A car that runs on air

http://theaircar.com/ ^

[BlueSky194]

What are people's opinion of this?

[CygnusXI]

Wow chica wow wow.
Mmm chica wow wow.
/repeat

[Dogrobber]

Your remarks are thoughtful. If I may add some additional remarks:
1. Almost any design which is a departure from the established engineering norms will have detractors saying "it won't work."
2. Physics says that light stuff takes less energy to move than heavy stuff - so all high efficency forms of transport are going to look like plastic golf carts.
3. Air motors are easily capable of reversing to become air compressors - i.e. capable of storing energy while braking.
4. No highly efficent design will survive the Department of Transportation crash worthyness regulations, Americans with Disabilities Act requirements of use by handicapped persons and the American Trial Lawyers requirement that anyone hurt in an accident with one of these wonders get great gobs of money (of which the attorney will take 40%).
There is no way that these designs, under our current legal and regulatory framework, are going to be marketed in the US.

[Dogrobber]

Oh, and I forgot. Any compressed air driven car will need a compressed air storage bottle of at least 10 K psi. That is a rolling bomb. Nobody in the US is going to have something like this in their garage.

[Political Junkie Too]

-PJ

[Protagoras]

It kinda' bothers me that all the "snake oil" types tend to get out there first and that discredits some of the serious work being done without fanfare.

Me too. But the market always sorts it out.

[BlueSky194]

I hope you people are getting a good laugh at this.
When the Wright brothers said they built something that could fly.
People all laughed at them.

[Mister Da]

Man, it is gonna get rough a few years from now, & my wife asks me to fill up her car!

I pull up to the 12 different refueling stations & scratch my head. Did she buy the salad oil car, or does it use hydrogen, propane, air, moonshine, or high octane? I know she didn't get the nuclear package, cause she said the lead lined driving suit itched & messed up her hair.

The instructions to refuel the vehicle are written on the inside cover of the refueling receptacle, but it is written in 37 different languages & so is very small. The only words I can make out look like Bhopal & Chernobyl, but what does that have to do with refueling?

Maybe I'll just plug it into that big old charger there while I get a Coke.

[TChris]

The cycle contains 360 degrees crankshaft rotation. 70 deg. is about 20% of the cycle.

Whoops! I cruised past the "20°" too quickly and misread it as "20%". :-/

[Calvin Locke]

IIRC, back in the 1980s, the USPS was looking at vehicles that stopped using "rubber bands", and stored energy would be
released when getting the vehicle moving again.

I guess it worked so well, that the government and oil companies added them to the list of things kept from the
public at Groom Lake.

[IncPen]

I hope you people are getting a good laugh at this. When the Wright brothers said they built something that could fly. People all laughed at them.

Oh, boo hoo.

I'm not commenting on the merits of the technology, plenty of people are more qualified than me to do that. I certainly hope this pans out.

That said, I think you need to get a sense of humor. It's funny, dude, have a laugh. We all die in the end.

Even you.

[Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...]

Oh, and I forgot. Any compressed air driven car will need a compressed air storage bottle of at least 10 K psi. That is a rolling bomb. Nobody in the US is going to have something like this in their garage.

I hear you on that but it is just a technical problem to be sorted out. They have been playing around with carbon fibre material for these tanks and it is just a question of time before the commercialization of the tanks is relatively commonplace. As for it being a 'rolling bomb'... well, I don't think the dangers are much different than sitting on a full gasoline tank, propane tank or having one's house hooked up to natural gas that could leak out and fill the house. All of these represent big dangers too and were just technical problems to be sorted out.

[Dogrobber]

Yeah, I checked out the site today and I was really impressed. First, this is a Spanish company- not French - and the Spanish make some really innovative stuff. The tanks are carbon fibre wrapped around plastic liners, strong, light and resistant to corrosion.
The vehicles are touting ranges of 125 to 185 miles on full tanks with a 4 hour refilling time using internal electrical motors to drive the air motor to charge the tank. I generally go five miles each way to work with a sixty mile trip once or twice a week. That means I would not have to "refuel" daily, or if I did, it would not take four hours. My sixty mile trips would be 1/2 tank and would only mean a two hour recharge at my home.
The only real problem is the top speed is 55 mph.

[Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...]

Well, as far as top speed goes, it's meant as an about town car where speeds on city streets are less than 55 most of the time. As should be evident, it is not suitable for every driving need but within very specific application guidelines, it's just the ticket.

[Dogrobber]

I would be interested in two things- pickup from stopped or low speed and the effect of reduced tank pressure on proformance,i.e. does a low tank make it doggy?

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Yo! Pimp mah golf cart?

[Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...]

Probably not. The pressure will be quite high in the beginning but it will be reduced with a PRV anyway. As long as you are above the pressure of the PRV, it shouldn't make any difference to the car's performance.

[decal]

I've been aware of MDI for awhile now (from a link at Car Talk).

The big cheese there is Guy Negre, who used to design engines for Formula One cars, so I doubt this is a scam.

These vehicles are mostly meant for city commuting; you won't want to get on the Autobahn with one of these.

Their biggest problem isn't so much speed or range but heft:

"Fundamentally, the vehicle is a simple, light urban car, composed of a fibre-glass or hemp fibre body like other modern cars (Renault Espace amongst others), and not sheet steel like most vehicles. The chassis is tubular, as in racing car engines and motorcycles, to produce strength at a light weight. Additionally, the parts are not soldered but glued as in aerospace technology."

http://www.theaircar.com/car.html

The vehicles only weigh 1650 lb - no match for a Corolla in a head-on, let alone a semi.

[Dogrobber]

Yeah, I know. But any really fuel efficient vehicle must get a great deal of its efficiency from pure reduction in weight. Engineering tricks only go so far and you are hitting the raw edge of Newtonian physics. Like I have said before, everything eventually ends up looking like a plastic golf cart.