Air Car!

[sheepdog 10]

Now we are getting somewhere! With all the talk about air pollution and the high cost of gasoline Tata Motors of India has come up with a real winner! At least I hope we are, I got an email from my aunt about this cool car, and you know how it is with emails, you never know weather its real or faked, but I’m hoping this one is real.

Tata Motors has designed a car that runs on COMPRESSED AIR! Imagine that! NO pollution folks! And the air coming out of the exhaust is quite cold, and can be used to run the air conditioning. The car body is fiberglass of course, and it’s glued together instead of being welded. I’m not real sure I like that part. I’ve seen the remains of a few fiberglass cars after a bad wreck, and they pretty much just turn to dust.

One of the first things I noticed is that it doesn’t look so much like a roller skate on wheels, like so many of the new gas saving or electric new cars they are coming up with. It actually looks pretty roomy, much like our popular mini vans. It uses a microprocessor to control all the electric functions of the car, and a tiny radio transmitter to send signals to the lights and turn signals and all the other things. It doesn’t even need a key! The car works on an access card that it can actually read even if it’s still in your pocket. Now how handy is that? While it’s top speed is only 60 miles per hour, one big advantage of this car is that it gets nearly double the distance from a charge up of its air compressor as the current electric cars get on a battery charge. They will be getting compressors set up in locations around the area, local gas stations that will fill the car nearly as quickly as filling up with gas, or you can charge it up at home with it’s on board compressor in 3-4 hours, which isn’t all that long either.

And talk about simple to maintain, all you have to do, aside from filling up the compressor, is change out one liter of vegetable oil (imagine that!) every 30,000 miles. I like that vegetable oil part. Sure be nice for the farmers to have some benefit as opposed to the big oil companies.

The cost of the car in India will be around 365,757 rupees, or $8,177 in US currency. I don’t know if they would be imported to the USA for that price, but even if it was close to that, that is really cheap according to what most American cars costs these days. The car is set to be released in August of this year. I am anxious to see just how well the car does and how it works. You know sometimes things look good on paper but out in the real world they just don’t turn out like the designers had hoped for. I’m sure there will be some bugs that need to be worked out, but all in all it looks like a big improvement on the other options we have now for efficient and non polluting cars.

 

[k_nitin_r 8]

India currently has serious electrical power shortage problems and it seems unlikely that something that people can recharge at home will do any good. Some towns go about eight hours without electricity in a day, though if you are fortunate enough to live in an area where a lot of other political and other influential folk reside, you get a to hour power cut. There are some villages that get only two hours of electricity a day and farmers use it to run the water pumps at their fields. There are electric scooters, electric motorcycles, and electric cars available in India. The electric scooters and electric motorcycles have not really sold in significant numbers, but you just may see the G-Whiz (sold in India as the Reva) occasionally. The idea behind the Reva was to take advantage of the electric car subsidy provided by the government to offer a car that costs as much as the cheapest petrol-powered car in the country, the Maruti 800 (the Tata Nano has now taken its place as the cheapest petrol-powered car). However, by the time the Reva entered into production, the subsidy offered by the government for electric vehicles was withdrawn and the price of the Reva electric car almost doubled. It was no longer an attractive choice for most consumers because when you pay twice as much as you do for a regular car, you don't expect to have it just as much use as a scooter. To add to that, you did not get the kind of air conditioner that you would with a regular car either (back then, they had the seats that would get cooled rather than an air conditioner, but later the air conditioner was added as a standard option on the Reva).I see the air-powered car as a similar solution to the electric car because you have to plug it into an electrical outlet for 'charging' (in this case, compressing). The difference is that the air car can be filled with compressed air at compressed air filling stations. I do not see how a compressed air vehicle can get very far - it will probably have the same limitations as the electric car or the fuel cell car. There would be infrastructure problems, just as there has been with the use of LPG and CNG as fuel sources (LPG did become very popular when consumers were permitted to use the LPG cylinders of their kitchens to power their petrol-powered cars, though people turned to diesel when the government took measures to prevent it). Apart from the infrastructure, the limited range means that it will be of little value to most people in India (typically, people want a car to be able to take them back to their home towns at least once in two months - and that's usually a 300 km road trip).

[sheepdog 10]

Just another example of why I enjoy Xisto as much as I do. To have a conversation with someone more or less on the other side of the globe is very enlightening and I find it fasinating. With my lifelong exposure to only things in the USA coming here can be a real eye opener sometimes.It's hard to fathom a country that is growing at such a huge rate technologically anyway, that would still be having difficulties with something as basic and important as electricity. When you stop to think about it, everything runs on electricity. I can't think of anything "modern" that does not require it. Imagine the jumps in production and lifestyle improvements something as simple as a good and constant source of electric would bring. Almost seems like India is putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Just out of curosity, where does India get it's power from? In the USA we have a lot of coal fired power plants, and hydro electic plants, and of course, Nuc's. (which I'm still pretty leary about, but that's another topic) It seem to me a shame to have all these great advances and then not have the ability to use them regularly or with any certainy. Does seem pretty silly to me to develople things requiring electric and then not have the electric to use them.

[Quatrux 4]

I've just read about those compressed air cars, I think more research needs to be done, as they're not so efficient to change electricity driven cars, or normal petrol/diesel cars, but the technology is quite interesting, I guess it could be combined with other technologies? If India has problems with electricity, these kind of cars might be a solution, but still you need energy to compress the air in the first place. :)Here is some more reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car

[sheepdog 10]

Well, you make a good point that you would need electricity to power the compressor, at least at the fill up stations, but they have an onboard compressor, if there was a way to power it from the engine while it was running, that might be a great solution, if you could more or less reclaim some of the energy created from the original charge, sort of like a perpetual motiion machine. But even so, from what I read they get farther on a tank of compressed air than an all electric car gets from a battery charge.

[Ananya 0]

Tata motors is really making India proud by launching such a car that will take us a step farther in the attempt of making the environment pollution free.Now as the source of energy for Air cars is electricity so it would all depend on the means of electricity to determine how clean its impact will be on environment.But despite having many advantages its biggest disadvantage is energy loss. As compared to conventional motors performance of compressed air cars isn't that impressive as the prior one wastes a lot of energy as heat during conversion from chemical to mechanical energy and the latter one undergoes various phases where chemical energy gets converted to electrical energy to compressed air to mechanical energy.Each phase undergoing energy loss.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I've just read about those compressed air cars, I think more research needs to be done, as they're not so efficient to change electricity driven cars, or normal petrol/diesel cars, but the technology is quite interesting, I guess it could be combined with other technologies? If India has problems with electricity, these kind of cars might be a solution, but still you need energy to compress the air in the first place.

Yeah, I think it's something that is doable but will need a lot of refinement. Sort of how we didn't go straight from gas to all electric cars, and instead it went from gas to hybrid to all electric. Time will allow more experimenting and knowledge, and so in the meantime we may have gas/electric/air hybrids or something like that. The big problem though is that the new technology is always expensive. Even in electric cars that are 'cheap,' replacing the battery can cost 5-10k.

[sheepdog 10]

From what I have been hearing lately, the electric or hybred car sales here in the United States has pretty much been falling on it's face. I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors, like the general bad economy, but one fact that jumps out at me is that these hybred cars don't really gain you much in the way of fuel efficiency. Some of the ones I've seen advertised are only 25-30 miles per gallon. So why bother getting all those other things that can go wrong with the new technoligy when you can get a normal, tried and true gasoline engine, that gets 40 miles per gallon, like our little Ford?

[rpgsearcherz 5]

From what I have been hearing lately, the electric or hybred car sales here in the United States has pretty much been falling on it's face. I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors, like the general bad economy, but one fact that jumps out at me is that these hybred cars don't really gain you much in the way of fuel efficiency. Some of the ones I've seen advertised are only 25-30 miles per gallon. So why bother getting all those other things that can go wrong with the new technoligy when you can get a normal, tried and true gasoline engine, that gets 40 miles per gallon, like our little Ford?

Those hybrids that don't get many MPG is because their normal versions got much worse mileage. An example would be the hybrid Escalade (I think that's what it was). While a hybrid helps, it still doesn't offput the fact that larger vehicles (or inefficient ones) will consume more gas.

I think the economy does play a role in the car sales, but a bigger issue is people who analyze how much they're truly saving. Doing side-by-side comparisons of some cars, such as all electric, to what we drive now, you find out that in more cases than not, hybrids or all electric vehicles cost more money to drive. This is based on factors such as maintenance costs + vehicle costs + fuel * average of x miles per year, and a few other things. While the idea of using less gas definitely sounds great, in all actuality the savings isn't that much when you consider needing new batteries and having to go to specialist places for repairs and whatnot.

[k_nitin_r 8]

When vehicles are sold with hybrid engines, they are expected to give more to the gallon than the average vehicle does. However, when you are driving a sports utility vehicle instead of a sedan, you ought to expect the mileage of an average sports utility vehicle rather than an average sedan. Unfortunately, the average consumer who buys a hybrid vehicle buys it to be able to crunch more miles, therefore the sales of vehicles such as the Toyota Prius would be higher than the sales of a hybrid version of the Cadillac Escalade.When you want to get into comparisons of how far you can get, you should look into comparing the Toyota Yaris Hatchback, the Toyota Corolla, and the Lexus CT200h. The Lexus CT200h is built for fuel economy, but the price tag associated with it would turn most people away. The Toyota Prius is not available in all geographical regions yet and neither is the Toyota Camry hybrid, so the only hybrid option from Toyota is the Lexus CT200h and the price tag is enough to keep most people away. In fact, I am sure a lot of people do the math and think that even their fuel bills cost less than the difference in the price between a Toyota Corolla and a Lexus CT200h.

[MayukhDebnath 1]

The air compressed car is not new. In a thesis submitted in SMVD University in Apr 2010 it was researched on some air compressed models and the results published. These lines are quoted from there.

 

The first compressed-air vehicle was devised by Bompas,

a patent for a

locomotive being taken out in England in 1828.

There were two storage

tanks between the frames, with conventional

cylinders and cranks. It is not

clear if it was actually built. (Knight, 1880)

 

The first recorded compressed-air vehicle in France was built by the

Frenchmen Andraud and Tessie of Motay in 1838. A car ran on a test

track at Chaillot on the 9th July 1840, and worked well, but the idea was

not pursued further.

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

However, whether it is Air, LPG, or Electricity, at the end of the day its the petrol engines that win on performance. The amount of research and engine perfection that has gone into a petrol engine is enormous. Air compressed cars are like LPG gas cylinders, the material different is being air instead of LPG. The combustion technique is different and the bye product also differs. As compared to regular petrol pumps, we saw a large increase in the LPG refilling stations in recent times with the increase of Hybrid cars. Also city transport on Auto rikshaw is now on LPG. But with the Petrol, LPG and now the Diesel prices being deregulated which lead to increase in price, people are turning to the electric option. In metros and bigger towns where power cuts are not a regular feature, this option is open, unlike in villages, where power is a luxury, with most of the days going without electricity.

An air compressed car also requires electricity to fill up its cylinder with compressed air. So filling it up at rural places is not a viable option. Also setting up multiple pumps in smaller towns is also not economical. So even if the air car hits the market, and people opt for it either in fancy or price, it will be limited only to the urban setup and suburbs may not see any demand.

Also its efficiency being on the lower side for its speed and horse power, it cannot be used for longer duration. So what we can conclude is, even though it is a noble idea, there may not be many takers for the car.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

The air compressed car is not new. In a thesis submitted in SMVD University in Apr 2010 it was researched on some air compressed models and the results published. These lines are quoted from there.

 

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

However, whether it is Air, LPG, or Electricity, at the end of the day its the petrol engines that win on performance. The amount of research and engine perfection that has gone into a petrol engine is enormous. Air compressed cars are like LPG gas cylinders, the material different is being air instead of LPG. The combustion technique is different and the bye product also differs. As compared to regular petrol pumps, we saw a large increase in the LPG refilling stations in recent times with the increase of Hybrid cars. Also city transport on Auto rikshaw is now on LPG. But with the Petrol, LPG and now the Diesel prices being deregulated which lead to increase in price, people are turning to the electric option. In metros and bigger towns where power cuts are not a regular feature, this option is open, unlike in villages, where power is a luxury, with most of the days going without electricity.

An air compressed car also requires electricity to fill up its cylinder with compressed air. So filling it up at rural places is not a viable option. Also setting up multiple pumps in smaller towns is also not economical. So even if the air car hits the market, and people opt for it either in fancy or price, it will be limited only to the urban setup and suburbs may not see any demand.

Also its efficiency being on the lower side for its speed and horse power, it cannot be used for longer duration. So what we can conclude is, even though it is a noble idea, there may not be many takers for the car.

 

You did raise some good points regarding the issues that are faced in places where electricity is more of a luxury. I can't recall ever being anywhere like that (in the US) but I have been to many small towns where there's one gas station for 100 miles in any direction, and in towns like that I can definitely see it being an issue in terms of expecting special charging stations (as their usage would be minimal).

 

It's interesting to see what this idea has been around for so long though!

[k_nitin_r 8]

Mayukh,In your post, you mentioned that air compressed cars are like LPG except for the material being used, the combustion type, and the byproduct.I always assumed that air compressed cars stored energy using an electric compressor in the form of highly pressurized air and then utilized energy released through decompressing the air. It seems rather inefficient considering how much compression would be required to store enough energy for a trip around the city. I imagine the whole of the back of a Volkswagen Transporter van would be needed to store enough compressed air for me to get to work and head back. At that scale, I think I would be using more electricity in a compressed air car than in an all-electric car that used batteries for storage.

[MayukhDebnath 1]

Mayukh,
In your post, you mentioned that air compressed cars are like LPG except for the material being used, the combustion type, and the byproduct.

I always assumed that air compressed cars stored energy using an electric compressor in the form of highly pressurized air and then utilized energy released through decompressing the air. It seems rather inefficient considering how much compression would be required to store enough energy for a trip around the city. I imagine the whole of the back of a Volkswagen Transporter van would be needed to store enough compressed air for me to get to work and head back. At that scale, I think I would be using more electricity in a compressed air car than in an all-electric car that used batteries for storage.

You are right about the air being compressed and stored and then released at regulated amount to produce the energy to drive the vehicle.
Take the case of a river water dam which generates electricity by letting the water fall from a height and making the huge magnetic turbines rotate and generate electricity. Now water by itself does not produce energy or electricity when in contact with air/fire/machines, but the force generated due to the falling water is what makes the turbines move. But unlike water, air will not fall, and will need external source like electric compressors to store under pressure. So for air extra energy is needed.
Now for LPG or diesel or petrol, these are naturally combustible (refining needed) and hence just using them straight is possible. Since these are natural and at the same time self combustible, they are economical.
There are H2O fuel options which works in HHO+gas formula to generate energy, is also being discussed for long. Even vegetable oil (bio-diesel) as alternates to petrol is being thought about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil_fuel.
There is never-ending research going on, but the petrol comes first, and next diesel for economic use. But we'll see more of the hybrids and and tribrids on road as petrol prices rise like rockets and left with fewer mines/rigs to dig from.

[demonboy1990 0]

by the title of this post i thought it was about a flying car lol, well but hope the eco friendly car is real but i do not think i or anyone else i know will be buying one for the price i would be we buy cheap cars here a car is for getting people around so buying a car for that much would be a waste even if it is eco friendly what would you either have money to look after your kids, put food in your kitchen, pay the morgage, etc, or buy a car i know what one i would want and its not the car, but hope if its real then the makers at least make plenty of money for all the work they had to do if it is true.

Edited October 10, 2012 by c4l (see edit history)