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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.
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 want to stress that these are estimates, and that we'll know soon more precisely from our engineers," ZPM spokesman Kevin Haydon told PM, "but a vehicle with one tank of air and, say, 8 gal. of either conventional petrol, ethanol or biofuel could hit between 800 and 1000 miles."
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
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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".
Electric vehicles can be about 75% efficient including regenerative breaking. Presumably the drive train will be used for some slowing here recharging the air tank. Compressing air always produces substaintal waste heat so the base efficiency will be less than for a battery-motor combination. Let's say that they do well and get 50% efficiency on compressing/decompressing. In that case, if we expect about 0.2 kWh/mile for an electric vehicle, we might get 0.3 kWh/mile for this vehicle. That is about 3.3 cents/mile (11 cents/kWh). For a 30 mpg car at $3.00/gal we get a fuel cost of 10 cents/mile. So, the cost could be about a third of the cost of gas.
Turbochargers do increase efficiency. The only reason that turbocharged cars often do worse than non-turbocharged cars is the tuning. Small turbodiesels often get better fuel economy than similar output non-turbo diesels.
"- Honda Insight - 80-90 mpg in real world I-95 driving (mine)"
Bullshit.
No, no, no, shut the fuck up, you're lying.
God the things losers like you will lie about to get attention...
Autobloggreen has garnered a number of comments on this concept, most of them negative. To sum up:
* The thermodynamic efficiency of air cars is worse than gasoline engines, often far worse, meaning that you *hurt* the environment by driving it.
* The overwhelming majority of the performance of this vehicle comes from gasoline, not air
* The company has a very bad reputation of making ludicrous claims and misrepresenting stats
* It's made by Indian manufacturer Tata motors, not known for quality
In short, don't bother. If you want an affordable (100 mile range without burning any gasoline, that will be on the road in a year or two, there are really three good options I can think of off the top of my head right now: the Aptera, the VentureOne, and the MiEV. The Aptera is for if you want the absolute limit in energy efficiency modern tech can currently provide and want to look like you're driving a spaceship, the VentureOne is for if you want to feel like you're driving a motorcycle, and the MiEV is for if you have more than two people. I've probably missed a couple other good options, I'm sure.
To potential EV buyers: keep an eye out for scammers. Two big ones are LionEV and Spark EV.
To potential hydrogen car buyers: hydrogen cars are worse for the environment than gasoline cars, so don't bother.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
This may seem like a troll, but it's 100% correct. Those numbers are impossible, even with drafting.
As for fuel efficient cars, the most efficient vehicle coming out in the near future is the Aptera Typ-1e/Typ-1h, but the Typ-1h only gets 130mpg when its battery is depleted. And this is a car with a 0.11 drag coefficient (compare to 0.26 for a Prius). It doesn't get much lower than that and still be streetlegal.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
UK. You don't get them in the US. This is the equivalent of 70 US mpg, not bad for a proper car with a proper boot and a low environmental footprint (none of those nasty toxic hybrid batteries).
I'd be careful about making generalizations like this. France, for example, has a "special license" category which allows you to drive below a certain speed (I think it's 50 kph) and only on the shoulder. It's useful in rural areas where elderly need to be able to drive but can't pass the more stringent normal licensing test (which, you're correct to observe, is tougher than the U.S. standard).
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
[quote]It's emissions, not waste heat, that are why gasoline engines are bad.[/quote]
CO2 emissions per mile are proportional to thermodynamic efficiency of the fuel cycle and amount of energy that is needed per mile. With a gasoline car, the well-to-wheel efficiency is about 20%. With an electric, it's ~30%. With a hydrogen car, it's ~15-20%. With an air car that operates on air alone, it's something like 4-20%, depending on whether you're using an onboard or home compressor, or whether you're using a huge, expensive, top of the line regenerative industrial compressor.
Air cars have a whole host of other issues, too. Horrible volumetric energy density, safety (the energy likes instant releases), decaying performance (the lower the tanks get, the slower your car), and so on.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I think you're correct. It mentions the seatbelt thing on the results page for the PT cruiser tests. There's some additional padding to protect the legs of a passenger not wearing a seatbelt, but if you are wearing a seatbelt the pads just provide one more surface for you to smash into before the belt stops you.
First off, reserves don't work that way. Here's a writeup concerning how this concept applies to oil, but the same thing applies to lithium. Reserves don't simply "run out"; there's many thousands of cubic miles of the stuff in Earth's crust and oceans (Earth's 1.65e23kg crust is 20-70ppm lithium for a total mass of 3.3 to 11.6 quintillion kilograms). All that changes is how much is mineable at *today's prices* with *today's technology*. I.e., either higher prices or advancing technology put more lithium into play -- and not just a little more, but literally exponentially more. Example: the oceans have And on top of this, unlike oil, lithium is an easily displaceable resource -- most lithium is used in glass, ceramics, and greases, and can be substituted for in all of them.
The scare articles ignore these basic facts. They also ignore other things inconvenient to them -- most notably, tailings. For example, listen to this quote:
"This means there is less lithium per volume of water, so competitors have to process more water, explained Tahil, adding that there is also the issue of the lithium-to-magnesium ratio. The more magnesium, the harder it is to extract the lithium."
Yes, but that means that you get *more magnesium* out of the process, which also has sales value. Likewise, other mining operations that are seeking various minerals can (and do) get lithium tailings. Currently, these are typically discarded due to the low price of lithium. As demand for a mineral rises, recovery circuits get added where appropriate. This is "value added" mining -- no new mining is going on, but you just get more product out of it. Production from almost any brine pond in the world will give you lithium tailings, but almost none bother to extract the lithium salts from them; they're going after other, currently more valuable minerals.
Some people have this silly notion of world mining operations as though the Earth was some big ball of "nothing" in the crust, and scattered around this "nothing" are little random deposits of one mineral (mixed in with "nothing"), and these couple deposits are all there are of that mineral. And, obviously, the real world doesn't work that way. *Everywhere* is minerals, and a given element can be found almost anywhere at least in *some* concentration, however minimal. All that changes from place to place is how cheap it is to extract (which can vary widely). Likewise, when you produce products from anywhere, you're going to get tailings that include all sorts of other minerals -- and you're mining, crushing, and concentrating them to boot, so half of the work is already done! But if the price of the minerals is low, it's not worth recovering further from the tailings. If the price rises, you recover them; it's as simple as that.
One thing to remember about lithium: it's cheap. It's currently very cheap. So? Well, people don't prospect for cheap minerals. Think for a second of how much oil our insatiable demand has continually turned up over the past century. Now imagine actual exploration for valuable lithium deposits. It's only reasonable to expect major growth in known lithium reserves, probably by orders of magnitude, should lithium suddenly gain any appreciable value.
Lastly -- and here's the real kicker -- lithium is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a lithium ion battery It's price could grow tenfold and you'd barely even notice it (and you better believe there'd be a *lot* of new reserves coming online with that much price growth!) 1 kWh of automotive li-ion batteries currently costs ~$300-$2000, depending on the type. This involves less than a kilogram of lithium carbonate, which currently costs about $4.50.
In short: Ignore the scare mongering. There's no world shortage of lithium, and never will be.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.