Fact or fiction: Zero Pollution Motors plans to start building its air-powered car by 2011 at the latest. (Zero Pollution Motors)In 2000, I wrote about Motor Development International, a European company that had developed 2-cylinder cars that could run on tanks of compressed air.
Guy Nègre, a French engineer and president of M.D.I., said he would soon be building his environmentally friendly cars all over the world, at dedicated plants in Mexico, South Africa and the United States.
It’s fair to say that the experts I contacted back then were skeptical. Andrew Frank, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis, said this about compressed air: “It’s a losing game because the efficiency is just not there.”
Nevertheless, the air car appears to be staging a comeback. Operating in a vastly improved environment for clean technology, M.D.I., now based in Nice, France, made a splash last year when it announced a partnership with Tata Motors of India, builder of the forthcoming Nano. The press clearly loves the story, because it involves a vehicle that “runs on air.” The car? Well, in videos from France it looks pretty much the same, but it is actually new and improved, I’m told, with an onboard heater that kicks in at 35 miles an hour.
Shiva Vencat heads the United States operations of M.D.I. under the name Zero Pollution Motors. “We initially designed the car to run only on compressed air,” he said. “But people had an issue with the range of 50 to 60 miles. The heater, which can burn ethanol, vegetable oil or other fuels, warms up the air, increases its volume, and extends the range. It has a viscosity sensor so it can adjust to whatever fuel you put into it.”
Mr. Vencat said the six-passenger, fiberglass-and-foam-bodied air car will sell for $18,000 to $20,000 in the United States. He added that M.D.I. has more than 300 investors and has sold the rights to build 40 plants around the world. He envisions a network of small $20 million factories, each building cars at a rate of one every half hour. Plants in the United States will open in late 2010 or early 2011, he said, with the first possibly located in Newburgh, N.Y. Then again, back in 2000, Mr. Nègre said he would be building cars in 2001.
Zero Pollution Motors claims that the new and improved air car can now leapfrog any known battery technology. The company’s Web site says, in fact, that its pneumatic vehicle can travel 848 miles (with the equivalent of 106 miles per gallon) on one tank of air, though an asterisk indicates this is “estimated performance and subject to change.”
There’s still plenty of skepticism.
Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Clean Vehicles Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, says that heating the air will “maximize the thermal efficiency of the operation,” but he’s “highly dubious” of the claimed range.
“Historically speaking, the side of the road is littered with cars that have limited range or long refueling times,” he said. “And with cars like this there are upstream emissions, because you have to compress the air with something.”
But even Mr. Kliesch said he holds out hope for the success of a car that fulfills fantasies going back to Jules Verne. After all, who doesn’t like the idea of a car running on air?
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