Air taxi
AutoBlogGreen reports on the French designed Air Car, which may be coming to India soon. The company, MDI, also makes the above “MiniCat”, an air car in miniature format for city driving.
The killer advantage of air is that an equipped pumping station can “fuel” it in 2 minutes, just like gas. (Charging at home takes around 4 hours). I would wonder how efficient the compression process is, and most importantly, how loud this engine is. The 100 mile range isn’t fantastic either, though certainly fine for a commute, especially if air stations became prevalent. And finally, I’d be concerned about heat: compressing air generates quite a bit of it, no?
More pics of the little beauty here.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
The MDI has an aluminum engine that runs cool enough to touch while running. It is quite noisy compared to internal combustion engines. Compressed air (in carbon fiber tanks, which tear instead of explode, as would metal tanks) becomes colder as pressure is released; air conditioning is available as a by-product.
One hundred miles is rather limited but MDI has a hybrid charging system in prototype that uses a small engine to continually recharge the air tanks as the car travels. In this case the range is 4000 km.