Here are some more thoughts. For reasons of ongoing personal stupidity they all avoid gas dynamics.... You recharge the thing by plugging it in at home for four hours. The max power you can get from a standard domestic outlet is about 3kw. (230V 13A. That's how it is in this part of the world, I doubt it is orders of magnitude different elsewhere). If recharging takes 4 hours then the total energy in to the system is 3000 x 60 x 60 x 4 = about 43MJ. That is about the same amount of energy as in 1Kg of gasoline. To be fair, only about 20 - 25 % of the energy in gasoline is recoverable in a IC engine, so we can say that the air car, fully charged, has the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline on board. 190 mpg (300km/..) at moderate speeds in a superlight vehicle is not stretching the credibility envelope too far. Don't forget the mileages achived in competitions like the shell mileale marathon (>1000mpg, admittedly in super specials) Looking at my latest electricity bill, I see that the cost of night time electricity is around 4.5 pence / Kw/h. So my gallon equivalent cost me 3 x 4 x 4.5 = 54 pence. My gallon of gasoline would have cost me 3.30 GBP - 6 times as much. So, if I was happy to drive a low powered vehicle at moderate speeds for less than 300 km, i could save myself some money, and do my conscience a lot of good. This could have the edge on electric vehicles too, as storage will not degrade over time and there will be no batteries to periodically replace / dispose of. Richard -----Original Message----- From: Diego Sierra [mailto:dsierra@TELEFONICA.NET] Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 11:29 PM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT]: Air car Hi! About some of the things we talk here, a friend of mine (which read the quotes) said: > If it is, I don't know that I would consider it "safe" to be sitting > on a 4000+ psi container of compressed air in an accident. 4K psi is the pressure of the bottle he uses for scuba diving, and he doesn't know about an accident with them so far. "Is worse to sit over 50 liters of gasoline, isn't it ?". >90m3 storage / (566 cm3 x 4 cylinders x 3500 rpm) = 11.4 minutes running >time with no losses computed. They didn't say how much of the stored (compressed) air is used when injected into the cylinders. Cheers, Diego. -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body