106-mpg Air Car for Only $18,000 Coming in 2010
 

Yahh!

I hate to be cynical on this, but I've read about this car for the past 5-6 years, and it's always only 2 years away. They made the engine, it works even if it's noisy. I hope they can bring it to the market, would be a shame if it faded away from lack of money.

Most people are put off it by the compressed air tank, which is compressed at 300 Bar (4350 PSI) if i remember correctly, though the tank is designed to fracture and slowly let air out rather than a massive blowout, though no one has demonstrated this yet and doing so would quell any lingering fears.

I personally don't like the look of it, they are a french company so you'd expect the design to be slightly weird and funky, but it isn't, and something about it just doesn't look safe, even if it is in tests.

SVOboy -

My wife sent me an e-mail on Zero Pollution Motors a few weeks ago. This is what I wrote :

CarloSW2

Duke Nukem Forever released in 2008!

:D HAHAHAHAHA......arrrrghhhhh

how are they planing to get around the problem of the engines freezing up? air powered cars have been around for years but have only been sold/used in very warm areas because as you release a compressed gas it will cool the tank and the exhaust side of the engine and unless you keep it warm it will freeze up solid.
also, air compressors are horribly inefficient and have their own set of problems, just talk to someone who works in a factory that uses compressed air, or has worked on large air compressors.
The only advantage that I can see with this is that to make the energy storage you just need to build a strong enough tank, unlike a battery that needs rare metals, and the engine is just a steam engine running on air, it could be made out of almost anything, from crude to exotic.

MDI (a French company ;) ) had financial problems to finish the design. Thanks to Tata's investment they have been able to finish it and now the Tata nano is the real life bed test.

For France MDI promised an hybrid. I don't know if I will buy it when released, but I do want to see it wild spread in real life.

Denis.

the technology is valid, so i hope it'll come into production on an acceptable scale.
one must considder it's like compareing the first gasolene engine with the current ones.
the basic technology is the same but it's much more refined economical and probably a little safer to, so if this gets a chance to grow and the "fuel" cost is competetive with the alternatives the time is right for this.

yeah, the tank thing worries me. show me a test where they drop a bulldozer on the tank. crude, yes. but if it doesn't turn into the equivalent of a couple sticks of dynamite, then i'm sold.

Hi,

Gasoline is incredibly explosive: 1 gallon of gas equals 63 sticks of dynamite.

very good point :thumbup:

but if you drop a bulldozer on a full (modern) tank of gas (say 18 gallons), i don't think it will explode with the force of 1134 sticks of dynamite.

or maybe it will?

if a bulldozer falls on your car while you're in it, i don't think you'll worry to much about the gass tank exploding.

innovative technology always provokes fear in some people, the first trains, planes, bycicles and cars where met with great scepticism, and surely by todays standards most of these contraptions where pretty unsafe. the first person that tried to ride a horse must have been considered a quite suicidal. But all these things turned out to be economically viable and where an improvement if not revolution over previous means of transportation... so people took their chances en learend from what went wrong.

re: cooling effect of this system

now your A/C is free and your heat is expensive! This may take off in hot parts of the world :)

Gasoline is flammable with the right air/fuel mixture and isn't under 4350PSI like the air tank, so if the tank gets cracked or broken the gas leaks out or evaporates out. I'm sure the amount of energy in the gasoline is the same amount of energy in the dynamite but it's not really comparable in this case since dynamite is a solid -> gas explosive and has higher velocity than a gasoline explosion.

Though i googled 300 Bar/4350 PSI and apparently that pressure is quite commonly used in scuba diving air tanks, so it's not like tanks for those pressures have never been used before, and accidents with split/ruptured tanks must have happened and reported. Also the MDI Air Tank apparently has a thick rubber coat over the carbon fibre shell to reinforce it should it ever split, though a practical demo of the tank being hit under the same pressures/forces that it might in a car crash would be good to see.

yeah, i know the dozer idea was pretty outlandish, but it was the first thing that popped into my head. maybe one of those tanks strapped to a car crash test wall would be better. hit it directly with a car, and see what happens. while the likelihood of a car hitting the tank dead on would be pretty low, it does represent a worst-case scenario

You can buy tanks to attach to paintball guns at 5000psi (regulated output, obviously). They hang on by the valve while you ram into trees and dive into rocks. Compressed air is a HUGE industry around the globe and the science and safety of this industry is WELL established. This isn't really just some mcguyver hack job system, i'd be certain.

Oh yeah, and to go with the cooling effect of the discharge being used for A/C, filling these tanks produces a LOT of heat too... which could be used to heat the facilities that fill them. My paintball tank is QUITE hot when it is filled from empty.

At least if you get in a wreck in the Air Car it won't burst into flames due to a fuel leak. You'll just end up very cold. And whisker whipped. I don't believe shrapnel would be a problem because of crumble glass and the plastic body panels that are resistant to shattering. Heating wouldn't be expensive anyways because these vehicles are designed to have an onboard compressor ran of gas, its heat will either be expelled or used to heat the cabin. Just like the plans are to use the cold exhaust to cool air for the cabin.

edit: on a side note since this vehicle cleans the air as it move(in air only mode). Do you think you will be paid when you drive into London's congestion zone, since you removing some of the pollution? Your only adding to the road stresses; your not a zero emissions your negative emissions.

There is one thing that I cannot understand regarding the supposed efficiency of a compressed air engine.

When you compress air it generates heat. Between the time you compress the air and the time you use this air to power a vehicle that heat dissipates away. That is a very large loss of energy.

It reminds me of the gasoline ICE. Most of its inefficiency is due to the wasted heat which is generated burning the gasoline.

Can someone shed some light on this issue for me?

At this point we are simply replacing one inefficiency for another. At least this one is cleaner/cleaning.

This does indeed effect the overall "well to wheels" efficiency calculations. But you are taking energy from a large, fixed power installations and storing it for later use in your vehicle. Even if you lose 50% of the energy to heat of compression, you may still come out ahead as far as pollutions, since you can more easily install pollution controls (and perhaps even carbon recapture equipment) at the the large electric plant.

The big issue for compressed air vehicles has been that compressed air is a rather heavy, bulky way to store energy. This limits the operating range.

MDI is trying to get around this by adding an EXTERNAL combustion chamber to heat the air. So their latest series of announcements has been "dual mode" operation --- compressed air only for low speeds and/or short ranges and external combustion for longer ranges.

Unfortunately, it is hard to tell if this is all just speculation or whether they have actually done what they claim. MDI has a history of announcement of "production soon" of cars with great performance, but then never delivering.

This was true with the 2002 production dates by MDI and Zero Pollution Motors of the e.Volution car in South Africe. Also true with the air powered taxis for Mexico City a few years later. And the eolo car by MDI in Italy in 2004 time frame. And many other missed promises by MDI -- almost every year since 2000.

Part of the problem may be the business model of the company. MDI does not intend to make money by building cars, but instead by selling license and franchises. Just like in a pyramid scheme, what counts is being able to sell more franchises, not the ability to deliver.

This is a legit technology. A friend of mine is working on what Charlie noted and MDI is trying to do, heat the air coming out of the tank in stages for a drag car.

It is a tricky thing and new technology is always going to get the stink eye, but since we know that physics rules we can isolate the shortcomings and work for solutions. ICE are going to be unmatched. The reason they were at the front end of our engine development (after the steam engine) is because it was so darn easy to turn a high energy fuel into motion.

What we are trying to do now, in my time in the auto industry, was get a fuel source that could hold that much energy or more efficiently use the energy that is stored. An ICE is extremely inefficient, but the fuel is packed with sooooo much energy it is hard to not turn it into motion.

The air car will come, I can't wait for it. There are cooling issues and also efficiency issue, the same as an ICE, but the aircar is more of a alternative fuel as opposed to an energy reduction. I don't think compressed air can ever match the energy storage capacity of gasoline, but it offers an alternative to gasoline that IMO probably won't ever be "as good." We are still working on the fuel source to change that, but for now we need to look into lots of options. This is just one alternative to help get us off of gasoline.

That thing looks like an aerodynamic dog. In a light and streamlined shape, it would probably do more like 150 mpg, assuming the stated arithmetic is sound, which it probably isn't.

I think that you always have this weight vs. aero vs. user needs trade off. That looks to be about as light weight as you can get by being as compact as possible. If you are to get it any smaller in certain areas yo are probably cutting into needed component room and cabin room. As ecomodders we throw away niceties and comfort for better fuel efficiency. Unfortunately for them, they have to make it marketable and give it enough versatility that consumers will buy it. The Volt, Prius, etc. all have and will give up aero for comfort, usability, and style. it's tough engineering a car that people want to buy.

it doesn't look that bad aero wise... sure it could be better, but it's got no front grill whatsoever and a pretty smooth curve in the front, the back looks like what you have on the average sedan or hatchback...but of the separation is controlled nicely that shouldn't be to bad either. also it's just a sketch, and not a very realistic one, things might look very different on the final car. remember how the volt changed!

another things to consider is the size of a car, the smaller a car becomes the harder it is to combine a comfortable seating position and interior space with sleek lines... but frontal area is just as important as a Cd... for this reason there's quite a few cars that have a better Cda than the prius for example. this car doesn't look all that big to me.

and just like the prius all this car needs to do is prove this propultion system is a valid alternative to ICE... if the thing that moves it is a success you'll soon find it in prettyer cars too

Aerodynamics aren't all that relevant if the whole project is vaporware, like all of the other MDI projects.