yeah that would be great but I don't think big oil would like that too much, how much does a senator cost these days in the U.S.?

I forsee many deaths related to these cars if the "its glued together" statement is literal.

I guess its an interesting approach to powering a car. It's only practical though for short trips and city driving. I have to wonder what the performance is like.

Note that the sample car in the pic is a taxi - this sort of thing is great for an urban taxi fleet. Clean, possibly quiet, and in a downtown center, blocked off to most normal traffic (which 'city center fees' practically do), where the majority of other vehicles are similar lightweight vehicles, probably not all that unsafe.

Excellent! i want one.

response to David: Glued together causing deaths?

Lets not forget Lotus's are "glued" together also. But I don't see high fatalities from Exige's or Elise's

This is very cool. I wonder if theres a purge valve on the back that acts like a turbo. :)

Besides if everyone would drive those. Consider how much better the air in cities would be. Now if all drove those the kinetic energy from their much smaller masses will decrease the crash dmg. Gasoline is so OLD tech.
we better get rid of it as soon as possible. Besides the fossil fuels are needed in chemistry after all. So we would be better of saving them there.

Great! I can't wait to not have them here in the US! With all these transportation choices here in the land o' the free, I'm sure we don't need this sort of forward-thinking.

Seriously though, why do all these products show up in other countries and are never available here? When it comes to transportation options, we don't seem to have many choices in the US. Trains, buses, bike-lanes, micro-cars...only in select US cities. It sucks for me because I *hate* driving in the city.

Thanks for the wild predictions, Nostradamus. Adhesive technology expands way past elmer's and superglue these days. Check out 3M and Dupont's websites. They should have enough info to quell your adhesive fears. I'd like to know more about the compressed air tank.

The air tank is made from Carbon Fiber. at least they say so in the videos.

This will be the thing. Just get a solar panel to your backyard .. and show the finger to _ _ _ companies.

I have watched some tech show about this kind of technology for cars and I'm actually impressed by the idea. This would certianly have an economic impact in the US for those who service normal gasoline cars because the air car actually have less moving parts with zero emissions.

The issue really relies on American attitude with their cars because they want sporty and fancy cars with little regards to MPG and it is a proven fact. Granted they're crying now about gas prices and I was like well you should have thought about it when you bought that Hummer with 9mpg rating.

The air car technology is great for in city driving but not so great for long road trips unless there are air filling stations for this kind every 100 miles, installing them wouldn't be very expensive thing to do if people actually start buying these cars for light duty use. Gas stations in remote areas could go green by installing solar panels to run the air pumps to fill up the tanks on site so that way the air supply is ready upon demand.

Darkk

why do most people think this technology is soooooooo new?? this is old stuff..this is called pneumatic technology? like pneumatic jacks? pneumatic screwdrivers? pneumatic wrenches? actually a korean guy was making this but he didnt even had the money to begin with..too bad the indian guy got the idea and was resourceful enough to find some investors

Big oil companies the and our oil funded Presidents and Congress will never allow it here. Doesn't matter if it is glued or riveted.

@ oliblurr:

Sometimes the best inventions are methods of utilization not actual products. Thomas Edison was not the first to invent the light bulb, but he created it with a power infrastructure that allowed the bulb other electrical devices to enter the average home.

Its not simply about just 'being resourceful', pitching an idea to government and getting it approved is never easy.

Big oil companies the and our oil funded Presidents and Congress will never allow it here. Doesn't matter if it is glued or riveted.

KALANCHOE9 quit being an inflammatory armchair liberal and get a life.

This car is great news for zero emission transportation possibilities!

Meanwhile, I'm excited about this announcement from this professor at Purdue that discovered a way to create a wator powered engine by mixing aluminum and gallium in a water tank environment to create hydrogen.

He was interviewed on the Glenn Beck show on Wednesday night (5/30/07), if you'd like to search.

Wow! Nice to see some clean green innovation come out of India! Pitty the US couldn't come up with something better - being the greatest country in the world and all (sarcasm).

Most of you seem to believe these will never make it to the USA but I believe you're all wrong. Clearly this article (and the original) was written by a stupid person! Why would South Africa or Germany be interested in a vehicle which didn't meet strict safety standards?? These are not third world countries! Are all Americans this stupid??

Compressed air is just an energy transport medium like electricity or hydrogen (because we have to manufacture the hydrogen). The problem with compressed air is energy density. To even get a low energy density pressures have to be in the thousands of psi.

I looked up the Huntorf plant specs in Germany. They use compressed air as an energy storage medium to then generate electricity for peak power generation. With a maximum operating pressure of 70 bar (approx. 1040 psi) they can generate 2 kW-hr of energy per cubic meter of air storage. An internal combustion engine with an efficiency of 30% gets 11.2 kW-hr of mechanical energy out of each gallon of gas. So a compact car (34 mpg) uses about 33 kW-hr of energy on average to propel itself 100 miles. To convert a similar class car to air power would require either a 1 cubic meter tank with a pressure of 16,500 psi or an even larger tank at a lower pressure. I haven't taken into account the various efficiencies that would modify the answer somewhat but I think this gets us in the ballpark.

I think electricity makes a lot more sense for an energy transport medium. The volumetric energy density is higher even with the relatively immature battery technology. Infrastructure is largely in place, although if we use it for transportation it will require serious upgrading. The big problem is still the mass energy density as batteries are fairly heavy.

All ideas like this sound really good until you start analyzing the details. Personally I don't think pneumatic will ever become the predominate transportation energy medium.

For the "green" crowd, it will be interesting to see what the total carbon output is. Obviously, it requires energy -- probably from a commercial power plant -- to compress the air. Compressing the air generates heat which will be lost as the air cools in storage resulting in wasted energy.

And "Big Oil" does not kill stuff like this in the USA. People not buying it kills it. I'm betting my money on a car powered by a great big wind-up spring.

This is very good sounding technology and I'm all for zero emissions, but what about safety? If the compressor tank exploded depending on how much psi is released and in what direction this may very well kill or heavily injure the driver and passenger, a few hundred psi should do the trick.

That's the funniest thing about all these alleged 'green' technologies... This one is going to require electricity from... ? No gas station is going to put up solar panels, not even to squash their own lighting bill. The energy is going to be delivered on the same wasteful power distribution lines as your home's power.

Hydrogen is worse, though. THAT either comes from petroleum or worse, water. (electrolysis is 50% efficient or less). This truly is a step in the right direction, though.

I agree that this product will not sell here (in the U.S). It's the chicken/egg conundrum.... Which comes first, the cars, or the filling stations ? Until there are a lot of both, don't expect it to attract investor attention in the states (read as: We're far too ignorant to see the potential here, so we're not buying it.)

I wish the best for it, though. I truly do. Maybe when India really comes into it's own as a world power (as it is even now), we'll start questioning what we did wrong. Why are my beloved United States so messed up ?

Cool car. :)

"The big problem is still the mass energy density as batteries are fairly heavy."

Bingo. It's the endless downward spiral that holds electric cars back (until we have a large technological break through). If you want to go farther, you need a bigger battery. A bigger battery means more weight, meaning you use more power to go a given speed, meaning that you can't go as far and then you go back to the beginning again and repeat to infinity. What I'm looking forward to are much more efficient solar cells (they just hit 40.7% with new ones in a lab!) to be combined with a hybrid or electric car. Put some solar cells on the roof and get enough charge while you're at work (on a regular day) to power you all the way home. Now that's efficiency.

Carbon fiber is a composite that is "glued together". So is fiberglass and Kevlar. I dont see a problem there but it could as easily be built with aluminium or just steel if that worried people. Airplanes built from aluminium are as light as those made of carbon fiber. The performance difference would not be enough to change it much.

High pressure air tanks that can hold 10,000 PSI are usually made of aluminium or steel.

I think this car is great but I wonder how safe it is to have air tanks compressed to 4350 pounds per square inch in a car that will sometimes be driven by drunks. I have no idea what would happen if that tank or the valves that attach to it would fail. Scuba tanks are normally made of aluminium and filled to about 3000 PSI. They will fly around like a rocket if the valve fails. The large high compression air tanks used to fill scuba tanks usually are filled to 6000 - 10,000 PSI so its not something outside of common technology.

That car uses a 340 liter (90 gallons) air tank. That provides 125 miles per tank of air, adding a larger tank would obviously increase the range. If it only takes two minutes to refill the tanks that sounds like a very good way to power cars especially for city driving. But is it safe?

Is it possible to put a compressor in the car. So that the Kinetic energy of the car could be used to generate more compressed air?

If this was possible, it might provide more miles per refill OR even no need to refill.

I hate to break it to you but most airplanes, military or passenger, ARE glued together!

I think a solar panel on the roof could power a small compressor that could top up the tank while you are parked. (Like the compressors that you can buy to inflate your tires) This would minimise the need to stop at a station to refill the tank and be a totally green non-polluting vehicle :)

What's the problem here? India has agreed to be the proving ground. Sit back and watch for few years. Analyze the data and build a better one. No need for guinea pigs when nation's are willing to try it.

Good luck India- I hope it works out for all our sake's.

I think this is great!!! I think it will be very hard to get 1 in the USA.
All the US car makers will do there best to stop this car from being sold in the USA!! Never the less, I put my name on the list to buy 1.

GreenCrusader wrote:
"Wow! Nice to see some clean green innovation come out of India! Pitty the US couldn't come up with something better - being the greatest country in the world and all (sarcasm)...Are all Americans this stupid??"

Weng writes:
Green Crusader, you must have a big "D" on the front of your caped suit that stands for "Dumbass."

If you can't contribute anything worthwhile to conversation then shut the hell up.

Marc just wishes that an internal combustion engine can get a thermal efficiency of 30% - more like 12%

Some of these posts are positively dripping in self-righteousness. How about doing the arithmetic people, at least before you start in with the standard shibboleths of "Big Oil" and American stupidity?

Ever played paintball? Ever seen an air tank explode? Those are less than a litre. Now imagine one a cubic meter in size exploding. Unlike gasoline that deflagrates, this really does release all of its energy at once.

i don't think president bush, with his oil business, would like to see this hog in america

this is actually NOT innovation from India. It is from France. I've been watching the development of this vehicle since 2001.

Even if the source powering the compression isn't renewable, it takes a lot less energy to fill an air bottle than to run a car for any length of time. I.e. the energy used to fill the bottle will get you farther than if you put the equivalent energy in your car because we just don't have good enough storage technology, at least it's not been mass produced.

Real solutions to our problems would include using the internet like we were promised. Almost everybody in a call center could work from home.

For housing solutions there's earthship.org and cal-earth.org. Ignore all that crap about getting compact fluorescent bulbs and go buy LED instead. They last longer and they use 3kw per hour instead of 60 of the CFBs.

All of our green spaces should be planted with edibles in stead of ornamentals. We also need to work together to support each other and most of our social ills will go away. I believe if enough like-minded people got together on this and if it was wide spread enough to keep the gvt from shutting it down, the more stodgy of the public would end up joining in and only those who benefit from the concentration of power would resist.

In other words, as so aptly proved by the so-called communist countries giant disasters, forcing people to live cooperatively instead of competitively doesn't work. And the reality of it is that they absolutely were not communist, the words communist and regime do NOT go together unlike laciest. Be on guard for theocracy rising in this country.

c`mon, there are submarines that are glued together as well, Trieste was a Swiss-designed deep-diving research bathyscaphe ("deep boat") with a crew of two people, which reached a record-breaking depth of about 10,900 m (about 35,760 ft), in the deepest part of any ocean on earth, the Challenger Deep.

c`mon, there are submarines that are glued together as well, Trieste was a Swiss-designed deep-diving research bathyscaphe ("deep boat") with a crew of two people, which reached a record-breaking depth of about 10,900 m (about 35,760 ft), in the deepest part of any ocean on earth, the Challenger Deep.