Voiture à air comprimé

[Chazam]

By Bob Ewing

The world's first commercial compressed air-powered vehicle is rolling towards the production line. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre, will be built by India's largest automaker, Tata Motors.

The Air Car uses compressed air to push its engine's pistons. It is anticipated that approximately 6000 Air Cars will be cruising the streets of India by 2008. If the manufacturers have no surprises up their exhaust pipes the car will be practical and reasonably priced. The CityCat model will clock out at 68 mph with a driving range of 125 miles.

Refueling is simple and will only take a few minutes. That is, if you live nearby a gas station with custom air compressor units. The cost of a fill up is approximately $2.00. If a driver doesn't have access to a compressor station, they will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car's built-in compressor to refill the tank in about 4 hours.

The compressed air technology is basically just a way of storing electrical energy without the need for costly, heavy, and occasionally toxic batteries. So, in a sense, this is an electric car. It just doesn't have an electric motor.

But don't let anyone tell you this is an "emissions free" vehicle. Sure, the only thing coming out of the tailpipe is air. But, chances are, fossil fuels were burned to create the electricity. In India, that mostly means coal. But the carbon emissions per mile of these things still far outdoes any gasoline car on the market.


Unfortunately, the streets of North America may never see the Air Car, though; it's light-weight, glued-together fiberglass construction might not do so well in our crash tests. However, that does not mean the Air car is confined to the sub-continent. Nègre has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

And this isn't the last we'll hear of the technology. The folks making the Air Car are already working on a hybrid version that would use an on-board, gasoline-powered compressor to refill the air tanks when they run low. Negre says that technology could easily squeeze a cross country trip out of one tank of gasoline.

Voilà le lien : http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/315

En résumé :

Son inventeur et promoteur : Guy Nègre, ancien ingénieur en formule 1.

vitesse autour de 100km/h, autonomie d'environ 200 km. recharger la bouteille d'air comprimé prend quelques minutes dans une station adaptée, et coûte 2$. La recharger chez soi en branchant la voiture sur une prise électrique prend 4h. Très gros avantage : voiture "électrique" (c'est l'électricité qui est utilisée pour comprimer l'air dans le réservoir d'air) sans batteries. inconvénients : pour des raisons de recherche légereté, sa structure est en fibres de carbone et semble poser des problèmes aux crash-tests américains... (pas de tôle pliable... )

6000 voitures devraient être vendues en Inde en 2008. 12 pays se sont montrés très intéressés par cette voiture et cette technologie (qui existe depuis des années soit dit en passant), dont l'Allemagne, Israel ou l'Afrique du Sud.