World's first battery fuelled by air?

ummm... this is not a perpetual motion machine.

It's the regular blue collar slobs that pay for everything.

Far reaching new power technology needs to be mandated, if viable, through the normal power companies and supply channels.

They install it, they do the upkeep - the end.

You just work, pay taxes and die. Like always.

I know lots of broke ass-ed hippies (no offense) who were smart enough to but diesel engines who run on fryer oil. That's definitely PO' folks doing there part!

BS, I have a gas guzzler and I sorely regret not getting something more efficient- my Explorer was not exactly cheap, indeed, I could have gotten a sweet hybrid or something more fuel efficient for the same amount of money.

The "I can't afford to be environmentally conscious" line is just an excuse!

How 'bout an engine that runs on - no fuel?

Tax Air haha!
That will be like Taxing water it'll never............................
............................................................Wait?!?

"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"

;-)

This this this.

A lot of people in the industries worry that their job will just be made redundant.
Parts still break.

And for the drill companies, they will still be needed for other things too.
There are plenty of drilling jobs outside of oil. So none of the expertise will be lost, they will still have use for all that knowledge.

There will still be jobs for carrying around all the supplies and chemicals (same goes for that Brown's Gas thing too)

The only people who should be afraid are the execs of X oil company. All those men in black suits sitting in their mansions probably.
Once a specialized, limited resource has been superseded by something plentiful, they have nothing.
I guess they'll probably go try find work at some company that works with rare metals or something... (something that might actually be beneficial, they might actually gain a heart there)

I am slightly confused by your comment Rick, exactly what does OPEP (Ohio Physician effectiveness Program) have to do with electric cars or gas prices?
I was unaware that doctors in Ohio established oil prices!

I think he meant OPEC.

Agreed. Henry Ford wanted diesel to propel his cars. Several biographies state the same.

Henry perceived that he had two basic adversaries. (Make that hates.)

1/ Banks

2/ Standard Oil Of New Jersey.

His competition? He understood that his competitors would eventually follow his lead, only if he got it right.

But with banks and the oil barons, he understood that once corporate control was surrendered to either vulture (more likely than not it would be both) his independence, the ability and freedom to design and sell what he wanted, the way he wanted to, would be gone.

We've seen it time and again since Ford's days. A start up or front runner in a smaller company, is taken over, either by a competitor who wants to sideline or steal a new technology, or a consortium that feels threatened that the new tech could kill their own business profits.

A big part of the underlying problem is the right's paranoia about setting sane transportation policies to reduce both the cost of moving things around and the pollution it causes. Instead of sound national policy we get virtual ideological worship of randomness, inertia, and mucking about.

After all, we don't want to become the next Soviet Union, do we? And we know that their economy was "Planned" and that "planning" alone causes Failure.

Yessir. When you plan only for the exclusive benefit of a Politburo and their camp followers what you get as a result is chaos. In short, corruption. Robbing a bank, isn't the same as judicious national planning, especially to those whose money is being swiped..

If that pitch doesn't work? Grossly exaggerate an unestimated risk. For example this new technology demands that we know first --

"What about toxin discharge? What about using up all the oxygen? What happens when there is an oxygen shortage?"

Golly. Imagine running out of air, before we run out of clean water, safe food, jobs, money and enough trees for a forest?

Or, as Hunnter points out "A lot of people in the industries worry that their job will just be made redundant."

Has any such concern halted the mass exodus of American industries and jobs off shore? Nope.

One of the simpler methods of testing the merit of an orchestrated backlash is to review the ideas, ideology and the backers of those people who most profitably oppose it.

If it's Big Oil, Big Pharma, and so on, merit tends to rise in inverse proportion to the opposition it generates. In other words - corporate panic.

The Air Car is getting the same treatment - Horrors! It is electricity dependent! Owners have to pressurize air! It forces the utilities companies to burn tons more coal!

Ah no. A properly configured pressurizer takes 3 minutes.

Your computer running for hours on end, along with the fridge, air conditioner, furnace and so on does what by comparison?

But it's a nice dodge [unintended pun] if you want to create a rumor that something is just too suspicious to succeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_vehicle

If we were smarter there would be a delegation in India arranging to license factories here to build these critters as mini-towncars.

As Detroit continues to dismember itself, and set up everywhere else on earth, there will be more than enough employees with car building skills to get the new tech going. And wouldn't it be a well deserved shock to Detroit's new exiles if their products were soundly rejected for being -- too expensive, too archaic and -- too foreign?

You're right Rick! We did post many times that car here last Year. People just have to go for the Current archives post and find it. Thanks for bringing that up!

Using a source of energy that is non-polluting is great.

But I need to clarify a gaping hole in your logic.
Many investors have been scammed by 'revolutionary' new energy sources, but the bottom line comes down to efficiency. I mean efficiency in the scientific sense of the word. You say, "No fuel, no combustion, no pollution, just plain ambient air." but then "Sure, it has to be compressed into bottles first."
Tell me how the air will be compressed without utilizing polluting energy sources. Remember that compressing air requires energy. There is that silly efficiency question again.

The bottom line is that hydrocarbons are extremely efficient. They are easily flammable, combustible, and transportable. Any time you burn a hydrocarbon chain, whether it be gasoline, propane, butane, etc. you will release carbon.

Remember the efficiency question.

There is no 'gaping hole' in 'my' logic.

Of course, you need energy to compress the air. How you obtain that energy is up to you. If you're using a compressor plugged into the grid then you are using a minute portion of the energy your fuel combusting car would use and generating a tiny amount of carbon in comparison to just burning fuel to power your pistons.
The cost in electricity, if you use regular electricity, is approx 10 times less than what you would pay at the pump. So it's not free, but it's cheap, and the emissions from that are incredibly small compared to what they would be otherwise.
That is the worst case scenario and it's already 10 times better & cheaper than what we have. There is no gaping whole, the logic is perfectly sound as far as i'm concerned. Keeping what we have would be perfectly illogical. And we haven't even mentioned the pollution of ambient breathed air yet. Cos that's another thing, it's not just about CO2, it's about particles of metal & other things flying around & sticking to our lungs, our skin, coming down in acid rain on our fruit, vegetable, fields that feed our livestock etc.
Overall, even in the worst case scenario (use of existing electric grid), the air car is waaaaayyyyy preferable to anything we use today.

Now let's move on to the PERFECT scenario, which is one envisaged by the manufacturer. =)
the car can drive up to 120km/h (that's the small model). Driving at 60 or 90km/h leaves it with unused power. You can either use that power to drive your onboard compressor, therefore pumping air into your bottles as you drive, or you can stop the car and leave the motor running (it's just air, after all) and use it's full power to compress air into the bottles.

The other solution would be to have a battery on board: charged when the car is running by some dynamo or something, it could be used to power the compressor.
Or you could have a solar panel on the roof, maybe. I believe MDI are looking into that too.

In any case, the efficiency of this car is virtually 100% better than the combustion engine, it's very cheap to make, the retailers make the cars so there is no delocalising of jobs and repairs are done cheaply by people who actually make the car themselves and therefore have cheap parts.

The car has been running for 11 years now and it's simply scandalous that it hasn't already replaced the outrageously inefficient and polluting combustion engine.
I add that the Italian rotary version is much smaller, much lighter & much more efficient than this French piston air engine and i think the Italian version should prevail, but the inventor has put everything into this and i'll be damn happy if one day i have an air engine, be it based on a piston engine or a rotary engine.
Even if i have to fill my air tank with an electric compressor powered off the grid...it's not the same thing to charge a massive battery in a heavy electric car as to fill a bottle with a compressor.

Heck, do you complain about "holes" in the logic & lack of efficiency when you put air in your tyres?? It's so damn cheap to do that you don't even have to pay for it!

I,m just shooting from the hip here without seeing the specs and all, but it seems like you could connect a compressor to the "motor" like a generator or an alternator in a conventional engine. Then all you need to do is make sure that you have enough of an initial air charge to get the thing moving then let the compressor do the rest. Seems logical to me any physics or engineering freaks out there want to shoot holes in this idea be my guest.

drewsuf, what about running the compressor off of the engine? Could that work? Hey I'm asking you because you brought up the egineer angle

Thanks for the pie-chart. This varies considerably from one country to another, however. In France the share of nuclear is around 80% i think. They say it doesn't generate much Co2 but i wouldn't believe that so i won't argument on that.

I'm no engineer and quite frankly i'm not going to even go near a "scientific" debate with figures out of anyone's hat...if you are honest in your questioning and not simply trying to debunk and 'be right' then you'll try to answer these questions yourself by researching the matter and not simply ask them as if an absence of reply would prove you right in some way & therefore prove that the air car pollutes as much as a regular combustion engine-powered car.

The pressure of the tank is 350 bars. This is arguably a hell of a lot more than tyre pressure, ok. So you need a more powerful compressor.

It takes 1.5 minutes to fill a 175 liter tank of the smallest car (3-4 seater), which will give you around 220 km of autonomy in town. The cost is 0.5 Euro (less than 1 US Dollar).

Now, if you honestly think that powering an electric compressor for 90 seconds is equivalent to powering a combustion engine for 2 to 3 hours then you are not suffering from myopia but from something slighly more severe. ;-)
(no offence, i'm a tad ironic but not mean, i swear! don't hit me!)

And as said before, electricity can be generated from various methods. It can be solar, wind, from heat pumps...or from the air car's unused engine power when driving along, or simply stopped on the side of the road : stop the car's motion and use it's engine for a few minutes while you wait for your onboard compressor to fill the tanks. You've 'wasted' a bit of fuel and gained a full tank.

Even if you powered your compressor off gas, in 1.5 minutes you wouldn't burn much, would you? Maybe a liter? Even if it were 2 or 3, you'd still be laughing because most cars use 8-10 liters to drive about 100 km. You'd be using what, 3 for 220 km? Sounds pretty good to me.
And since you're using so little the whole manufacturing and distribution and refinement process of the oil & petrol would be drastically reduced too.

You could also use your air engine as a domestic generator for electricity or heating, i suppose, it could just use part of its energy for lighting & the rest to compress the air it needs at it goes along. The only issue there is noise...

Oh, that's another good thing with this engine: you don't need to keep it running. Stop at lights and your engine stops. It instantly restarts as soon as you let the bottle's valve open. You save at lights & you make less noise for everyone. No more fumes in the streets. No more smog above cities, at least not from the cars...

If you want more info, simply check out their site :
www.mdi.lu
They were at the Geneva 2009 Car Salon in March, 11 years after their first Salon in Paris.

And here is a link to some videos on the matter...
http://www.google.com.mx/search?as_q=video+compressed+air+car&hl=fr&num=...

Drew_suf?

Where are you getting this bizarre logic? The Detroit Chamber of Commerce? Big Auto? OPEC, Rick Perry? POX NEWS?

Clearly you haven't bothered to examine in any detail already published reports on the Air Car or how it works. CURRENT already has several threads on this.

Your objections? You're just blowing smoke. BTW. Something a zero-pollution Air Car doesn't do...

You say,

"Answer me those questions and show how compressed air will reduce carbon emissions. Myopia is possibly worse than apathy."

Simple. Inertia and fear of change is worse than risk and innovation. Be brave.

1/ Compressed air fill-up time for a Nano is approx 3 minutes.

How long has your computer been on today, sport? And the TV? The Fridge? The lights?

2/ You may not have noticed but the world's other countries are well into a massive power conversion to move away from all forms of fossil fuels. But which country is dragging its technological feet? Guess.

3/ You assume that dependence on coal, oil and natural gas will or must remain static. Hence your claim that having air cars fill up (for 3 minutes each) will cause coronaries among environmentally-sensitive Engineers. That dependency is being turfed
for the very sane economic reason that it stands in the way of corporate and national PROFIT. This is not just a Green Issue it is huge concern to bean-counters. With our dollar in the tank we have no real choice but to convert. Hate to do so or not doesn't matter.

4/ Try to remember that economic trends are not subject to mawkish sentimentality. I know there are still grandparents out there who remember horse-drawn buggies and blacksmiths. But whatever nostalgia there might have been was snuffed without mercy. People knew better than to invest in an archaic technology that was made dysfunctional and they shunned it - there is no better example of this today than Detroit and the Big Auto meltdown.

Is it time to re-examine your assumptions?