Air Car may fly in India, but will idea float in North America?
I’ve got a story at Technology Review (www.technologyreview.com) that looks at a French-designed compressed-air car and a deal with India’s Tata Motors that could see commercial production beginning this year in France and India. Personally, I think the concept is quite neat — particularly when you envision every home having a portable compressed-air station that both fills your urban car and captures heat for your hot water tank. Let’s face it, not all of us need highway-speed cars or the range required to drive back and forth from Boston to New York. Most of our driving is local and at speeds under 60 kilometres an hour (assuming we obey speed limits). Motor Development International, based in Nice, France, has a well-engineered Air Car design that could work in such urban settings, particularly in developing countries such as India. In North America it’s a tougher sell, though at least one company has signed up to manufacture and distribute the Air Car in the United States. There are many skeptics out there who question the efficiency, speed claims and range claims of MDI’s Air Car, but it’s an interesting project nonetheless and I hope MDI makes some meaningful inroads.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
January 16th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
For those who doubt compressed air could power a car for any distance, compressed air was used a the turn of the last century to power coal mine trains. At a mine in Bankhead, Alberta each train hauled 60 tons of coal plus the weight of the train. Make it light enough and streamlined enough and an air car could be impressive.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I must admit that the prospect of a $7,500 car that can run for 200-300km on $3 worth of compressed air sounds pretty amazing. Of course, the compressed air would just be a storage mechanism for energy generated in other ways. The advantage over hydrogen and fuel cell systems of biodiesel could lie in lower infrastructure costs. Installing compressors in homes and service stations already connected to the electrical grid is a lot cheaper than developing a whole new hydrogen infrastructure, leaving more money to direct towards genuinely renewable sources of energy. The compressors could also be powered directly by wind or water turbines, as well as solar power systems. As for biodiesel, once you factor in the energy required to grow the crops and process them, as well as the inefficiency of internal combustion engines and the continued reality of toxic emissions, it doesn’t seem like a hugely alluring prospect to anyone but corn farmers.
While it is unlikely that one technology will allow us to overcome fossil fuel dependence, it does seem sensible to think that something like this could be part of the mix. Especially if the energy being used to compress the air is coming from a renewable, non-greenhouse-gas-emitting source, these cars could make a big difference in the developing world. They could also help tackle urban air pollution, such as the kind plaguing Beijing.