Tired of paying over $3 per gallon for gas?

Would you buy a car that runs on air?

A French car company, Moteur Developpement International (MDI), has developed a car that runs on compressed air instead of gasoline called the MiniCAT.

It costs 2 cents per mile to operate (instead of 12 cents per mile for gasoline-powered cars), gets 125 miles per tank and has a top speed of 70 miles per hour. Sorry guys, no 1/4 mile or 0-60 mph times.

The air is heated and compressed using an electrically-powered device similar to the kind that compresses the air for scuba tanks. As a side benefit, the heat of the air compression process can be used to heat a home’s water.

3,000 MiniCATs will go on sale this summer in Europe and its French producer is wondering if the car will be hard to sell because it is such a new idea. I guess time will tell.

 

whoa! that idea great idea. If it actually works. Now they can sell us air and water I'd say oil problems have already been solved. So let's get gasoline back to 1.50$
I can't wait, could you imagine driving across country for maybe 100$ that's insane.

 

How does that work? That might be okay for short commuting but it certainly wouldn't be good for long trips. It would also no doubt be a golf cart sized vehicle.

 

I saw that on TV once, but I seem to recall it had a short coming such a pollution from the power plants and long distance driving.

Here is a little information I found:

Could a car run on compressed air?

Inside This Article
1. Introduction to Could a Car Run on Compressed Air?

Yes, it could. You could compress the air at your house using an air compressor, fill a compressed-air tank in the car, and the car could run off of it. You could use an engine very similar to a steam engine (using pressurized air instead of pressurized steam) to convert the compressed air to rotational energy.

The main problem you would have is the size of the "gas tank" you would need to get any kind of reasonable range. You would need a LOT of compressed air to take a car very far.

An alternative would be to use a liquefied gas like liquid nitrogen. You can think of liquid nitrogen as air that has been compressed so much it has liquefied. Liquid nitrogen is much denser than compressed air, so you could store enough in a car to give it reasonable range. You could then fill up at the liquid-nitrogen station.

A compressed air car would generate no pollution while you are driving. However, the power plant that produces the electricity that compresses the air (or liquifies the nitrogen, for that matter) is probably generating pollution from the coal or oil it is burning. Power plants are relatively clean and very efficient compared to car engines, so this is not a bad trade-off. Still, it's important to compare apples to apples.

Another thing that would be interesting to figure out is the efficiency of a liquid-nitrogen engine. If you burn gasoline in a car engine, only about 20 percent of it powers the wheels. The rest creates wasted heat. It would be interesting to see how efficient a power plant is, plus how efficient a nitrogen liquefier is, plus how efficient a liquid-nitrogen engine is -- that would tell you whether you were creating a technology that is better or worse than the gasoline engine in terms of efficiency.

 

I saw a photo of the MiniCAT. It is bigger than a golf cart- more the size of a mini-car. It is ideally suited to city driving. After 125 miles, it must be recharged. Suppposedly it costs $2 to fill up with air!

 

The picture that I saw looks like a SMART. That fits under the golf cart category in my book. I wonder how long that takes to recharge.

 

A car running on compressed air? Sounds like a lot of hot air to me.

 

TONS!!!!! of SMARTcars over in Germany.
lots of Opel, smart, peugot, audi, BMW, and porche.
Sadly no Ferrari for tdub.

 

Yeah, Jeremiah, I saw that too. I was featured on beyond tomorrow. Which recently seems to be the same episodes over and over so it fell out of my rotation on the DVR.

Sound enough ideah. The guy got it from working on Fork lifts which operate on compressed air, if I recall the program right (no emissions lasted longer than electric motors?)

 

I am only aware of electric, propane, and gasoline but not compressed air fork lifts in the this country. I guess they must used compressed in Germany for some reason.......pollution maybe?