Right now Neil Cavuto is on Fox News. There was just a segment where Pat Boone was talking about "air cars" and I just have to say something. It is an interesting concept, like electric cars but again just like them entirely misses the point.
Basically this car is based around a very strong tank filled with very compressed air. You are not going to be able to get an adapter and just blow real hard into this thing, I would wager a bicycle pump would not work either. You are going to need some sort of a real heavy compressor to fill this thing up. Just like the 'pollution free' electric cars this compressor will run on electricity. Guess where most electricity comes from, coal (yeah I know there is 'clean coal' but lets not get too complicated) and huge diesel generators.
This is like saying that a hot casserole a neighbor brings over is 'cooking free' because it was in the neighbors oven, not yours. I am not saying that we shouldn't seek more efficient vehicles. Between sheer cost, our national security and peak oil sooner or later (likely sooner) the day of people driving their fossil fuel jobs from a small farm or the suburbs are going to end. In order to avoid anything but a massive and probably negative shift in our life patterns we need to keep independent transportation affordable. However lets be honest about it. If we produce power from a combination of wind and nuclear power it would be very close to 'pollution free' but a cord going into a wall that leads to a coal plant or even better a diesel generator it is not pollution free.
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Maybe we are supposed to eat beans or heavily buttered potatoes to power these cars? Pneumatic cars does not sound very practical, but at least, it is something 'out of the box'.
Some of the 1st car designs were steam powered, and maybe this technology might become useful in the future, should oil become scarce or non existent.
I deal with environmentalists on a regulor basis and their disconnect from the total picture drives me nuts. Some enviros are against nuke plants bacause of residual waste. Some enviros are against coal plants because of carbon emmisions. Yet all these same activists will demand additional water treatment which promises no benefits but will require many new power plant sources to operate. Basically, enviros do not like people because we breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2, because we drink pure water and excrete out pollutants, and because we live and develop natural areas. Practical solutions to current problems cannot be driven by people with this type of mindset.
SED
Yes, big compressors would be required to fill it. Which would be horribly inefficient, because you got to convert fuel to electricity, electricity to compressed air, then compressed air to mechanical force. Just skip the middle men and convert fuel to mechanical motion (oh wait, we already do that...). And if you think a gasoline explosion is impressive, just wait 'till your 4000 PSI air tank gets rear-ended...
It won't save any energy....the energy required to compress the air in the first place is massive and inefficient. Further, range is nearly non-existent, because of the size of the tank required.
Physics (especially the laws of thermodynamics) aren't just a good idea, they're the law.
Finally, we have pretty stringent rules about pressure tanks (fire extinguishers, dive tanks, oxygen tanks, etc) for a reason: They are dangerous to handle.
I think we have to count every last kilowatt and erg of electricity as being coal and oil fired, until the last coal and oil fired plant is retired.
The point is that even if your electricity comes from a wind turbine, by using that energy you force someone else onto the coal plant's output.
We have to reduce electricity use as well as build alternate capacity, to achieve any real difference. As I speak, a friend that does pipefitting is working on a new coal-fired plant. There can be no "green" electricity until the last fossil fuel plant is retired.
And when you run out of "air" on the highway, you won't be able to hike to the nearest service station for a gallon of "air."
Not to mention the friggin' thing is a damn death trap. I'll drive the fart-mobile if everyone else does, but if there's so much as ONE SUV on the road, forget about it...
Snoop-Diggity-DANG-Dawg
I absolutely love the casserole/cooking-free analogy. That hits the nail on the head. All these "alternative" source items still reqiure fossil fuels in one form or another. A tremendous amount of oil is used in the fabrication of all the materials required to build a car.
while it isn't ideal, burning coal to generate electricity to run your car is MUCH cleaner, and much more efficient, than burning gasoline in your car.
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