Baby, You Can Drive My Air-Powered Car
With a family of four, I’ve lately been trying to figure out how to wedge my crew into a single car. Sounds easy, but have you seen how big car seats are now? The one for our toddler consumes so much space that the front passenger seat in my Subaru Forrester is pushed all the way forward and can’t be moved back. My four-year-old daughter, who sits behind me on the driver’s side, is wedged in to the point where here feet are constantly in my back. Isn’t the point of an SUV (even a small one like the Forrester) to avoid such cramped spaces?
And so we have begun to tentatively look for a larger vehicle. But I’m environmentally conscious (really!), and I don’t want to drive an even larger vehicle that uses even more gas and makes even more pollution. And so we’ve started looking into hybrids, but selection at the SUV and minivan level has been fairly disappointing. This is all a roundabout way of getting to the entire point of this post: A new technology using compressed air as fuel is showing incredible promise. In fact, it’s so far along that the first model is headed for release this year.
Celsias has tons of details, including an extensive video on how it works. Unlike, say, fuel cells, the technology is hardly groundbreaking. Standard combustion engines use tiny explosions to create pressure in the cylinders, causing the pistons to move. With the air-car, the same cylinder-piston structure is used, but instead of gasoline going into the cylinder, a blast of compressed air forces the pistons to move. The only fuel used is for the creation of the compressed air, which can be done at home before you leave (and offering a 125 mile range), or, if everything pans out, via a hybrid system that will compress air via a small gas-powered compressor. The Celsias story says that such a system could provide 2,800 miles of range on one tank of gas.
Naturally, the first model of air-powered car isn’t much to look at, strongly resembling the tiny, electric “Smart Cars” you see buzzing around the tourist traps. But an engine is an engine… if this little guy delivers, I’m sure it could be adapted to other vehicles. Might I suggest an SUV?
© 2007 Christopher Null
