CitiCAT compressed-air car coming to U.S.

With all the talk about upcoming battery-powered and fuel-cell electric cars, it’s easy to overlook the air car. That’s right, air car.

Now Popular Mechanics reports that a car that runs on compressed air will come to the United States for 2010. Unlike other air-car models being designed for Europe and India, the United States will get a six-passenger, vanlike model called the CitiCAT. Zero Pollution Motors, based in New Paltz, NY, says it will produce up to 10,000 of the models at several plants in the States.

Its specially-designed piston engine will run on either compressed air stored in an onboard tank, or, after the air pressure runs out, on gasoline or ethanol. The car will reportedly have about an eight gallon tank for liquid fuel, which will give the car a range between 800 and 1,000 miles.

It will cost just under $18,000.

We’ll believe it when we drive it—and we just might for the Automotive X Prize competition. Until then, imminent production intent could be just hot air.

—Eric Evarts

Comments

[David Brodbeck]

This is not a new idea. The major problem is the overall efficiency is usually ruinously low. When you compress the air, it gets hot, and when it cools in the storage tank all that heat energy is a total loss. Then, when you start to take air out of the storage tank, the expansion cools it, reducing its energy content further and creating potential ice build-up problems in the engine. You can get around some of this by reheating the air before it enters the engine, but that requires burning some kind of fuel and you no longer have a zero-emissions vehicle.

There's a good article about the history of compressed air propulsion here, that explains a lot of these problems in more detail:
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/comprair/comprair.htm

[Geo. Whetstine]

How 'bout we let our current crop of pols in DC drive these. They seem to have a genteel sufficiency of hot air so theoretically they could be the driver and the fuel supply.