This seems like an eco-dream come true, a car the runs on air developed in India. I’ve seen stories on this since 2008, but have yet to see the car hit market. Now the claim is in August 2012.
I don’t think you’ll see IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri driving one of these though, since he has been prone to booking posh 5 star hotel suites and won’t even drive the electric car he has. And like an electric car, that energy to charge the air tank with compressed air has to come from someplace, and that someplace if you are connected to the grid is likely fossil fuels, nuclear, or perhaps hydro. Though, with no fuel taxes, it might be a hit with anti-tax crusaders. With a claimed top speed of 60mph and range 185 miles, it should be enough to overcome the range anxiety of electric cars, and there’s no worry about battery fires or having to replace the expensive battery pack in 2-4 years. Whether it will ever be seen in the USA will of course depend on its crash worthiness. And when there is a crash, will it do this?
Story submitted by George Lawson
What is this? ‘Alison Italo Aus’
Will it be the next big thing?
Tata Motors of India thinks so.
What will the Oil Companies do to stop it?
It is an auto engine that runs on air. That’s right; air not gas or diesel or electric but just the air around us. Take a look.
Tata Motors of India has scheduled the Air Car to hit Indian streets by August 2012
The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy N. For Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air to push its engine’s pistons and make the car go.
The Air Car, called the “Mini CAT” could cost around 365,757 rupees in India or $8,177 US.
The Mini CAT which is a simple, light urban car, with a tubular chassis, a body of fiberglass that is glued not welded and powered by compressed air. A Microprocessor is used to control all electrical functions of the car. One tiny radio transmitter sends instructions to the lights, turn signals and every other electrical device on the car. Which are not many.
The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0-15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.
There are no keys, just an access card which can be read by the car from your pocket. According to the designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100 KM, that’s about a tenth the cost of a car running on gas. It’s mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car, a factor which makes it a perfect choice for city motorists. The car has a top speed of 105 KM per hour or 60 mph and would have a range of around 300 km or 185 miles between refuels. Refilling the car will take place at adapted gas stations with special air compressors. A fill up will only take two to three minutes and costs approximately 100 rupees and the car will be ready to go another 300 kilometers.
This car can also be filled at home with it’s on board compressor. It will take 3-4 hours to refill the tank, but it can be done while you sleep.
Because there is no combustion engine, changing the 1 liter of vegetable oil is only necessary every 50,000 KM or 30,000 miles. Due to its simplicity, there is very little maintenance to be done on this car.
This Air Car almost sounds too good to be true. We’ll see in August 2012 if it is.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Would this run off the “Free air” you get for your tyres?
Of for goodness sake. With a tubular frame and glued-on, light-weight skin, why do they need any sort of engine. A couple pedals, push rods and a good gearing system and you’re there: the Weight-Watchers Wonder Wagon. Oh, and there could be accessory pedals for those otherwise dead-weight passengers – a three-person-power, emmission-free, heart-healthy, go-green jalopy for the urbane masses. And for all my Canadian cousins (from Saskatchewan originally) who needs a heater when you would be working up a sweat in a capsule? For New Yorkers in August….. the convertible model, of course. There’s no problem and no end of inventiveness which we can’t devise to answer any questions – we have had terrific exemplars this past decade in spinning a good yarn.
Caleb says:
January 31, 2012 at 7:35 am
On rainy days it would beat a bike.
————————————————-
Install pedals in it and you might have something marketable.
Going to have to change the name before they start shipping to Mexico. Almost as bad as the Nova.
NOtes from 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6138972/ns/us_news-environment/t/car-runs-compressed-air-will-it-sell/
Minicars don’t sell except to midgets. And students.
And 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2281011.stm
I am completely sceptical of the gullible warming gravy train and the supposed role of CO2 in changing climate, but guys, a litle perspective before leaping to find fault in the latest innovative thinking. Reading some of the remarks here has me worried we’re all becoming just as entrenched and feeble minded as the ecotards who oppose all development on imaginative environmental reasons have been for decades.
With the number of respondants concerned about the results of a collision on the compressed air bottles, I assume LPG and CNG powered cars are eitehr banned or the subject of mass hysteria stateside and also that no one has considered the vulnerability of fuel lines in a conventional petrol or deisel powered car in the case of an impact which would be severe enough to induce a loss of integrity in a compresed air storage vessel?
I see a clear benefit in this type of vehicle in urban use given the absence of tailpipe emissions (of actual pollutants like benzenes and oxides of nitrogen and sulphur).
True there are energy losses in compressing the air before use, but there are also significant energy losses in producing, transporting, refining and distributing the petrol and deisel burned ‘at the point of energy consumption’, if one wishes to split hairs.
True enough the efficiency claims are probably optimistic, but who achieves the claimed fuel consumption in their conventional cars?
With respect to the trifles about the car needing to be light owing to it’s feeble powerplant, tell me why an F1 racing car is featherlight despite it’s powerful V8 powerplant? Adding lightness is in no way to be criticised, it is in fact sound design practice and very long overdue in automotive circles.
As far as compressed air being a feeble source of energy, who has never heard of industrial complexes using compressed air to drive it’s machinery? Even oil rigs sport pneumatic mains to power tools and equipment, despite production installations sitting on top of a source of hydrocarbon (that really would be using the energy at it’s source).
And as for the central driving position, how does anyone criticise this? You can drive on the correct side of the road in India or the car can be exported somewhere driving on the Napoleonic side of the road without the need to move the steering wheel to the wrong side of the car (consider the location of the clutch pedal in relation to the gearbox in your conventional car and explain how driving the the left hand side of the car is anything other than a compromise before retorting that the sensible parts of the Commonwealth and Japan have it wrong). And if that doesn’t convince you that a central driving position isn’t as good as it gets, ask any owner of a McLaren F1 what they think of the central driving position and report back here with any unlikely complaint.
Credit where it’s due, this is a sound idea for urban personal transport and is far better than carting a hefty battery around for a few kilometers before plugging in to trickle charge for the rest of the day and/or night, plus orders of magnitude better than pushing a deadly treadly to work.
The MiniCat will initially only attract a low sales tax in order to acheive market penetration (on the back of false and pretentious ‘green’ policies), and then will be taxed in the form of the usual annual road tax, registration fee, road tolls and ‘fuel’ excise (charged at the flowmeter on the compressed air charging point at participating garages – guarantee the standard automotive compressed air hose coupling will be unlike an tyre inflation valve, crow’s-foot or Glenlock connection), in addition to attracting a taxable annual fee for a approved stored energy/pressure vessel inspection.
End of rant.
I see great promise here. This could be a “dual fuel” vehicle, also able to run on compressed CO2 sequestered from coal-fired power plants. CO2 liquifies under pressure, so you could squeeze a lot more into a tank, and the pressure would be fairly steady as the liquid boiled off.
Racing models could use liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
“the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0-15 degrees below zero.”
This could be a problem in a country as humid as India.
I can just see this thing pulling into the garage with 20 to 30 pounds of ice built up around the motor and exhaust.
I searched the Tata Motors web site and found no references to “Air Car” or
“Mini Cat.” What’s up with that?
I like it!
And hey, I have an air compressor in the garage, too… of course, I’ll have to tweak that a bit because currently it only goes to 130psi. The only issue I can see for here in Calgary is that I’ll have to install a heater. Something like the gas heater my dad used to have in his Volkswagens ought to do it. Then again, I’ll still be burning gas… but oh well, saving the planet and all… maybe the catalytic heater I have for camping would work, that’s just propane.
Not sure how it will perform going west into a Chinook wind, but I’m guessing that top speed of 60 (100km/h), which is the speed limit on some roads, might suffer a bit. Driving straight into a 100km/h wind ought to give me a net speed of… what… 10km/h? 5?
And I’m pretty sure I’ll need to leave the battery plugged in all night to run the lights and stereo. It better have a stereo, since it’s against the law to wear earplugs and use an iPod while driving. And I know I’ll use a lot of lighting power, just for the hazard warnings alone. I assume they’ll be LEDs.
Oh well, if all I’m doing is going from home to the nearest grocery store, which is about 5km away, it should be fine. Then again, as someone already pointed out, the price is going to have to have Canadian road taxes built in, so I’ll be paying more than that estimated price… call it $15k. Not bad for something I can only use a small number of days per year to go a small distance.
I wonder what the net energy will be when it’s -30C… anyone who ever tried spraying a can of compressed air outside at those temps knows that instead of a sharp blast of cold air you only get a slight breeze.
But seriously, for certain markets in warmer climes, it should be better than what they currently have. At least more of Canada’s immigrants will have acquired some driving time before they move here to become cab drivers.
Might work well in India, or permanently warm places like Miami. But in a northern place where the ambient air is often well below freezing, Boyle’s Law would sap your power. You’d pull into the filling station, get filled up with hot and tight air, then your tank would “leak” energy as soon as you started driving across snow!
Hoser says:
January 31, 2012 at 9:49 am
What about liquid air? That is, LN2. There are a number of issues, positive and negative. Safety is improved since pressure in the dewar would rapidly dissipate with a rupture, the liquid would boil off and not explode.
Main problem: the very poor energy balance. You need at least 5 times more energy to liquidize the air/N2 than you can recover. Plus severe problems with icing of the heat exchanger that is needed to expand the liquid N2 into the necessary amount of pressurized gas for the cylinders to work.
Liquid CO2 needs heat to evaporate and generate pressure. No heat, no pressure. Liquid CO2 will solidy due to the heat extraction process, which is why it is used as long term coolant in transatlantic shipments of biochemicals. You will get very cold in a liquid CO2 propelled car.
Why not a ‘pressure cooker’ type of ‘fuel tank’ with block of dry ice in it?
Release the pressure, pop off the top, drop in a block of dry ice and seal it up.
I think it would be safer to handle, quicker to re-fuel, easier to distribute, have a lower explosive potential and have a greater potential energy density. In India (in the always warm parts) you could have an ambient air reverse ‘heat sink/heat pipe’ so that you draw the heat of sublimation from the surrounding air (or internal air conditioning)
There would be no pollution (at the point of use/driving) and all of the plants along the road would benefit
How nice. But if they want to export it – how will they be able able to compete against the Volkswagen Eco Rabbit, or Britain’s Sinclair C5. or the Ford Edsel, or the Ford Nucleon, or the Dymaxion Car, or some other wildly successful dream car? And it doesn’t even fly.
All of this kind of junk, from light bulbs to biofueled aircraft to ‘locovorism’, is driven by some progressive politicians’ unilateral Utopian wet dream. Folks should read up on what Karl Popper had to say about Utopian future states. In a nutshell, one mans’ Utopia is anothers’ Totalitarian Hell.
TATA AIR CAR at the TATA PROVING GROUNDS ?
This video sure leaves one wanting…
wanting something else.
🙂
From a January 5, 2012 Tata Motors press release about Auto Expo 2012:
Tata Motors unveils 3 new vehicles at Auto Expo 2012
* Tata Safari Storme, the new generation Safari
* Tata Ultra, the new LCV & ICV range
* Tata LPT 3723, India’s first 5-axle rigid truck
Also demonstrates alternate fuel technology capability concepts:
* Tata Nano CNG
* Tata Indigo Manza diesel-electric hybrid
* Tata Starbus Fuel Cell (hydrogen)
(http://tatamotors.com/media/press-releases.php?id=730)
Where’s that Air Car??
“…a car [that] runs on air developed in India. ”
What’s so special about the air developed in India?
That sounds great for short commutes in the city like to the grocery store. I wouldn’t want to take it on the freeway in SoCal though or any fast highway for that matter. 60 is not really fast enough for one reason. I like the idea though. There is a lot of potential there with batteries being so expensive and problematic.
There is a lot of negativity here. The system being developed by Tata for this vehicle is licenced by a French inventor who had been running his prototypes around for some time. The promo videos that I saw a couple of years back quoted a range of around 300km. But there was also a version with a small paraffin heater unit that extended the range by warming the air coming out of the tanks. The engine does not run at heroic pressures, so the loss of power as the pressure stored in the tanks falls is not catastrophic.
The engine in the French prototype worked in reverse as its own compressor, but it looks like the Tata has a different approach. Probably much more thoroughly engineered.
From the promo videos I reckon that the main technical challenge was damping the appalling noise the things made . .
Having some experience both of compressed-air systems and of maintaining pneumatic and hydraulic systems I would like to comment on a few things.
Compressed air is an excellent power source in many ways. For example it is capable of very large and very fast changes in power, it is extremely simple, reliable and durable while overstraining a compressed air engine is completely benign. The only thing that happens is that it stops.
The most important drawback is probably the requirement for extreme airtightness. Even a minute leak will completely ruin the economics of a system. The idea that this car will be more or less maintenance-free is optimistic to put things mildly.
As for the durability of the pressure vessels, if they were made of high-grade steel they would be safe for a few thousand refill cycles, which would be more or less equivalent to the life-cycle a conventional car. However I’m uncertain about the durability of composites in such applications.
And, yes, these cars will be death-traps. For one thing a “fiber and injected foam” body has essentially zero energy absorption capability which means that even minor collisions will usually result in injury or death. And the pressure vessels will be very dangerous. It is clear from some comments here that many are unfamiliar with the vast difference between compressed liquids and compressed gasses. I still remember the first time I visited a combined hydraulic/pneumatic workshop. Huge hydraulic components were tested without any particular safety measures while even small pneumatic gadgets were tested under heavy steel cages solidly bolted to the floor. I was taught that if a hydraulic machine burst, the only real danger was that you might get hydraulic fluid in your eyes while even a small pneumatic component would throw deadly shrapnel for many yards. So, yes, I am much less afraid of a LNG tank than a of high pressure air vessel, even though LNG is potentially explosive and air is not.
I wonder by the way how long it will take for the exhaust line to freeze up in Indian climate?.