More often than I care to admit as a younger man I’ve gone half-cocked into situations thinking simple obvious solutions just needed to be implemented to make things happen, only to be faced with schooling myself on all the stuff I’d failed to account for. Finally, I learned to assume that if things weren’t going as easily as I thought they should, then it was almost certainly more complicated than I had assumed.

In other words, any humbleness I have was beaten into me. :-)

I heard a mechanical engineer on a radio talk show once, and he gave me a little 2-sentence mechanical engineering insight which I think sketches out an invaluable framework for critical thinking in our modern era. He said “We can build a plane so that when it crashes, no one dies. As long as we are willing to pay $20,000 for a flight to Cleveland.”

Always remembered. Often repeated.

I agree completely, and as a mechanical engineer I could go on a thesis sized rant on the physics and realities of this, but I’ll spare everyone here. Since you already made a bunch of good points against it. Bottom line, this thing is a dangerous energy sink. And it needs to be treated as such.

What, you thought economic multipliers only applied to spending, and not to taxations? Heh.

If we care about energy, the environmnet, conservation, and so on, then we’re going to be spending the next couple decades up to our loins in green comparisons of efficiency and emissions and footprints and so on.

So henceforth, let’s all stipulate that’s the first rule of green comparisons: count everything.

Which claim of course completely avoids and obscures the fact that the power generation required to “fuel” the vehicle is enormously less efficient (and thus MORE polluting) than that required for, say, an electric vehicle. Pretty dishonest, no?

Moving the required energy-generation emissions from one place to another does not make them go away, which is what the statement implies. The vehicle is not actually “cleaner” if it still requires that X amount of emissions be created for it to run.

“Vencat … counters that the car is cleaner than any internal combustion engine and remarkably simpler—and cheaper—than more advanced powertrains currently under development.”

Maybe the target market is not “green” but simple, inexpensive low-range people movers for urban environments. Wonder if you could power moped with this technology.

Cost/benefit. Show me the money. Ain’t no free lunch.

It may or may not play out in the future and you are right that it needs to be quantified but it is far more compelling when there is something to test that actually works today. I have hope that for the next four years science will actually be the guide for judgment. It hasn’t been in some time.

Yeah, we’re gonna run an engine of some sort to compress air to run an engine of some sort to move a car! No added efficiency removes there, no sirree…and there’s nothing dangerous about highly compressed gasses whether volatile/flammable or not…nope, safe as houses. ;-)

When assessing alt-energy proposals for vehicles the first thing I look at is the real cost/benefit factor. The primary object of ANY vehicle propellant/fuel production is to turn non-portable energy into usable portable energy, which is a consideration conspicuously missing in most alt-energy-vehicle arguments. The real figures to use for energy efficiency there involve how much (MEASURED IN DOLLARS*) dependable non-portable energy (be it wind, solar, hydrogen generation, or whatever) is required, and what the final cost of the usable portable energy output is (MEASURED IN DOLLARS*) as delivered to the consumer of same.

Ethanol is a good case in point. Before gasoline became supreme, Henry Ford’s cars were made to run on either gas or ethanol, because gas stations were rare and farmers could make their own ethanol. It might take a farmer four units of stationary energy to get one unit of portable ethanol fuel, but they could capture those non-portable inputs at low cost. (Had Prohibition not come along when it did, Big Oil might never have gotten quite so big.)

Or electric vehicles–home electric production from solar panels is beginning to approach cost viability as the tech improves. If/when it gets to the same cost as pulling kWh’s from the local grid, electric cars become MUCH more viable, as the cost to consumers of their vehicle usage drops when they become capable of grabbing cost-competitive inputs for self-generation. Applies equally whether you’re topping up the Li-Ion batteries on your electric Honda or using the juice to compress air for your PuffMobile.

A quantum cost reduction in the technology of portable electric production and the argument will be over–our vehicles will become capable of “re-fueling” themselves, given enough time between usages. Outdoor parking spaces in sunlight might become actually desirable!

[*--You have to measure in dollars (or yen, whatever) because that is the one mechanism available for standardizing actual costs between different inputs in anything resembling an open marketplace. As command/control economies keep re-discovering the hard way.]

As Tully points out, there is no reason whatsoever why this technology HAS TO be more efficient etc etc. Further, we have no reason whatsoever to think you have ANY of the knowledge required to be able to make such a judgement. S why do it?

In the future, could you at the very least keep in mind that you always have to carefully measure the inputs and the outputs? And that you have to count everything in the way of inputs and outputs?

The answers to whether or not this is a promising approach involve measuring, counting, equations, and so on. It’s blind optimism about alternative approaches that leads to investigating and subsidizing the wrong things, meaning that everyone ends up paying more, regardless of whether or not we really GET more.

I really, really, REALLY want the judgments about alternative approaches and funding and subsidizing and researching them left to engineers and mechanics who will do ruthless math. Politicians and the most doe-eyed of greens simply do not have the tools necessary to MAKE sound judgements.

I agree completely for once. Air powered cars are the laughing stock of engineers. Now instead of running a motor to directly turn wheels, you’re turning a motor to compress air to turn wheels. The more processes you have, you take an efficiency hit at each one, so the less energy you put to the wheels. I did a quick calculation once to figure out how much horsepower it would take to charge a tank in 3 minutes to power a similar car. The horsepower was in the thousands. Can you imagine the emissions and fuel used for that??? And not to mention the safety issues. A tank holding that kind of air would be hotter than hell and would contain a HUGE amount of energy, making it very volatile in an accident, or if a weld pops, etc.

This is nothing but a giant LOL, something I would see on Pundit Kitchen. I’ve come to expect better from Justin.

Why does it HAVE to be less? Indeed, it could easily be more. The energy to compress that air has to come from somewhere. How efficiently does the compression process convert that energy into mileage? What fuel and other resources are required to produce that energy? Glad someone noticed that compressed air is NOT fuel. It’s propellant. Ask any welder what happens when a tank of ANY super-compressed gas ruptures, especially catastrophically.

Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The purpose of either vehicle propellant or fuel is to store energy for later use in moving the vehicle around. For compressed air to be commercially viable as a propellant system, the availability, price per mile and usable range of that system have to be competitive with the other available fuels/propellants.

But it would be pretty cool if it were commercially viable. If KwikTrips became compressed air stations instead of gas stations, the machine that’s supposed to inflate my low tire might actually work when I need it. On the down side, run out of air on the road and I’m not wild about carrying a 100-lb tank of air back to the PuffMobile to get me to the next air station.

(RE: Ethanol–they used to call Bob Dole the Senator from Archer Daniels Midland. Hubert Humphrey was the Senator from Cargill. )

Don’t blame Iowa alone for Ethanol’s political resilience. It is the top corn-producer, but the rest of the top ten include: Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and South Dakota. Which means that if you want to become Governor of Ohio supporting Ethanol is probably really good idea. Opposing it outright is not a good idea.

In Presidential politics Ohio is probably most important in saving Ethanol. Ignoring Iowa entirely during the primary process is a risky strategy, but it’s also feasible. The last guy to win the White House without Ohio was JFK.

That being said, I wonder how much the cost of the electricity would be to power the air compressor? … and how much does a tank of compressed air weigh? … it’s got to be multiple times less than a fuel cell battery.

lol, biggest problem would be figuring out how to effectively tax air.

Oh, yea and unless Des Moines suddenly becomes the air compressor producing capital of the world, I suspect that ethanol will probably be with us for quite a while too.

And no, I don’t believe in perpetual motion machines b/c they can’t exist with the forces of gravity, friction, etc., but the system they describe could create a reality where you wouldn’t need to plug in your car for months. And that would be as close to a perpetual motion machine as we’ve seen, especially once that actually has a use.

Despite what the narrator says, the energy that is required to move the mass of the car from point A to point B will have to be generated outside the system. We are still at the same problem we have for fuel-cell and hydrogen-powered cars. How do you generate all of the power to compress the initial air?