If you could power your car off of compressed air from a standard air compressor, would you?The above link leads to a car called the "City flow Air" made by a company called Motor Development International, based in luxembourg. They have a line of cars from small, three person cars (airPod) to goods/passenger transport vehicles (MultiFlowAir), they currently *AREN'T* in production, but the company predicts to have a factory starting in New York near the end of 2010/start of 2011. These vehicles are run off of compressed air, some of them hybrid air/gas vehicles, some full air.
The city flow air, full air compression version, gets up to about 70 mph, the hybrid version up to about 80. The hybrid version gets around 1500 KM (almost 1,000 miles) to a full tank of gas. The way their "Hybrid" versions work is that they work off of air up until a certain point (i think like 40-50 mph) then kicks in the gas power for the upper speeds. Obviously this vehicle isn't a speed demon/hot rod sort of car. Obviously, it's very environment friendly.
The prices for each are projected at approx. this (in US dollars, converted from euros):
AirPod ~ (no Current price estimate)
OneFlowAir (basic Model) ~ $5,000
OneFlowAir (standard model) ~ $7,000
MiniFlowAir ~$12,000
CityFlowAir ~ $17,000
So my question is this. Would you support the idea of car fuel sources moving to Air Compression? The technology appears to be quite possible, and economical. In theory, would you like to see this fully replace petroleum driven vehicles, or would you just want it to become a "hybrid" driven vehicle technology? Personally, I'm kinda interested to see if this can be incorporated with either electric or hydrogen, to create a very economical, clean vehicle power source. Mostly, I just wanna save a bunch of money on gas.
Edit: Oops, forgot to post this, as well.
This page contains a demo of their 2002 experimental vehicle. They still currently use it as a test vehicle. Note that it is very bare bones, and has no sound suppression at all.