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.

Comments

Easy

[TheMadcapZ]

We steal it from Druidia. Better get working on Mega-Maid.

Re:Easy

[electrictroy]

I've already got a car that gets close to that:
- Honda Insight - 80-90 mpg in real world I-95 driving (mine)

Volkswagen is also building a car that will get 240mpg, although it's only a two-seater. It will arrive late 2009 (europe), and hopefully hit the U.S. sometime shortly after.

Re:Easy

[magarity]

In India, a Honda Insight is a 6 passenger vehicle
 
In South Africa it could be a cattle truck.

"Zero Pollution"?

[johndiii]

Probably no such thing. At the very least, there is waste heat from the mechanical processes of the automobile. The energy require to accelerate a vehicle to a certain speed will be roughly the same, regardless of the source. In the case of the "air-powered car", the energy used to compress the air could come from a coal-fired power plant. Is that better than burning gasoline? I don't know, and I would be very interested to see a comprehensive analysis.

In considering the environmental impact of a particular vehicle, there are a number of factors to consider:

• How the energy is obtained in the first place. From petroleum drilled out of the ground, a coal mine, natural gas, solar power, nuclear power, and so on.
• The efficiency of conveying the energy from the source to the user. Coal and petroleum products are relatively good for this (some loss to evaporation for gasoline, I imagine). For remotely-generated electricity, there would be transmission losses. If you charge your electric car from a solar panel on your roof, much less so.
• How the energy is stored (or storage losses). This is one of the big issues with hydrogen. It tends to seep through containers. Compressed air would be a similar problem. A leak in your compressed air tank has an environmental effect just as a lead in your gas tank, and is harder to detect. It's more efficent to store a liquid than a compressed gas.
• The efficiency of converting the stored energy into motion of the vehicle. What are the thermal losses for state changes? Friction in the engine?

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.

Re:"Zero Pollution"?

[cupofjoe]

Another Hindenburg reference. Great fricking Caesar's Ghost.

Seriously, though - and on a tangent for a sec - he's got a point. No, not about a hydrogen-fueled car ACTUALLY bursting into flames a'la the great Lakehurst weenie roast (that's why he used a smiley-face, I guess) but - unwittingly - about the public's perception of the implications of having hydrogen on-board a road vehicle.

The truth is, technology wants to go in a safer direction. The US DOE is spending a lot of money - well-spent, in my opinion - on developing components of an automotive approach to hydrogen fuels, including infrastructure, end-to-end efficiency and cost, and of course materials science and engineering.

Check out http://hydrogen.energy.gov/

The long and the short of it is this: the current standard is to store compressed hydrogen on-board in 5000 psig tanks; the tech maturation for this approach is to up the ante to 10000 psig. Yikes; no wonder the public has the wrong idea - that's a lot of mechanical energy stored up in there. Some of the more interesting (but not new) technology DOE is funding is for "absorptive" storage, both liquid- and solid-state, wherein the hydrogen isn't at high levels of compression - rather, it's safely (for the most part) tucked away inside the molecular structure of a parent "carrier" substance. At fairly low pressures (~15-150 psig), for the most part.

Okay, tangent over. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a hydrogen materials engineer. And I'm WAY more frightened of gasoline vapors than I am of hydrogen in any form.

Cheers,
--joe.

Re:I just want to know

[hal2814]

It depends on where you're at.

I was over at Spaceball City the other day and a gallon of Schweppe's Air was $4! Spaceballs: The Air was even more expensive at $5. They had some cheap off brand air for $2.50 but you never know what you get with the generic stuff.

On Mars, there's just an outright tax on air that everyone pays. It's like 15% of your income but there are expemtions for midgets and girls with 3 hooters.

Re:But..

[eln]

I would have thought the emergency Air Supply would be provided via a recording of "All Out of Love", but I guess that might make it more desirable just to stay stranded by the side of the road rather than trying to use it.

Re:I'm skeptical

[palegray.net]

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Re:I'm skeptical

[zeet]

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.

Re:But..

[Sandbags]

From what I can research, the air tank will power the car, all by itself, for about 200Km. With a gas engine suppliment, this could be drastically extended, upwards of 400Km I would say is a fair (safe) estimate. The cars come with their own internal pump system that can run off household electricity, but it takes upwards of 4 hours to fill the tank, and assuming it operates like any other air compressor, it will be loud. The good news is high pressure canisters could refil your tank in 3 minutes or less. Houses would almost certainly have to be equipped with high pressure home filling stations. they won't take much room, could fill 2-3 cars at once, and given all day to refill. By burying them we could eliminate most of the noise. The heat generated compressing the air could even be used for hot water (or to supplement it) as a side effect.

Creating high pressure air (4000+ PSI) generates heat. Filling a tank with uncompressed air takes time almost as much for safety as for the actual time to compress. Filling stations could bury high volume, high efficiency compressors, divert the heat using geothermal options, and eliminate the bulk of noise. You could fill up in 3-5 minutes by using pre-pressurized air from massive underground tanks, or even massive above-ground tanks in some areas. they'd cost a bit to install, but over 10 years would pay better returns than fossil fuel stations. At home, if you had a smaller version system, you could either make hot water, or put in geothermal capacitors. The benefit to geothermal would mean in some markets you'd never have to shovel your walkway in the winter again (use heat pipes under concrete to both dispurse heat and melt snow, lol)

It's a bit dangerous though... carbon fiber tanks at 4000+ PSI... If one ruptuers, the force released could quite litteraly throw the car a few blocks. More likely, it would simply rupture, causing the car to act like a bomb, just without flames... Vapor expansion at this level could rip people and metal apart. these tanks need to be REALLY strong to be safe, adding significantly to vehicle weight, reducing storage space, and limiting fuel economy. Sure, we can make one that goes 800KM on a fill up and has room for 4 including luggage, but there's no way the motor safety guys are ever going to allow it on the streets...

I'm skeptical. Keep them out of my country until there's 50,000 or more of them driving around. We'll see then how safe they are.

Also, the vehicle itself is pollution free, but making the electricity to compress the air isn't. If we're moving in this direction we'll need a major investment in free energy sources like solar and wind. Also, compressing the air locally at filling stations requires power. a lot of power. We'll need a super conducting grid to make that happen (if we plan to use clean electricity instead of current local poewr plants). Of course, the same is true for electric cars.

High pressure air can be trucked around easy engouh too. We don't have to make air at every filling station. We could have a few small locations around town and drive trucks from key points to filling stations. This may lower the cost and complexity a bit in favor of logistics.

We'll wait and see.