Air Powered Cars

Posted by Shaun on September 23rd, 2006 filed in Technology

I happened upon a couple of videos (through Digg) of a Science show. The topic was air powered cars. Stupidly, my first thought is how do you drive a car on air? Well, these cars have motors that rely on compressed air to rotate the driveshaft instead of combustion.

After watching both videos I think the guy in Melbourne has the better design. The guy in Nice just took an ordinary internal combustion engine and modified the design to run on air. The guy in Melbourne design a new, very small, rotary engine. Rotary engines as (as I understand it) far more efficient.

Even with an air powered car you would need to use some power to compress the air before you fill the car. The big savings comes from having a car engine that runs very efficiently. Instead of going 300 miles on a fill up, these may be able to go 3000. Not bad. Now, let’s make it happen.

Part 1