MDI’s Air Powered Car – The Future is Here!

Posted on February 29, 2008
Filed Under Economy, Technology | Leave a Comment

This car runs on nothing but air, reaches speeds of nearly 70 mph, and runs for 125 miles before needing a recharge that takes a whole 3 minutes. Yes the car is for real, and expected to be available in showrooms as soon as August 2008.

The man behind the Air Car is Guy Negre, who was a Formula One racing engineer in a previous life, but for the last 15 years he’s been at MDI in Nice, France perfecting cars that use compressed air instead of internal combustion to move the engines pistons.

The air is compressed to 4350 psi and stored in tanks under the car. The high pressure (roughly 150 times the pressure in your tires), was a concern, but by making the tanks of carbon-fiber instead of steel, they’re lightweight, stronger, and will just split versus exploding in a crash.

At gas stations equipped with custom high-pressure air filling units, it would take only a few minutes to recharge the tank – about the same or less time than a gas fill-up. The cost for the 340 liters of compressed air would be about $2.00.

Drivers could also just plug in the cars on-board compressor at night and recharge the tanks in 4 hours.

By adding an engine that powers the compressor for recharging on the go, a hybrid model has been created that could take you from Los Angeles to New York on a single tank of gas.

Is anyone else thinking “where can I get one now?”

It’s not always so, but in this case, the immensely practical comes with a reasonable price tag. The Air Car models will range in price from $7,500 to $25,000.

MDI Air Car An agreement has been made with Tata Motors, India’s largest automaker, to begin producing the world’s first commercial versions of an air-powered vehicle. The CityCAT, at $12,700, will be one of the first of approximately 6000 of these zero-emissions Air Cars scheduled to hit Indian streets in the summer of 2008.

In addition, MDI has made deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

Will we ever see these in the United States? I’d like to think so – in fact yesterday would be good

But it won’t come soon, for the same reasons it’s taken so long to finally get serious about alternative energy sources. Lots of vested interests in the old ways, and until recently – cheap fuel.

The reality is that the pain of higher gas prices is finally reaching the point where folks are starting to seriously consider ways to do without it.

Some say the Air Car can’t make it in the States because of an “all-glue construction” and “inability to pass crash tests”. Frankly, that’s nonsense. We’ve got aircraft made of all composite materials which are far stronger than metals.

The bottom line is that people want this, or something like it, and they want it now.

If you watched through the end of the video, you saw there is more to the air power story. It seems another inventer has been hard at work coming up with a rotary style air powered engine about the size of a flat basketball.

It’s going into production soon to power everthing from forklifts in warehouses, to golf carts, watercraft and cars.

It just gets better and better.

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