Nothing revolutionary here. We could have done this 150 years ago but something else was, and still is, better. Next please.

PS - Until I can spend $3500 on it and pull 1.8x 60' times and sub 13 second 1/4 mile passes, I don't want it

I think the main disadvantage to this idea is actually condensation. Even with the best filters and with filling the vessel from another compressor you'll still end up with quite a bit.

That means depressurizing your fuel tank and draining it at least once a day, or risking corrosion and an eventual blowout.

Jon, the cylinders are made from carbon fiber.

So you don't want it unless it can break the speed limit?

What do you mean by "made from?" A lot of air compressors are metal/carbon fiber composites and they're still susceptable to corrosion (particularly galvanic corrosion - and the check valve is an unavoidable metal contact point).
CFRPs are hardly "corrosion-proof" either. They're resistant, certainly, but they do slowly but steadily degrade when in contact with water. I'm going to assume they're using MMCs due to the kind of pressure they'd need to be storing.

That's not really the point, though. You'd need to be able to evacuate the condensation somehow. Even ignoring the corrosion issue, condensation impacts performance. Autovents waste air and they aren't terribly reliable, and you can't really evacuate condensation by hand safely unless you reduce the pressure to 20 PSI.

Um, no. If you read my post again, you, and everybody else, can clearly see thats not what I said.

Back on topic - We are totally barking up the wrong tree looking at cars to try and fix the pollution problem. YES, cars contribute to a lot, if not most, air pollution at least in the US that I know of. It is however a technology that is "maxed out", if you will, within the bounds of current infrastructure. There is all kinds of technology to make a cleaner car, but NONE of it is practical. Nobody knows how to practically solve the transportation issue. Wasting our time on the issue of polluting cars is going to get us nowhere, very, very, slowly.

We must look at other sources of pollution. A big one in particular is power plants. The other major contributor to air pollution is fossil fuel burning power plants. This is a technology that is NOT maxed out within it's infrastructure, and in fact we have the technology TODAY to start replacing every single one of our coal power plants with a clean burning, SAFE, nuclear reactor!

It's really too bad that the freak NIMBY tree huggers afraid of Nuclear plants are the same idiots that buy Hybrid cars because they think they're doing the world a favor. Hope it feels good knowing you're part of a solution curve that is already flattening out, because there is NO REPLACEMENT FOR THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE.

Imagine if we no longer had to burn fossil fuels like coal or gasoline to generate power. It would take MUCH more stress of the environment much quicker than we could even HOPE to accomplish by trying to clean up our cars. And for those freaking out about the supply of fossil fuels diminishing, it would take stress off that issue as well. And guess what happens to be a by-product of a nuclear reacting power plant? Thats right, pure hydrogen! How convenient! Maybe the stress taken off the infrastructure AND the environment by building nuclear power plants would buy us some time DOWN THE ROAD to develop a replacement for the internal combustion engine in cars, something thats not going to happen for a VERY long time anyway.

What about having an air lock style thing, which you would place some highly absorbent material in? That would allow you to remove it without letting much pressure out. Seems like a decent solution to me. I'm not familiar with how much water forms though.

That's *sorta* how filters work.

The amount of condensation that forms depends on a lot of factors, like the volume of air, the amount of compression and the initial humidity of the air. Most of the moisture will be taken out by the initial fuel compressor, a little more of it will be removed by a filter. No matter how much you pre-condition the air, you're still going to have some condensation.

Condensation, by the way, is the number one cause for failure in pneumatic tools (followed shortly by dust). The entire vehicle is going to have to be moisture-hardened. And even the best, biggest commercial compressors need to have the condensation evacuated after every few hours of use. You'd be surprised at how much water builds up.

It's going to take a combination of lots of changes to make a difference. There are already laws and policies restricting the creation of new coal plants in many countries. It would be terrific of the whole world could go nuclear, or wind, or solar, but guess what? Not everyone has that technology yet.

And I really don't understand why you seem to think there won't be a replacement for the gas engine in cars. Fully electric cars have been making huge strides over the past few years, and this air car thing, from what I've seen, will be a pretty awesome system when it's completed.

What else can we do? We can reduce our meat consumption, pay more attention to the hundreds of tiny opportunities we have ever day to conserve, vote democrat, and for god's sake, stop the production of biofuels until it's efficient enough that it actually helps the atmosphere instead of making it worse.

(sorry if that was incoherent, I'm falling asleep.)

That makes sense. Some way to automatically drain the water seems like the only viable solution then.

I was primarily talking about the USA, and I know damn well that we have that technology. We just aren't utilizing it like we should. And I never said there wont be a replacement for gas engine in cars, I said there wont be a replacement for gas engines anytime soon. A full replacement of the gas engine is very far off and our efforts today would be MUCH better spent on other sources of pollution. The other technology will come in time.

Autovents waste a lot of air and they aren't terribly reliable. Most of them use a kind of ultrasound sensor deal to detect the volume of air in the canister, and then they electrically pull open the drain valve and use the canister's air pressure to blow the condensation out. This would be noisy, wasteful and prone to failure. On a humid day the autovent will also completely ice over.