Car Powered Using Compressed Air

car powered using compressed air

Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car is making that a reality. The car would be powered by compressed air. Certainly seem like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production:

Refueling is simple and will only take a few minutes. That is, if you live nearby a gas station with custom air compressor units. The cost of a fill up is approximately $2.00. If a driver doesn’t have access to a compressor station, they will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tank in about 4 hours.

The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car. Five-seat concept car runs on air

An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town.

Tata is the only big firm he’ll license to sell the car – and they are limited to India. For the rest of the world he hopes to persuade hundreds of investors to set up their own factories, making the car from 80% locally-sourced materials.

“Imagine we will be able to save all those components traveling the world and all those transporters.” He wants each local factory to sell its own cars to cut out the middle man and he aims for 1% of global sales – about 680,000 per year. Terry Spall from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers says: “I really hope he succeeds. It is a really brave experiment in producing a sustainable car.”

Now does that sound like the Toyota Production System to you? It should. If I were an executive at Toyota I would sure examine this to see if it really is as promising as it looks. And if it is Toyota sure has plenty of cash and the management practice to make a very compelling case for allowing Toyota to produce this globally. The engineers desires closely match what Toyota has learned. Both seek to eliminate the waste of transportation (friction).

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11 Responses to Car Powered Using Compressed Air

  1. No name provided says:

    Hi , I like a lot your blog post expecially the article for click fraud tools and your post regarding Car Powered Using Compressed Air , it looks very interesting. Nice to share it with us. I found you on Ask Jeeves while searching for click fraud tools . I just Digged it on Monday so will notice also an increase of blog traffic in exchange.

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  3. Anonymous says:

    Insightful. I like this. Will try to see whether the information provided herein is useful or not by the specific outcome after putting into use in real world practice. Thanks.

  4. Mike says:

    Probably now that Oil price are decreasing so much compressed air cars will be forgotten 🙁

  5. Justin says:

    Is this an efficient car? I noticed the MPG stats, but my real question is reliability and efficiency of filling up? I absolutely love all these alternative energy methods for powering cars but my true concern is all this confusion as to where should our resources by allocated too. Basically I think we should focus on one or two primary methods for alternative energy and ‘maximize’ the capability.

  6. Anonymous says:

    I really have to wonder about this… compressed air doesn’t have nearly the energy density as gasoline or hydrogen, or some other fuel that can be consumed on-board to run, say, an electric generator to power an electrical motor. And what about mechanical conversion efficiencies? How much energy does it take to compress air, and pump it into a car? Wouldn’t it be as efficient to just charge a battery for an electric motor instead of running an air compressor?

  7. Ryan says:

    You know, that's pretty cool. Really, if you think about it, it's the same concept steam engines used – using high-pressure air to expand and rotate an object performing work. This just removes the stuff needed to actually MAKE steam.

  8. Jeff says:

    “An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town.”

    Right. Remember 10 years ago when scientists, etc. said we were only 10 years away from having cheap, reliable, avialable zero emission cars? How many different ideas are people going up with till someone says, “Ok, let’s just bite the bullet and do this.”

  9. Brent says:

    I have read about these before, the range isn’t too bad for a commuter but the top speed is generally the limiting factor with all these types of vehicles.

    After much discussion and thought I have determined that the bare minimum for a commuter is 60 mile range between “refills” and a minimum cruising speed of 50mph. That would cover the needs of 80% of commuters. The optimum seems to be electric.

    Outside of that you really cannot go past a vegetable oil powered vehicle i.e. a converted diesel. Nothing else really makes sense as almost everything else uses fossil fuels of one kind or another and the problem, running out, remains.

    Oil companies and auto manufacturers don’t like that because they lose control of the supply. However, if GM had stuck with the original volt they wouldn’t have had to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy.

  10. Oscar says:

    That's pretty cool from one side but 4 hours to refill the tank is too much time i think. I'd better kept paying more for the oil than waiting 4 hours each 125 miles.

  11. Josh says:

    When I buy a car, I want to be able to drive the car to work/home which is about a 20 minute commute each way for me. I also need to go grocery shopping, drive to see my parents who live 3 hours away and the occasional weekend which requires a long drive. If a car can not have a universal purpose…it is useless. The car must be universal and unfortunately I do not know a single person who would buy a car for the single purpose of commuting.

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