Air Car
- Thread starter WLH
- Start date
As petrol/gas prices go up so does creativity. These are cool.
Of course not for high performance (yet) but I could use and air car as a run around, just plugging my compressor into anyone's convenient power outlet
Of course not for high performance (yet) but I could use and air car as a run around, just plugging my compressor into anyone's convenient power outlet
Ideas like this pop up from time to time, but there is a fundamental flaw: You can't get more energy out of a system than you put into it. In this case, you are storing the energy in the compressed air, the compressor that puts the energy into the air tank runs off of electricity, and the electricity is (most likely) being generated by burring a fossil fuel of some sort - you always end up right back where you started. In city driving, most of the energy is used to accelerate your vehicle from a stand still. You can recover a significant portion of that energy through regenerative braking. Once you get your vehicle up to speed, however, most of the energy is being used to push the car through the air. This can not be recovered (which is why hybrids get better mileage in the city than on the highway). So, this idea may might make sense for an urban vehicle like taxi or a city bus, but would never cut it as a replacement for a general purpose automobile.
Mmm, the only problem with the alternative cars is that they cost about twice as much as buying and running a normal car.
Sounded awful too, like a mega-noisy-diesel :thumbsdown:
Sounded awful too, like a mega-noisy-diesel :thumbsdown:
ay8306 said:
I certainly agree with the concept that the energy has to be put into the system in order to get it out. Where I see such vehicles working is local delivery, etc. where you can get the benefits of a lower cost supply of energy.
Also look at something like London where a daily congestion charge of £8 ($16) and rising, is levied on normal cars, but this would be free. That starts to skew the economics in favour.
