Wanted: Compressed Air Cars

Compressed air-powered cars and MDI's various designs for a compressed air-powered vehicle (of which the AirPod is the latest variant) have been covered in quite a great deal of depth here on CR4 by myself and others.

The current target market is now France, the main reasoning - France's "Nuclear power" which can be used to cleanly and affordably power the inefficient air compressors to produce the air to power the vehicles (compared to air and carbon polluting fuels like coal, petrol and diesel). The air powered car concept is still flawed and the promissed product over the years is still Vapourware, but it is a good marketing stratagy and reminds me of the days of the idea of "nuclear-powered" cars. This may be enough to actually get the air powered car on the road for actual large scale field trials.

Below is a good recent article that covers MDI and the compressed air-powered car (both past, present and future plans).

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/deflating-the-air-car

According to the article it's not yet on the road and the 45km/h speed & 200km range haven't been independently verified.

Come back when you've got something to sell.

What's wrong with that? This is the short list:

- Terrible thermodynamics.

- They have been hyping this for decades now, but have never demonstrated more than 7 km range.

- Awful energy storage density: a 55 gallon 350 bar (yikes! 5145 psi) compressed air tank. All for the energy equivalent of a liter of gasoline.

- No infrastructure of compressor stations that can fill such tanks (that's 40 times the maximum pressure rating of a typical garage compressor).

- I can pedal my bike faster than it goes.

- Far worse environmental impact and wasted energy than for an electric vehicle or a small gasoline vehicle.

- SCUBA and SCBA tanks have limited life, and we assume these would too.

- The air engine suffers from the complexity and wear issues of an internal combustion engine. An electric motor is simpler, proven, quieter, and more efficient.

- If you wanted to have a scuba style compressor to fill up at home, you 'd pay many thousands of dollars for the compressor alone.

- Low resale value: who would want such a thing?

I completely agree with the view. Air compression is very inefficient. So car will overall use much higher energy to run 1 km compared to electric car. Not environmental friendly at all.

Airpod,

If you want spare hot air to run it longer, carpool with a politician.

Jon