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filkertomThis has hit, like, a half-dozen blogs, and if it turns out to be as big as I think it might it'll hit a lot more soon. It's not available in the US -- not yet. But... oh, if it was.
Ladies and gentlemen... the Air Car.
Ladies and gentlemen... the Air Car.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:41 pm (UTC)Who knows, maybe it will be at the Detroit Auto Show in a couple weeks. NAIAS 2008 opens to the public, ConFusion weekend, Jan 19 and runs for the next 8 days. Before that is is press and manufacters week.
Now if you had solar cells on the home to run a compressor to fill a tank in the garage during the day, you can fill-up the car when you get home.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:48 pm (UTC)Do the CAT Vehicles reach the American safety standards?
CAT Vehicles will have to be adapted to eh American safety standards like any other European cars and furthermore they are going to be produced in every country and will have to reach the inner standards of each country.
I sense inflation in the price of inflation at the gas station. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:51 pm (UTC)You still have to power the compresser. You still have losses in converting it to motion with a piston. Because the pressure drops with use, your car gets weaker and weaker as it goes about its drive. You still have to have a large tank of very high pressure air in the car with you that will turn to shrapnel in any impact. And you still make the tank super hot when you pump it full of high pressure air which makes the vehicle uncomfortable and weakens composite materials which make low-weight tanks (problems with temperatures and pressures doomed the tank design of the X33). What you are left with is a vehicle that has to be refueled for 15 minutes every day (average commute) and can explode under impact without any ignition source at all. The only advantage this has is that you use no power sitting at a traffic light - unless the radio or headlights are on, that is.
All the weakness of an electric car, but none of the positives. And if you think there is no pollution, ask yourself what is being burned at the power plant that powers the compresser at the Air station.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:11 pm (UTC)Who says "no pollution" or "no downside"? I'm seeing "much less pollution" and "cheaper" and "needs work to become truly awesome", which seems plenty good to me.
I love it when settling for anything less than utterly perfect Utopia is presented as unacceptable, for liberals. Can you imagine if the conservatives said, "No! Owning 85% of America's wealth is just stupid! If we can't have 100%--us, Everything, everyone else, NOTHING--then it's just not worth trying and we should give up"?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:44 pm (UTC)I, in turn, am rather discouraged when, in the face of literally decades of pronouncements like this - the "compressed-air free-fuel car!" has a scam history over 100 years old - these announcements are taken on faith at face value. I'm not saying that this particular instance is also a scam. I'm not even saying that their claim is false. But there is a very, very long history of claims like this - usually greeted with choruses of HUZZAH! ALL PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED! - that have, thus far, in the case of air vehicles, always proven false.
Again, this may be the time it's real. I don't know. But what I do know is that I can take the numbers they give and do some math on them, which I have done below. And the results of that math I find... questionable. Please do check it. I could have made errors. I could be wrong on some conversions. But energy is energy is energy, and if you can get it all into the same units - which I can here - you can make direct comparisons. And those comparisons do not make these de facto efficiency claims seem very reassuring to me.
Now, again, maybe this is the real thing. But I am not liking these numbers very much. Hopefully I am wrong not to like them and they are, in fact, valid. But with a century of air-fueled-cars scammage as background, some of us are gonna be real hesitant to take any claims around such inventions at face value until we get a lot more empirical data than we have seen as yet.
Soapbox Time
Date: 2008-01-08 12:10 am (UTC)But.
If it does work -- and, bluntly, it seems far too elaborate to bother with as a hoax and the world is too crazy for them to scam a business in another country -- if it does work, it'll be an exceptionally cool thing.
It may sound as if I'm ridiculously snarky in saying this, but... if you really don't think it'll work, contact them. Perhaps you have found something they have overlooked. Or perhaps you'll get a job with them. Or perhaps they'll show you how it can work. Or any of a number of other possibilities.
Because that, really, is what we are talking about here: possibilities.
I feel compelled to remind you of this video at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CBqRdaiik).
Re: Soapbox Time
Date: 2008-01-08 03:00 am (UTC)I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying that what they are claiming requires very, very solid demonstration and explanation. They are making an extraordinary claim, and it's a claim others have made before. I remember that 2003 round another commenter mentioned. I also remember a previous round - another group - that went nowhere. I further remember a round of this being discussed - with much more reasonable numbers, quite frankly - in a more academic way, involving compressed nitrogen - in the mid-1990s. There are iterations of this going back to the 19th century, some of which are raw fraud, others of which are simply people being hopelessly optimistic (and, in many cases, bad at math).
Perhaps you have found something they have overlooked.
If they're overlooking basic thermodynamics, which is all I'm talking here, then I'm not going to be able to help them. My energy calculations here are very basic; I'm demonstrating their implicit efficiency claims in overt numeric form. That's all. This is what their statements - their website, the BBC news coverage - say. (Again, unless I've made an error. And I've made one invalid assumption that actually makes their case more, not less, unreasonable, in assuming they recover all 22kWh out of that compression system. They won't, because you can't, because you will have waste heat, period, end of story.) And given that, I find these numbers to be unlikely at best.
This doesn't mean they don't have a working engine; I'm sure they do. This does not mean they can't make a working car; they've apparently done so. This doesn't mean they can't make it into a production car; maybe they can. It doesn't even mean their numbers are wrong, but I find it difficult to see how you get there.
At 66kWh, I could see getting there. Even at 44kWh, I would be significantly less skeptical. But they say that they're getting 125 miles out of 22kWh electricity input to a compressor, and that means they're doing 26% better than the theoretical 100% efficiency maximum of the most fuel-efficient production vehicle ever shipped. I'm not saying that's impossible; I presume their car is a lot lighter (the record-holding car is the 1830lb Lupo 3L, according again to Wikipedia, which is still pretty heavy and is made of metal), which would help tremendously. Being all-carbon-fibre would help, and the engine has plastic parts, so this is reasonable. It's possible. But even with that, it's a hell of an energy claim they're making, and the kind that should not be accepted at anything approaching face value.
Look, I'm not trying to pick on anybody. I'm really not. I'm not even yelling fraud, because I don't know. All I've done is shown, in math, what they are actually claiming from an energy standpoint, and saying I got issues with it. Significant ones. If they have a production-capable vehicle and it ships, I suspect you'll see real-world numbers that place the energy costs significantly higher, which would be less of a deal if they weren't stressing the Damn Near Free aspect of the whole thing.
(Then we start getting into discussions about the energy grid buildout, but that's not hugely controversial. At face value, it's a lot more efficient - per kWh - than the most efficient true-EVs I've ever seen, which is good, 'cause I ran the numbers with those, and we need 7.2 times the capacity of the current grid's peak capacity in addition to the current grid's peak capacity to replace the automobile fleet we have now. That'll be spendy.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:42 am (UTC)In fact, I fully expect that, assuming this is a workable car and not just a hoax, that there will be many, many bugs to work out before this becomes something that can be used like the cars we're used to. Also, that it may be better for metro areas than for, say, driving in Montana.
It's just that, shockwave sounded to me a lot less "I have some scientific suspicions" and a lot more "Your candidate for President is rich, therefore he has no business talking about the poor"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 01:57 pm (UTC)Ideally, all cars in the near future should be required by law to be Series Hybrids. This is how nearly all locomotives are built, not because the shipping industry values the ecology, but because it saves them fuel. This can burn even less gas if you have it built as a plug-in hybrid, able to recharge some from the house power. Eventually the best solution would be solar cells on everyone's roof that splits water into Hydrogen and Oxygen via some undiscovered catalyst, and uses that hydrogen in fuel cells. But we don't have said solar splitting catalyst yet, so existing power systems will be the norm for the next ten years and we need to stretch them out as far as we can.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:03 pm (UTC)I also do not believe in rushing out and making matters worse instead of better, just so you can say you never have to burn a drop of gas. I assure you, unless you have a compressor in your own home and are powered by a nuclear wind or solar power plant, you'll be burning something to power it all. And it would royally suck if the entire fleet suddenly got half the economy it already does, just so we can say we're making a difference...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:23 pm (UTC)1) power to the compressor: funny how people use this argument to imply, without any definition or allusion, that it will take just as much oil as it would running a gas guzzling SUV, or that any power used for the compressor causes the dirtiest, smelliest and most cancer-causing pollution known to man. Thing is, the compressors can be powered by solar, wind, water, temperature differences, tidal, biofuels, homemade moonshine, incinerated garbage, hamsters on wheels, etc. Right there you've got a big advantage due to diversity. Also, the generators running the compressors can be made a _lot_ more efficient, thus squeezing out 120 miles per gallon or better if you were to work up a comparison (as someone did once for using an efficient home generator to charge an electric car).
2) losses in converting to pistons: Ummmm, don't know how to break this to you, but _everything_ has losses when converting to motion with a piston. Singling out air engines as if they're the only ones who has losses will just make them depressed and gain weight and become unpopular. Besides, I thought it used a cyclical thingy to avoid pistons entirely, but I could be thinking of a different air car design, there have been a few that looked promising.
3) Getting weaker and weaker as you drive: That's only if you don't put any work into R&D. The designs that I know of have worked up a few ways to get optimum pressure to the engine regardless of the volume left. Unfortunately, the most efficient designs have also been the noisiest, a problem I've only seen mentioned by people who have actually ridden in one.
4) High pressure air bomb: Nope, not going to happen. There are numerous ways to design tanks and store high pressure air where any kind of puncture, from a bullet through the tank to detonating dynamite under the main valve, do not result in explosions nor shrapnel (well, not from the compressed air, though I'm sure the TNT tosses a few things around). The hydrogen crowd has done a _lot_ of research into high pressure container safety, and the air pressure they're talking about here is less than that.
5) Super hot air pressure: As someone who once had a temp job surrounded by highly compressed gasses of various types, I can assure you there will only be a little heat during refilling and it will disippitate quickly enough. What could be a problem is the cold from rapid decompression around the valves, especially if the air pumped in was humid. But I'm sure they've dealt with that problem already as it's something that pops up readily enough.
6) Refueling every 15 minutes: this is what all of that R&D money was spent on, getting the most miles per cubic inch of air. You _really_ think these things would get this kind of coverage if they had to be refueled every 15 minutes? You _really_ think nobody would notice such a glaring problem in all of the test drives and demonstrations?
I figure if this air engine really is ready for production and consumer sales, then we'll hear all of these false arguments against it from the big oil and auto companies, so we might as well start working on our rebuttles now.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 10:52 pm (UTC)Now to see who's the first to panic and start fear mongering to get it banned from the USA. "Next up on Fox: Compressed Air Will Kill Your Children!"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:03 pm (UTC)Not the miracle car it's being pitched as. As of 2003 the prototype only managed 4.5miles on a full tank of air. I have yet to see anything that proves they've substantially improved that, nor have I seen any proof of any new prototypes since then,. let alone production cars.
From everything I have read on the company for the last few years, most of their focus has been on selling licenses, not cars. So they sell you a license for several million, you get to try and make the car work, and if you do actually manage to make cars and sell them you pay them royalties.
Shame, because if the technology actually worked as advertised, it would make for at least a spiffy citycar runabout.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:34 pm (UTC)One problem with these cars, they use a piston type engine, just propelled by compressed air rather than the fuel/air explosions of normal cars. Piston engines are inherently inefficient as you waste energy converting the lateral motion of the piston to rotational energy,. Plus having parts stop, and reverse direction several hundred times per second is inherently inefficient.
The Engineair compressed air engine (http://pesn.com/2006/05/11/9500269_Engineair_Compressed-Air_Motor/) impresses me a hell of a lot more. That has been rethought from a blank slate, rather than trying to adapt turn-of-the-last-century technology to their new idea.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:12 pm (UTC)Assuming I have the right numbers via T3h Web (I checked multiple sources, please do feel free to check my work), a US gallon of gasoline is about 125,000 BTU, which is 37 kWh. They're claiming 125 miles at 22kWh. So they're claiming effectively... 210mp(us)g equivalency, more or less.
According to Wikipedia, the current record for any production automobile is the 78 mp(US)gallon diesel (the Volkswagen Lupo 3L). Diesel engines run at 45% efficiency; assuming 100% efficiency in that case yields 173mp(us)g equivalent diesel, but diesel has more Kcal per USG than gasoline (129,500), so it doesn't match up properly with the figure above for efficiency considerations. Normalising across calories per gallon, that yields about 167mp(us)g gasoline at 100% efficiency, interpolated from the record-holding liquid fuels car, or:
2.79 times the most efficient (in mp(us)g) liquid fuels production vehicle ever made, or:
26.7% more efficient than 100%-efficient gasoline consumption in the most fuel-efficient gasoline scenario to date.
So. I'm ... curious about these claims. Not saying it's impossible; just saying I'm... very curious.
Please do feel free to point out errors in my math.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-07 11:25 pm (UTC)Yes, it does, in the end. In both cases, I converted to kWh for my calculations, and they give kWh numbers. (And kWh-equivalents are easy to get from gasoline.) Yes, I converted back to mph-equivalents for the purposes of comparison, but that's mostly because they're units with which most people are familiar.
Energy is energy. And I'm sniffing at this and not liking the efficiency (miles per kWh, if you prefer, over miles per gallon) that they're claiming.
Also
Date: 2008-01-07 11:22 pm (UTC)Re: Also
Date: 2008-01-07 11:41 pm (UTC)Now as for the math, as I mentioned before you've got a lot more options for powering the compressors because they can be installed in a permanent location and don't have to move. Thus you can have a nifty hybred system that uses solar cells on the roof, a small wind turbine on the garage (with a customized pirate flag on the tail, of course), and as a standby, a small fuel burning generator that uses biofuel in a clean way. So straight number crunching comparisons really can't be made until you know how the compressor is going to be run.
Now, for "actual use" energy efficiency, I have to say that in what I've seen over the last few years people for the air cars are always quoting "projected" or optimal numbers, while the test cars actually built fall far short. I have no problem with the concept, and I'm sure if you get a lot of clever people together they can refine the air powered engine into something noteworthy (like "Junkyard Wars" but over six months instead of one day), but so far I don't think it's ready to hit the streets.
Re: Also
Date: 2008-01-07 11:51 pm (UTC)And when it comes to the math, where and how you get the energy doesn't actually matter. (Also, they say that the car has a built-in compressor that can charge the vehicle in four hours without external unit.) What they are claiming is 125 miles for 22kWh. That's their number. Where that comes from isn't relevant; how you get it (solar, etc) doesn't matter. The only thing I'm analysing here is:
What are they claiming, indirectly, when they say 125 miles out of 22kWh?
And what they're claiming, when you go to that number and that number alone, when compared to the same numbers from current vehicles, are efficiency leapfrogs generations above current piston (and rotary) engines.
I am absolutely not saying that this is impossible. I am not making that argument. I've just done a little math to come up with comparisons between their (implicit) claims of efficiency and world-best real-world efficiency demonstrated to date. Maybe they've done it; indeed, I hope they have. But given the long, long history of air-powered-automobile fraud, I want to see empirical data.
(edited to fix repeated(!) numeric typo, sry.)
Re: Also
Date: 2008-01-08 01:21 am (UTC)However, one problem with composites is lifetime. Regardless of how they're made, most have a limited active life. True, there are ways to extend the life and they're working on making them better, but I wouldn't be surprised if you had to replace the composite air tank on these things every four years or so, if they use composite tanks at all.
As for what they say the energy numbers are, I never go by that. People always quote the best, or worst, possible numbers regardless if they are "best possible lab conditions" or "theoretical extremes." The only numbers I go by are when they have independent labs run the tests on the actual product, then I make sure the labs are really independent. I look mostly at how things would work in the real world and the possibilities for diversity/advancement. The air engine has a lot more going for it in this respect not only because there are better ways of designing the engine (which use less moving parts, fewer resources, less mass, etc.) but also because the air compressors can be made to handle a lot of diversity. For instance, you could have a quick-charge compressor at a gas station that's powered by a high-octane biofuel with a heavily filtered exhaust, or a home unit that's slow to recharge but uses wind and solar power to fill up while you're at work or asleep.
Still, neat as this idea is, I'll believe it when I see it on the road.
Re: Also
Date: 2008-01-08 03:47 am (UTC)Pressure like that is not to be trifled with.
As for the efficiency claims I'll be glad if they turn out to be true, but I remain skeptical.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 02:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-10 02:34 am (UTC)The Discovery Channel Canada (http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/view.asp?date=4/1/2005) did a video of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 12:21 am (UTC)We know that there's a reaction of certain chemicals to an electirc spark. Maybe something could be done along those lines.
Another thing would be to develop engines that did more with less. I don't believe that we can't create an efficient engine that gets 50+ miles to the gallon and runs with the best efficiency possible.
Its things like this that make me optomistic.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 04:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 05:28 am (UTC)1) create the new car
2) protect it from the US automakers and oil corporations
By comparison the first step is easy.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 05:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-08 04:32 am (UTC)i must have one!
this idea is a breath of compressed air!