The Air Car Nears Completion 750
torok writes "According to an article on Gizmag, Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, has developed a car that runs on compressed air. It costs less than $3 USD to fill a tank on which it can run for 200 to 300km. The car will cost about USD $7,300 and has a top speed of 68mph. About once every 50,000 km you have to change the oil (1 liter of vegetable oil). Initial plans are to produce 3,000 cars per year."
Countdown till said inventor disappears... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, how many brilliant inventions have we heard of lately, and how many of those vanish just days after being announced?
I'm impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zero emissions? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Countdown till said inventor disappears... (Score:5, Insightful)
That far on 3 dolalrs? (Score:3, Insightful)
3 dollars to move a _car_ and _passengers_ that distance? Then I ought to use this same technology to build a generator. Instead of taking the kids to soccer practice, lets make electricity and put the power companies out of business.
Its not that cheap, they are fudging the numbers, etc, etc, etc.
Not that I don't like alternative energy study, and news about it. I just don't like it when crap like this gives us greenies a bad reputation. Its fodder for Fox News and George Bush to feed their mindless droves and keep them thinking "oil.. oil.. oil..."
Some side-benefits... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this actually comes into being, there are some really neat side-benefits of this sort of thing. Principally, as compressed air is not only easy to generate, it can be generated *AND* stored locally. That means that it can be done via "renewable" energy (solar and wind) *as they are available*.
As electricity is easy to generate locally - but not easy to store in sufficient quantity - you can't really have solar panels that will always be available to charge your electric car. However, you *can* have solar panels which fill your compressed-air tank, and then refill your can whenever you need.
Overall, that means a completely petroleum-free energy source for cars. Even if you don't believe that man is behind global warming, the thought of removing most of the automotive-produced pollution has got to be an appealing thought, with the idea of never paying a utility company (gas OR electric) to refuel your can again as a nice bonus.
Re:Lack of good info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, yeah, it is.
Burning fossil fuels in a power plant is generally more efficient and cleaner than burning them in a small, light mobile engine. So it reduces pollution that way.
While compressed air isn't the only such storage medium that turns the vehicle-power problem into a large-scale generation problem, batteries and fuel cells are far from clean to produce. Compressed air canisters aren't nearly as dirty. And, its a lot easier to build a distributed compressed-air generating infrastructure powered by large-scale power plants than it is for hydrogen.
Its not solving everything, but if it performs as advertised, it certainly is a useful part of the solution.
Crash Testing (Score:4, Insightful)
How do they come up with the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
[humor]Yes, I am kidding, there are ways to alleviate the heat generation like compressing outside, slow filling,...[/humor]
Got your AFDB out yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) It's all hype, no substance. There are plenty of inventors that try to hype things to get capital that they really have no idea how to make work. Sometimes they are even out and out frauds.
2) The product is a long way off. Often
3) The product doesn't do as well as expected. Some things sound really cool and then just don't pan out. They go to market and flop.
Take any one of those and combine it with
So get some perspective, and save the aluminium for wrapping leftovers.
Re:Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
A gallon of gasoline contains about 131 megajoules of energy per U.S. gallon. Rather a terrifying amount of chemical energy, when you think about it. For example, the tank in my car holds about 18 gallons, which means there's roughly 2,358 megajoules of energy in it. However, there's no possibility of all that energy being released in an explosion. Only a fuel-air mixture can explode: liquid gasoline can burn at the interface but not explode. Even if your tank were nearly empty of liquid gasoline and was full of a critical mixture, the resulting explosion would be tiny compared to the total energy in a full tank.
That's not true for a tank full of compressed air. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a similarly-sized tank of compressed air with that much potential energy in it. My tank full of hydrocarbons is as safe as a helium balloon in comparison.
No thanks. I've seen what extremely high-pressure air can do when it gets out
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Environmental considerations (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lack of good info (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
For the forseeable future we (the US) will be getting 55-60% of our electricity off of coal and 20% off of nuclear power. This electrical power can, with this compressed air model, be used to power the whole transportation sector, instead of oil. The US is the "middle east of coal". That means more US money staying in the US, less money being pumped into a volitale part of the world that doesn't like us much, more US jobs, more US oversight of the involved companies. As an American this benefits us greatly. It benefits all Americans except for the CEOs of the top 5 or so oil companies. (This applies elsewhere too, but America has the most cars, generates the most pollution from them, and all in all is the biggest oil consumer; though China is close, maybe surpassed the US in the past year or so.)
Additionally one would assume that the air compressors would be run off of electric motors, which allows them to use electricity produced anyway they want. If you wanted to use solar panels at home and plug the car into a small compressor to recharge that would work. If you wanted to goto a service station and buy their compressed air, that would work too. Unlike hydrogen, air compressing equipment is already widespread, hydrogen production isn't there yet. Either way, you're right in that we get less out than we put in, but the transision from oil to will be like that. We are very very unlikely to find something else we can pump out of the ground and use as easily as oil.
We are now transisioning permantly from a primary portable fuel (oil) to a secondary (compressed air, hydrogen, batteries, etc). It seems that these next fuel(s) will be with us for atleast the 100+ years oil has been.
India (Score:5, Insightful)
The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere. If they can make this work
Re:Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How do they come up with the numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
300 kilometers might be pushing it (not that I'm an expert here), but it's not implausible considering other efforts claiming similar ranges: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2281011.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Countdown till said inventor disappears... (Score:2, Insightful)
Never attribute to conspiracy what may be explained by mere incompetence :P. It explains the last six years of American politics and it explains your current issue.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's not the case here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:India (Score:4, Insightful)
And there is a lot more we could, and should, be doing. The first step to solving this crisis will be to realize that coordinated global action is not going to happen until many years after it's too late. Kyoto is a non-starter. Rather than foisting up the India-China emissions cabal red herring, the United States needs to assume its leadership role in the world and take tough, unilateral action on emissions. I guarantee that that would open the floodgates for all other nations in the world to follow suit.
Funny how we're so happy to go-it-alone on some issues, yet perfectly content to bemoan the lack of international cooperation on others, no?
Re:Some side-benefits... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lack of good info (Score:3, Insightful)
Except we have clean ways of generating energy, but they are only cost-effective in large-scale, immobile installations. The way to make a wind-powered, or solar-powered, or nuclear-powered car is to find ways of storing cleanly generated energy in ways which can be deployed in a car. Clean cars do help reduce pollution, by making it possible to power the most pollutant devices we have today using cleanly generated electric energy.
There's always a bigger fish... (Score:3, Insightful)
And I'm personally fed up of people who constantly buy hummers and other biggers car just to be the heavier of two in case of collision and hope for a better survival rate.
- First, there's no proof that just by picking the biggest car you're on the safer side. There have both been very bad reviews of some asian manufacturer of SUVs, and very good tests of Smarts. The size isn't a guarantee. Reading the tests in specialized press is the only sure way.
- Second elevated car fronts are more likely to kill pedestrian. Maybe you live in a country were nobody moves around with anything else than a car except within the confines of one's home. But here in Europe the streets are shared with pedestrian, biker, cyclists, etc. SUVs noses are much more deadly for them than regular cars.
- Third what will those people do once everyone has bought a Hummer ? Start driving around in tank, just to be sure in case of collision with an hummer ? Some sort of mutually assured destruction running amok there... with the environment as the by standing victim.
Re:That's not the case here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You forgot one (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You forgot one (Score:3, Insightful)
No, there is something much more effective. It's called High Barrier to Entry, and it is extremely effective at keeping out small car manufacturers, with expensive safety tests and regulation compliance (read, lawyers fees) etc (basically all of the lame attempts by American auto manufacturers to keep the Japanese out of the American car market by corrupting the political process). Unfortunately, the Japanese were smart enough to change their manufacturing process fast enough to keep up with the regulatory changes, and had the financial fortitude to push on through the pain.
If GM
Bzzzt, wrong, but thankyou for playing. The way to make money in the car business (like any other) is to make sales. In GMs case they do this through a dealership network. The dealership network makes almost no profit from the initial sale of the car, and nearly all of the profit through service and maintenance, in which they sell small products at ridiculous markups. When GM trialled the EV1, the dealerships realised that an electric motor has very little maintenance costs, and so there was no profit in selling them.
Second, to make cars requires a large investment in manufacturing equipment. Billions of dollars in fact. This investment is amortised over a long time horizon. If you radically change your manufacturing process to produce a better car, you lose your investment in the current equipment, something no CEO is going to be willing to explain at the next shareholder's quarterly.
There is more to business than just product.
Re:Countdown till said inventor disappears... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's not the case here (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a 40 gallon air compressor in my garage (and a set of pneumatic tools to go with them). I could install some solar panels on my roof and a small air compressor in my garage, attaching it to the 40 gallon tank.
It wouldn't recover pressure like the 1.5 HP electric motor, but who cares? I'm gone most of the day, so the solar panels can do a "trickle charge" on the air tank. If the car's range is 200km (~124 miles) that's actually a week's worth of mileage for me! It can take all week to build up the required pressure, and I can fall back on the electric motor for a quick recharge or if I'm using the pneumatic tools.
=Smidge=
Re:India (Score:3, Insightful)
WAR ON SMOG.
Re:You forgot one (Score:2, Insightful)
- buy the patents and hire the inventor
- write competing patents and entangle the inventor in patent litigation
- for a lot of long-term research, suppress research funding and/or discredit the field so that an initially good idea never gets developed much further
- create uncertainty about the expected costs, reliability, or safety of products
- create regulatory barriers
- even if you manage to make a product, interfere with distribution and marketing
While some bogus products ("200% fuel efficiency carburator") have made bogus claims about being suppressed in some of these ways, nevertheless, the above are standard business strategies. Microsoft has actually provided excellent examples for many of them.
Usually, companies try to go for the "we buy the technology for a few million dollars and let it die" route, because it's the least amount of hassle and risk and keeps everybody happy.
Re:You forgot one (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is ethanol so popular these days as an alternative fuel as opposed to other green fuel solutions? Ethanol is only a small (albeit a significant) step away from oil, yet it's being touted as the fuel that will save the planet. It's because corn farmers have a huge presence in DC. They saw an opportunity to increase the worth of their crop, and they jumped to get legislatures' attention. Don't ever underestimate the power of lobbying.
Re:Summary is seriously incorrect. (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, so the *technology* was developed by someone other than Tata, and the *car* is from Tata. That's hardly a major gaffe, and it's not like I issued a patent to Tata for developing it. I simply stumbled across a story that I thought would be of interest to Slashdot readers and submitted it with a quick summary.
In the future, you can avoid this apparent trauma by not reading the summary and going straight to the RTFA yourself for full details.
Ugh. Is this thing real? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't make heads or tails out of this story. It looks too good to be true, and the links feel suspicious to me. --And no, I don't put any faith in Discovery Channel stories ever since I watched a piece on breast implant science which had a super-positive bullshit spin on it and was funded by one of the actual manufacturers of silicon implants. The Discovery Channel just plain sucks, but it's hard to recognize this because it's so easy to sell bullshit under the guise of the all-mighty 'documentary'.
So can somebody please do the math and figure out if this Air Car idea is even possible? This is the area where the Slashdot crowd shines; Research, Thinking and Networking.
Thank-You!
-FL
Re:That's not the case here (Score:5, Insightful)
Fossil fuels _ARE_ extremely energy dense and thus good for cars. But if we could loslessly transmit that energy from a big honking power plant to vehicles, it wouldn't "shift the polution", it'd OVERALL REDUCE IT. A fixed-speed generation engine with millions of users to spread load out and cost-effective pollution scrubbing is going to put out a lot less crap into the air then the equivilant number of small, badly maintained, stop and go vehicles.
Just because our current power generation comes from badly maintained coal plants doesn't mean it HAS to be that way. There are a lot of benefits to efficiences of scale.
Re:Crash Testing (Score:3, Insightful)
And I love the perspective that says that an efficient, lightweight vehicle wouldn't survive a collision with an enormous Hummer, and therefore there is a problem with the smaller vehicle...
It seems a considerable oversight to me that Federal vehicle safety standards seem to consider almost exclusively the safety of the people in the vehicle, and not so much the people around it...
Re:Electric (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Inaccurate (Score:2, Insightful)
Diesel locos use large diesels to turn generators, which feed AC inverters that drive AC induction traction motors. This allows the engine to turn at the most efficient RPM for a given load. The same could be done in a car, and probably give superior performance (traction technology is much easier with electric motors).
But alas, this will be ignored because the greenies are concerned about carbon atoms, not improving technology. As usual they are using high pitched very loud screaming to send us down a path which has not been well selected. One can only hope the West can hold out against itself till the free market solves the energy problem for us. Otherwise, transportation is going to be sent to the dark ages, before even trains, till after years of expense and experimentation finally gets whatever technology we get stuck with, back up to where we are now.
Not only that, but US coal reserves can be turned into synthetic fuel oil to last many generations, being burnt in clean & efficient diesels (yes, relatively clean diesels have existed since about the time electronic controls were introduced to turbocharged diesels), getting us off the M.E. black gold nipple. And the developments in electrical traction systems alone, would allow a easy removal of the diesel, and addition of fuel cells when that technology comes of age. Literally, a drop in upgrade (if we engineer the prime mover separate from the traction systems).
Re:Danger... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:India (Score:3, Insightful)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=biYLn47VwJs [youtube.com]
It's not the amount of steel that makes a car properly protective, it's the way it's folded. in that case, the above mentionned smart is probably much better than your ford gas guzzler
Re:India (Score:3, Insightful)
Point 1: Is it okay to demolish the other, smaller car and give those passengers a zero percent chance of survival because you like your bumper 4 ft off the ground and backed by 4 tons of steel?
Point 2: In a roll-over accident the vehicle rotates around the "center of mass". That is well below the elevated passenger area in a hulking SUV. In other words, you and you precious family will get crushed.
Cheers.
Re:Electric (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC, the advertised MPG were maximum values, which I have heard are achieved from time to time. It really does not matter, though, because Detroit is still pumping out cars with <20MPG gas mileage. Even the Prius' worst case scenario doubles that figure. So, while it is not a solution to the problem, it is certainly a step in the right direction.
As for the pollutants in the batteries, you certainly have a point. Compressed air is certainly better than battery acid for the environment. Either way, anything that makes individuals less reliant on petrochemicals has to be a good thing.
Re:India (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL. You produce more pollution as a country than any other country in the world, and you produce (by a somewhat significant proportion) the most pollution per head. How you can be so naive as to sit there and even suggest any other country is "shitting into the atmosphere" is beyond me.
You sir, are a dick.
Re:When Americans do that, it's "Outsourcing" (Score:4, Insightful)
FFS, I'm not supposed to side with the French. I'm English. But this meme sickens me. A way of insulting the French for acting in what they perceive to be their national interest, when that does not coincide with what the US considers its national interest (and let's be very clear that the US only ever acts in what it considers to be its national interest), it just shows the originators and all those who parrot them as breathtakingly arrogant and ignorant.
Re:India (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it's cheaper putting gas into the big steel box than it is to buy a second car. I recently bought a car for my wife to replace the one she was driving because it was becoming too unreliable. This second car cost $17,000 (relatively inexpensive for a new car in the U.S.) and it gets 36 mpg on the highway. The pickup truck that I drive gets approximately 17 mpg on the highway. I do occasionally haul stuff/pull a trailer that's too large for a car, so the truck is a necessity for me.
Now, let's assume that I bought the car for myself just to save money on gas since the truck is a total pig in that respect. Let's also assume that gas is $2.50/gallon. That means the second car is equivalent in price to 6,800 gallons of gas, which works out to about 116,000 miles on my pickup. At my current rate, it will take me well over 10 years to put that many miles on the truck - that's a long time to wait for a car to pay for itself. Note that we're not including the additional insurance, licensing, and maintenance costs for the new car.
It's one thing to buy a more fuel-efficient car in the interest of protecting the environment, and I support those folks that choose to do that. Buying a second car just for the cost benefit of better mileage just doesn't make sense in a lot of cases though.
Re:India (Score:1, Insightful)
Believe me, you're a lot safer in the middle of a field of semis on the highway than you are in the middle of 10 soccer moms on their cell phone.
Besides, when you've got a couple HUNDRED tons bashing into you at 60+MPH no amount of hunky SUV steel will save your ass, you'll be just as dead as me in my subcompact; so your point is really moot.
Re:When Americans do that, it's "Outsourcing" (Score:5, Insightful)
And I suppose that you somehow think it's OK for you to make a general statement like this, but it's not OK for those in the US to make general statements about the French. Let's be perfectly clear here. Although the US avoids acting in ways that are contrary to its national interests, it frequently makes decisions and acts in ways that have no impact one way or the other on national interests -- just like pretty much any other country. The US has been, and continues to be very generous in many ways. Although some of that generosity has political aims, certainly not all of it does. I think you need to take a serious dose of your own medicine, lest you yourself be misconstrued as arrogant and ignorant. For what it's worth, I've heard pretty much the same joke come from the colleagues in England and Germany that I work with on a regular basis. Does that make it right? No, but it does show that US-bashing isn't the answer to the problem. Start at home and work your way outward.