renewable fuel consumption, not just gasoline consumption.
And if you are using a so-called renewable fuel, you must consider the non-renewable fuel that it takes to create that fuel; as well as other environmental factors such as water consumption, and loss of top-soil.
This car has been promoted as "available next year" for several years now. I'll believe it is real when I can go test drive one and buy it. Otherwise it's vaporware designed to raise investor money as far as I'm concerned.
EV is POwerplant + lines + battery storage + electric motor.
Air is POwerplant + lines + electric motor + air compressor( loss of efficieny) + air storage (assume no loss) + air engine (some form of loss greater than 12%).
The Air has the extra air compressor AND air engine which will have loses. I suspect that either will be greater than 12%, which is roughly what lead acid battery storage is (li-ion and ni-hy are better than that). Pretty much zero chance of air being greater efficiency.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanks for the post killbill, you hit every single point I wanted to make and saved me the effort of writing it. -Jay-
my understanding was that the lead acid storage and the charger were 12% total, but IANAEE. Still, I would be surprised to see the multiple mechanical approach beating a simple item. In the end, though, I think that the supercapcitors will own the storage, and when it happens (just like fusion :) ), then the loses are extremely low. I can not see mechanical air even coming close.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
See, like that.
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Most other car makers have a prototype that goes around and shows what it can do.
Where is even ONE compressed air car that goes more than a couple miles?
This reminds me of Moeller's air car, made him rich and has not been produced yet.
Why not cover the roofline with solar panels. While your car is sitting in the parking lot it could be "refueling" by running an air compressor.
My 1997 vehicle has a 3.5 liter V6 engine that shipped providing 214 horsepower, I imagine it isn't operating at quite that point anymore, but probably most of 200 horsepower. It get's mid 20's loaded or not, if it is driven with a light foot.
I guarantee it drives nothing like a 40 horsepower beetle.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
We need a paradigm shift in transportation, because it causes so much climate change.
Too many people have settled for the low-bar: they care about the threat, but they don't care about understanding whether the threat is scientifically reasonable, possible, natural, or unavoidable. "Climate change" stinks of politics, cherry-picking (of data), and other shady science. Besides, as a scientist, I have the responsibility to question their results--which, by the way, is hard to now that the "debate is over."
That being said, I think that there are *better* reasons for a shift in the transportation paradigm: Cleaner air, less stress, more exercise, better city planning, and simply raising the bar for better science and technology and so on. Let's raise the bar for the sake of "doing it right" and "doing it better."
So, ask yourself--how competitive can an economy remain when it spends such an out-sized amount on such a basic service? It should be driving the costs of transportation down to the level of a utility and investing the surplus in cutting-edge technologies.
Think of how much more it would cost if there was not so much public (hence government) pressure to keep US gas prices artificially low-- something, by the way, that limits what R&D oil companies can do in order to keep their margins where they need to be. (40% taxes would be better pent on R&D too, probably.) But we've gone down this road to keep our auto manufacturers busy, our people employed, and our transportation (fuel) costs low. So now, when the strings have been pulled as much as they can be pulled, the price of commuting will go up. Politicians can only prop-up an industry for so long... And the good news is that many see an opportunity to improve or invent. Money and glory and pride and beer for those who can supplant inefficient companies! Boom, there's competition.
Our economy could be strong(er)-- even despite government meddling to suppress the naturally occurring higher frequency dynamics associated with bad decision making, bad management, crappy engineering, and overall inefficiency. But mediocrity can survive if it propped up where competition cannot cull bad practice-- US auto companies for instance. And companies that do very well are squished to keep them from doing too well: Energy/oil companies for instance. But we (AKA many people) mandate that entities set the bar where everyone can reach it, we strive to minimize disparity in performance at the expense of excellence, we minimize personal accountability yet demand it from everyone else, we celebrate activism but avoid personal investment or respond with NIMBY, and we complain about how everything is broken and look to a horribly broken inefficient government to fix it?
The US is non-competitive not because it's companies are non-competitive, but because so many of its citizens are not willing to raise the bar for themselves.
people care about two things: themselves making sure they have more / are better than their neighbor change this, and one of the many benefits you will see is a strive for more efficient cars. until then, just more of the same as we have now. Btw, this is not likely to change. I have noticed a decline in the past 6-8 years, and i'm only 28.
Your post is Right-On. Driving a stupid-looking box around is an insult to a man and a woman's intelligence. The lack of an aesthetically-pleasing vehicle just to get great gas mileage is demeaning us down to where yes, driving one would make you feel like we had reached the level of a dumb animal, cattle. The "powers that be" want us to feel like cattle, demand little, like cattle, eat straw, like cattle, eat whatever slop they throw into our food trough. So what would YOU want? I'll tell you.
../introducingthe200mpgcardiacarrest700hplivingenginesystem02202008.pdf. You can have whatever shape and size vehicle you want. 700-hp is more than enough to pull a loaded 80,000 pound tractor-trailer rig up a mountain and go speeding across the Utah Salt Flats at over 600 mph correctly geared. Unfortunately, since so many bank people think my karma is bad I have been at a loss to get it developed for you. Besides, they don't want an independent U.S. inventor to do anything. Detroit wants something from France, something from Kumbaya Motors, or VW in Germany since we're too stupid here to create something new.
You want a big SUV like one of the new Acura MOX SUV's, but the problem is it doesn't have a 100-mpg engine and the price of gas for this coming Spring announced today is going to be $3.40 per gallon, so once again you're being herded like cattle to a financial breaking point you have to buy a boxcar that insults your intelligence! So you're lacking for what? Ans: an engine that gets 200+ mpg and develops at least 700 horsepower. Well, I have such an engine and it's fully explained in a short pdf here:
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
these air-powered flying machines? it's something to do with the curve of the wing creating lift.
Dude, Climate change is all bolony created to reduce the usage of OIL because OIL is running out, read peakoil.com and lifeaftertheoilcrash.com
1. Would you rather see a sharp reduction in supply causing mass starvation and panic and 500% inflation? or
2. Fake climate change, make people feel guilty and reduce usage so supply reduces more slowly, causing 10-15% inflation as it is now.
We still need oil, its needed for food & high speed high capacity transport, but we need to find alternatives fast at 4% per year replacement rates
else we're gona run out or go postal when its $100/gallon. You will see all horses taken off betting tracks and used for transport again.
Why is this happening? probably because the planet cannot handle >100million barrels of oil usage a day, (THATS A HUGE NUMBER!!) and its running out fast, watch those
fields drop in pressure and supply fast, they will fake some accident to cover up reduced supplies too.
Demand is growing, no thanks to China & India.
Whats another way? reduce populations.... and not over 50 years, but over 10 years, because at 4% per year more needed, thats 40% in 10 years which = 6 Saudi Arabias which DONT EXIST.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If greenpeace was told to shove it to the arctic, an 250+ nuke plants were allowed to be built without any hippies stopping it, then that would solve all your pollution problems.
France has 70% of their power from reactors, time to do it too. Because WAKEUP , COAL is POISON, but plentiful, and I dont see clean coal plants on the horizon being built.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
There are so many reasons to doubt the claims of this 'ZPM'. Starting with the name itself. Other than the Stargate reference. How is it supposed to be 'zero pollution' when the car is internal-combustion-assisted? Furthermore, where does the energy needed to compress the air come from? Yes, there are several 'zero pollution' sources of electricity, but that's really the province of the electric power producers, and NOT the auto designer. It would be more reasonable to call an all-electric auto 'zero pollution' than this so-called ZPM! The safety of compressed air is another factor. It may not be as dangerous as compressed hydrogen, but think that it will also be present with a liquid fuel in this hybrid vehicle - so there will be plenty of fuel and oxidizer for any fire.
I also have doubts about the efficiency of pneumatic engines. But I am no expert in that field.