Tata Motors Bringing In Air Car To India

The Indian auto-giant Tata Motors entered into a partnership with Luxembourg based Motor Development International (MDI), in the year 2007. The partnership was aimed at developing a car that could use compressed air as the propellant and recently Tata Motors has announced that it has successfully built and tested two vehicles with compressed air engine. Next agenda with these two companies is to build a variant of the compressed air engine which is commercially feasible so that it can be used in future products and also set up a manufacturing plant that would build this kind of cars in large quantities.

The concept of using compressed air as a fuel is not as neoteric as it sounds, it was used in mining industry more than a century ago even before the electric motors. The concept is not much different than the normal internal combustion engine, only the compressed air is used to drive the piston to turn the crankshaft which powers the car. The compressed air is stored inside a tank at high pressure and the electronic actuators sense the throttle and pump the air into the engine accordingly which in turn guides the spinning speed of the engine.

In general a compressed air engine can only supply enough power that can move a car 30-35 miles in an hour; to solve this power issue more air is needed to be pumped for which an onboard air compressor is required. The onboard air compressor could be powered either by electricity or by gasoline. The cars developed by Tata Motors and MDI are capable of running 200 to 300 kilometers on each tank of compressed air and can achieve a max speed of 105 kmph.

The advantages linked to the compressed air car include zero carbon tailpipe emission and the affordable prices as the compressed air costs only a fraction of what petrol and diesel fuels incur. On the other hand if we consider the shortcomings of these kinds of cars we can see that separate compressed air stations will have to be built from the scratch and since the cars have a limited range of 200 to 300 kms, they would not be feasible for long drives on the highway thus restricting its scope just to cities. To register the range shortcoming the Tata Motors air powered car can be offered as a hybrid in which the compressed air could power the car in the cities and gasoline could be used to propel the car on highways.

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