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Narrator: This is a tile of two very different cities. Two remarkable men and two similar but have different inventions that could revolutionize car engines.
Graham Phillips: What has the French Riviera got in common with Melbourne, they both host grand prix’s of course but they also both have companies developing a new kind of engine that runs on pure air. Now, power tools of course have run on air power for decades but no one has been able to turn that technology to cars. Well, there is a French company here in Venice that has done it. Maybe an air car revolution is about to happen.
Narrator: The cost of feeding the average families’ car with fuel is about $60.00 per week and rising. For hybrid, the average is about half that but imagine this, a whole week of driving for only a few dollars.
Welcome to the place that could make it all happen. This is the factory of MDI, Motor Development International. It is runned by inventor Guy Negre. Fifteen years ago this French engineer was designing state of the art formula 1 engines. Today, he is leading the race to design the world’s first commercial air driven car.
This factory is experimenting with vans, taxis, and people motors that could one day go non-stop with incredible 4500 kilometers on just one tank of fuel.
Graham Phillips: Guy Negre has been working for this air car for ten years. These are just some of the prototypes and when I say air it runs on compressed air of course. The compressed air pushes the pistons in the engine up and down rather than tiny explosions of petro like in the conventional engine but doing that with air is a real challenge but the reward is you end up with a car whose only emission from the exhaust pipe is clean breathable air.
Of course the real engine of the heat is under here, the engine. Now it is a four-cylinder piston engine just like a regular car but there are significant differences. For a start, that engine weighs less than half of the regular engine. That is because a little of the component have been made of aluminum, now the reason they can do that is because there is no combustion. This is driven by air pressure, in fact you can hold your hand on that engine when it is running and it will just feel warm. So it is well below the melting temperature of aluminum which means it is something like 80% of this engine is made from that light weight material.
Narrator: So, instead of those tiny hot explosions of petrol and oxygen that is pushing the pistons up and down like in a normal internal combustion engine, the air engine has compressed air doing the job instead.
Graham Phillips: This is what the air car looks like underneath the sits. There are three compressed air cylinders. Cut away and moved over here. Now, the pressure in these things is 300 hundred Barr that is 150 times the pressure you put your car tires to. So, very high pressure environment and that is why there might have a carbon fiber. If they have made this with metal, if you had a car accident they could explode and send shrapnel everywhere whereas the carbon fiber just splits.
Now the chassis itself is made of aluminum. The key to an air car is to keep everything light weight so you get the best possible mileage. Okay, we are good to go. Hey its working.
Push button from years from now but the final version will be automatic. Now, keep in mind this is just a prototype so feel the drives but it is much slower than the normal car. Now, when I do finally go to market with these cars they said it will have a top speed of about 110 kilometers an hour, you should get about 200 kilometers out of the tanks in the back before you have to refill which is pretty convenient for city driving that is pretty good I would say.
Narrator: The car can be refueled from the compressed air service station in just three minutes or plug it in to a power port at home and the onboard compressor will do the job in four hours for about two dollars worth of electricity.
Graham Phillips: For country driving, I plan to use a hybrid engine so it will be petrol or even some bio fuel that will help the air so that should get much faster car and also the one that will get a lot further.
Narrator: The hybrid engine would use a small amount of petrol to compress air as it go and on just one tank of petrol you could get from Brisbane to Perth or from Los Angeles to new York. How is that for fuel economy? MDI plan to have these first cars on sale in Europe by next year. Engines will be available in two, four, and six cylinders with cars price are starting from less than $15,000.00.
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