In the race to eliminate the strong dependence of fossil fuels and gasoline or diesel fuel for automobiles one of the new technologies being tested is in using compressed air to power runabout vehicles.

Enter the Air Car:
A Formula One race car driver by the name of Guy Negre is the driving force behind the initial testing and production stages to produce a vehicle that does not require gasoline or a bank of electrical battery charges.

Compressed Air Motor:
As I understand it the idea came to Negre after thinking about the compressed air motors that are used to rapid start the Formula One race car engines. You may be familiar with such a device that is used on certain big rig trucks and heavy machinery where the engine being cold would be hard to spin over, they use a blast of compressed air in a small booster starter motor to get the diesel engine turning over fast enough to take off running on its own.

FlowAIR:
This concept has been engineered and refined and scaled to the size required to operate small personal vehicles. Originally these cars were going to be called CAT meaning Compressed Air Technology, but it seems as though another little company by the name of Caterpiller had that name locked up and the new car manufacturer has decided to name them FlowAIR which seems appropriate and also has a little play on the word Flower.

It is unknown when the actual production will be sufficient to make a difference in our environment and various starting dates and production companies have been changed from time to time.

Economy:
It seems likely that this will be a difficult product to launch in a down economy as investors seem to be a little edgy lately. But who knows? Many fortunes have been made before in a down market and maybe this is just the thing to give the economy a little kick start also.

Their website claims that they are taking orders for 2010 delivery. We wish them well. We love the idea that this car would have almost Zero CO2 emissions, as the by product is guess what? AIR !

Here are some websites that discuss the Air Car:

http://zeropollutionmotors.us/

http://www.mdi.lu/english/

If any of you readers happen to know any more about this Air Car project or any news about production we would love to hear from you about it.

Tags: air car, flowair, guy negre

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 4:14 am and is filed under green fuel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.