Air-Car Ready for Mass Production

From Yahoo! Green:

The world's first commercial compressed air-powered vehicle is rolling towards the production line. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre, will be built by India's largest automaker, Tata Motors.

The Air Car uses compressed air to push its engine's pistons. It is anticipated that approximately 6000 Air Cars will be cruising the streets of India by 2008.

[...]

Unfortunately, the streets of North America may never see the Air Car, though; it's light-weight, glued-together fiberglass construction might not do so well in our crash tests. However, that does not mean the Air car is confined to the sub-continent. Nègre has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

And this isn't the last we'll hear of the technology. The folks making the Air Car are already working on a hybrid version that would use an on-board, gasoline-powered compressor to refill the air tanks when they run low. Negre says that technology could easily squeeze a cross country trip out of one tank of gasoline.

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I'm not sure why I post so much stuff straight from Yahoo's headlines, because being from Yahoo, everyone's probably already read it or at least seen the headline. But I thought this was pretty cool. I'm a little too tired for any kind of scholarly commentary, but I think we can all agree that this kind of technology doesn't fly in the States not just because the "glued together" nature of these particular cars "wouldn't do well in our crash tests," but because the oil industry is so powerful and influential here. Fuck them. They're literally killing us slowly every day, in more ways than one.