… the car which runs on air .
Say goodbye to gasoline and hello to the AirPod. CNNtakes a look at the car of the future that will run on compressed air.
Got a link with text? Video is blocked at work.
Air which will magically, and with no external inputs, compress itself. Buy now!:rolleyes:
Actually I just hit the original website to leave them a comment.
Firstly - hills. The US and many other parts of the world have serious hills, and hills can seriously whip on low powered vejicles.
Secondly [my main whine] Gimps - there is no provision for my wheelchair. Looking at how it is made, the tank that holds the air is under the seat, so you cant remove it and use a wheelchair as the seating.
Thirdly - people are not going to own 2 vehicles, one for commuting and one for running errands, The US tends to do large shopping expeditions once a week, not picking up a tiny bag on the way home every night.There seems to be no allowance for any sort of cargo. Also, people have kids, spouses, roommates. There are only 1 and 2 seaters [there seem to be a couple of configurations they showed but didn-t cover] and it just wont work for the harried parent who drops off a couple of kids somewhere on the way to or from work.
Unless they are literally going to market only to urban singles, I really don’t see this going anywhere in the US. Europe, perhaps … it really is a euro-centric design like the smart car.
I was going to say it looks more like a Tuk Tuk than anything else.
What happens to it when it gets hit by a car that has a bumper? It looks like it would be crushed.
And The Stig has a problem with tripod cars.
Aside from that it would be impossible to homogenize this vehicle to comply with NTHSA passenger safety regulations, storing energy in the form of highly compressed air is hugely thermodynamically inefficient, as anyone who has felt a freshly filled SCUBA tank can testify. The amount of heat that is wasted in the act of compressing a fluid is substantial, and unavoidable when transferring compressible fluids between a high pressure reservoir and a low pressure one. This type of vehicle might be adequate as a fleet vehicle for golf cart type service, but I can’t see it being practical as a municipal commuter vehicle, much less a general purpose commuter car.
Also, it looks like something that escaped from a Kubrickian nightmare.
Stranger
So does that mean if you lose power to the rear wheels you also lose your steering?
It’s unfortunate that they painted it red; it looks like one of those Fisher Price Little Tykes cars.
If you run out of compressed air, can you pop out the floor panel and scoot it around with your feet?
Cool, it can take you 200 kilometers along the road or 60 meters straight up when the tank blows up.
Well, I suppose that if you’d have the infrastructure for refilling compressed air vehicles it wouldn’t be hard to come up with some system to recover some of the heat produced by compressing the air… maybe have exchangeable tanks, you drive in and they pop out the spent tank and install a full one.
I wouldn’t want to be sitting on that thing during the refilling process anyway.
For large industrial compressors like those used in power plants or petroleum refineries, staged combustion is used to limit losses and recover heat. However, not only is this not practical for a small facilities-type compressor, and at any rate, a substantial amount of energy is lost in transferring pressurized air from a central reservoir to a smaller, portable one as the air goes from a compressed state to an uncompressed one (as it initially fills the tank) back to a compressed one. There are also the unavoidable losses as you bleed pressure to do work; you unavoidably lose a lot of the potential energy in the compressed air to absorbing heat from the environment. It just isn’t practical to extract energy from low pressure differentials, so you end up releasing a lot of the energy.
The advantage to a compressed air powered vehicle is the mechanical simplicity; instead of an engine and transmission, or a battery, power regulator, and electric motors, you just have a tank, simple pressure regulator, a few pneumatic lines, and very simple pneumatic motors. For fleet vehicles that see continuous where the maintenance and support cost are a high fraction of cost of ownership, the energy inefficiency may not be a significant consideration. But for a personal vehicle, I can’t see this being feasible.
Stranger