http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqpGZv0YT4

This looks promising. I might buy the hybrid version if it was affordable enough. It doesn't look cool, but with gas costing was it does, I can live with it. This is the first alternative engine I've seen that, at least at first glance, seems viable. Anybody else know anything about these?

It looks like it would only be practical for metro areas. It's like a golf cart on steroids. I could definitely see it if I lived in a city and conducted all of my business there though.

Looks cool, I wonder how good it is in reality.

That's retarded.

Yes, using the ever-more-expensive gasoline standard to fuel cars instead of something that's easily/readily available, cheap, and efficient...

THAT'S the answer.

...I expected some kind of Back to the Future flying car.

I thought moller skycar.

So how much energy does it take to produce large amounts of compressed air at stations though?

I always thought its a cool concept. Too bad it will get a terrible start if it becomes commercially viable and ever came to the US. Oil companies and automobile producers will find a way to kill it and probably won't get any support from the government.

If we used completely renewable sources to produce our electricity, it wouldn't matter.

So its a steam engine without a boiler.

In the sense that it uses pressure to move the engine, yes.

It's retarded because you still need energy to compress the air in the first place. How efficient is that? And how efficient is the engine? Also, it looks stupid. Make it look cool. I'm not a scientist.

Not necessarily. At the moment you can probably get a lot more power from air than you can from batteries, since battery technology is still very primitive.

Also, about the aesthetics? It's a prototype, dumbass.

These ones are just prototypes, and the prototype can different heavily in aesthetics from the final thing.

Also I fail to see how that would make it retarded, I mean it's not like we already use crapload of energy looking for, tapping and extracting oil, probably a lot more energy than it would take to compress a tank of air.

An engine that ran off compressed air with a backup boiler for steam engine function would be nice. Run out of air and you could make it back home with the boiler.

If you had a backup power source, why not just compress more air with it?

I know it's a prototype. You're trying to tell me that the real thing isn't also going to look stupid? It will.

I hadn't thought about the energy overhead for petroleum, though, that makes sense.

Allright folks, time for some quick wikifacts!

Energy Density (According to wikipedia, best values given for each)



Now, while you will easily notice that Compressed air is nearly twice as efficient at storing energy as current battery technology is, the most important factor here is the staggering gap between virtually all alternative energy storage technologies and plain old gasoline. To be honest, we just can't compete right now, and nothing short of a complete overhaul of the way the western world handles transportation will make anything other than gasoline viable on a large scale.

Also, just for fun.

Because steam engines are awesome and you can put whistles on them.

Also, what the hell does it matter what an engine looks like? Engines are hidden anyway.

But if this became popular, it might undercut some of OPEC's ridiculously large returns on oil. Which would drive prices down.

I'm all for it in that sense, at least.

From what I could hear in the video the car sounds like it's really loud. I guess as long as we can get around it's okay if everyone goes deaf.

Oh, my bad I forgot you're omniscient.

Following the current trend, it would drive the price up. Their profit goes down, so they increase prices to bring profit back up to previous levels. Stupid, but that's what would happen.

The main thing with this is you could reduce city smog. The only potential harmful element in the exhaust would be some of the oil escaping the filters since the input would be oil-misted to reduce oxidation.
It's not massively efficient because the air compressors themselves will rely on oil one way or the other and so it's another step of processing energy that inevitably results in further loss. It's not going to undercut OPEC in any sense.

I won't look at alt-fueled cars until they can handle 1200 miles in 19 hours.

It's difficult to create a device less efficient than the internal combustion engine. Plus, the more centralized and stationary pollution from whatever is powering the air compressors would be easier to deal with than millions of moving pollution-emitters.

Just like in cars currently available, that's not likely. You CAN have oil get into the cylinders and come out through the exhaust (as black smoke since it gets partially burned) but that's not how either engine is designed. They will have gaskets to keep the oil out of the cylinders, which will be replaced if the fail. Just like current engines. But you ARE right, that seems to be the ONLY possible pollutant that could come from this thing, and that's damn cool.

Really.

Google ballpark Internal Combustion Engines at 30% efficiency, for a REAL (IE non ideal) engine operating between ambient air temperature and 2300 K. That's not bad at all, and some reports place it as hight as 40%.

Quick google for air compressor efficiency, 10%.

Alright, centralized pollution production is preferable, I'll give you that point.

Still PEOPLE, RESEARCH YOUR ARGUMENTS. 3 seconds of google or wikipedia can add so much to your arguments. We are better than resorting to "OPEC IS TRYING TO STOP THE TRUTH" arguments. OPEC might be evil, that's another argument entierly, but LOOK at the technology, READ, DO THE MATH. If OPEC really is conspiring to stop alternative energy vechiles, they wouldn't have to try to hard.

Yeah, one of the main problems with CAES at the moment is dealing with the heat problem. It's pretty much impossible to compress air adiabatically so heat is inevitablty generated in the process. If this dissipates you're looking at a pressure drop/lost energy. This also means that when you run a generator/whatever off the compressed air, it'll drop to stupidly cold temperatures and to avoid damage you'll have to pre-heat the air anyway, probably using some sort of fossil fuel.

black smoke is raw fuel, blue smoke is oil

If you hate gas prices SO ****ING MUCH, get a small bore motorcycle.

Honda Nighthawk gets like 50-70 mpg.

My small bore Honda S90 from the 60's gets like 100mpg, doesn't even run right on unleaded gas, has an oil leak, and has been sitting for 25 years.

Depends on how much oil is getting into the cylinders.

But yeah, a two stroke that isn't oil injected will spit out blue smoke.

Motorcycles make a lot of sense until someone squishs you. :/

Apology accepted.

leaded gas is so much better for the engine, it's acts as a lubricant

One thing that could seriously improve fuel efficiency is making your cars narrower, reducing the weight and the wetted area of the vehicle. You Americans could probably make a decent dent in your fuel consumption/pollution simply by building your cars on a scale more like ours in Europe.

100mpg? Good heavens, the car broke world records. You just found the car-of-tomorrow.

I know.

But I don't really care, because it's easy to find parts for the engine it's still made.

I also can't use synthetic oil or I have transmission problems.

It's a motorcycle, and it's only 89cc.

It gets good mileage because it's so small.

I mentioned the Nighthawk because you can get them up to like 75-80mph. My S90 only gets up to like 60, 65 if I REALLY PUSH IT. You also have to keep in mind I'm not a fatty mc fatterson.

I hate huge cars, too. Trucks are a different issue. However, small cars suck. I'm 6'3" and I hate sitting in most MEDIUM sized cars.

Completely renewable sources are very inefficient and would have an absolutely massive and unacceptable impact on the environment even if we were able to fully implement them. What we need to do is build more efficient nuclear power plants.

The only way we'll be able to replace gasoline is by 1) making something that's cheap enough that the people who need cheap gas will want to buy it, and 2) making it easily chargeable from the home. We have to reduce our reliance on our massive infrastructure of gas stations before we can think about replacing it. It's just not economical to buy a car that uses alternative fuels because there are too few filling stations. And it's not economical to convert fuel stations because no one has cars that use alternative fuels. It's a catch-22 that is too big for a brute force solution. Another problem with alternative fuels is that the only reason they're cheap, is that no one is using them. Once people start using them, prices will shoot through the roof. Heck, ethanol has driven corn prices up like crazy and hardly anyone uses that.

Everyone approaches this with the wrong idea. You can't just say "Hurr lets save the planet! Here is something vastly less efficient that will do just that." There are not a significant amount of people who want or are able to throw their money away on things like that. The only way to initiate real change is to make something that is functionally better than what we have now. Transportation is so deeply embedded into our society that it is impossible to make sweeping changes if they are functionally a step backwards. People come up with stupid "environmentally friendly" ideas and blame big oil for making them fail. The reason they fail is because they suck. The only way we can make real changes is by making things that actually make sense to buy, and to do that it needs to have real world benefits. I agree that change would be good, but you can't ignore reality.

The fuel we use for the cars themselves doesn't necessarily have to be the most efficient thing in the world, as long as our source of energy (say nuclear power plants) is sufficiently low that the we end up spending less money powering our cars. We we could make something that's cheap, reasonably practical, and significantly cheaper to power than a gasoline car, you'd be in business. Until then, your just dreaming.

I say, **** the environment before it gets the chance to **** us!