Gas 2.0

While the MDI AIRpod is hardly “new news”, nary an auto journalist has managed to get behind the joystick (no steering wheel here) to test the viability of this odd-yet-innovative vehicle. In case you haven’t heard, the MDI AIRpod is a concept vehicle designed to run solely on compressed air as means of transportation, though no working models had been released to the press. But as the AIRpod nears actual production, MDI has begun inviting journalists to take a whirl in a prototype model, and Edmunds Inside Line was first in the queae it seems.

The AIRpod they drove was only a prototype, so you can take from their impressions what you will. But, just having the AIRpod on the road is a major first step towards actual commercialization of what was once just a wacky concept.

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An ‘air car’ sure sounds clean.  A car that runs on air?  What’s cleaner than that?  But of course it’s not quite that simple.

The world’s first commercial air car is currently being produced by India’s largest automaker, Tata Motors, who is licensing the technology from European-based company MDI.  A compressed-air car uses the force of super-compressed air to move the engine’s pistons up and down, as opposed to explosions produced from injecting a small amount of fuel.  At higher speeds the engine will burn a small amount of fuel to create more compressed air, sort of like how a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt produces on-the-fly electricity. The hybrid air-car setup should be able use any number of fuels, including gasoline, propane, or ethanol.

So now that we’ve established how the Air Car will work, how green is it?

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Compressed-Air Powered cars could take you over 800 miles on a single fill-up, at speeds of up to 96 mph. They should refuel in less than 3 minutes, and at speeds over 35 mph emit about half the CO2 of a Toyota Prius. Best part? You could see them in the US at the end of next year.

Car-tech aficionados may already be familiar with Zero Pollution Motor’s (ZPM) compressed-air powered car. For those that haven’t heard of it yet, read on:

“The compressed air vehicle is a new generation of vehicle that finally solves the motorist’s dilemma: how to drive and not pollute at a cost that is affordable!”

What happens when you replace the explosions in your car’s combustion chamber with clean compressed air? Well, as long as you lighten things up by replacing heavier parts with aluminum, you end up with a clean, efficient way to power a vehicle. Read the rest of this entry »