Comments on: My Next Car Has Been Chosen

By: Michael S Black

Michael S Black — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:01:02 +0000

Daniel, have you ever driven a car with a significant chunk of the HP coming from turbo’s? Wait till you do, there is this whole interesting phenomenon called turbo lag…personally it drives me batty, and if you have a Drive-By-Wire car, and there is some response lag anyway…anyway, see if you can get superchargers instead, the gas mileage may suffer a tick or two, but you will not have to worry about those damn turbo’s spooling up.

By: Michael S Black

Michael S Black — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:01:00 +0000

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:23:26 +0000

For those of you using Firefox from windows (or linux I suspect, i haven't had a chance to test it), that's alt click for "save linked file as".

That air car is rather interesting... and it doesn't look like they're trying to bend any laws of physics. The only problem I see (with the non-hybrid car) is that as the air tanks get low you'd run out of horsepower. The hybrid car thwarts that by using a gasoline engine to compress air as you go, but it seems like that would add a lot of extra weight to the car.

However, you still have the "energy state" problem. It takes energy to compress the air -- the same amount of energy that you're getting as output from the air decompressing into the piston chamber.

At least they're not trying to turn water into a combustible gas.

Also, those prototypes (at least the french ones) are fugly.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:23:00 +0000

For those of you using Firefox from windows (or linux I suspect, i haven't had a chance to test it), that's alt click for "save linked file as".

However, you still have the "energy state" problem. It takes energy to compress the air -- the same amount of energy that you're getting as output from the air decompressing into the piston chamber.

At least they're not trying to turn water into a combustible gas.

Also, those prototypes (at least the french ones) are fugly.

By: Carl M

Carl M — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:23:49 +0000

As they say ... ymmv.

If you push those turbos, I'm thinking that the mpg might be slightly less. :)

I'm still a Point A to Point B kind of guy. If a vehicle does that, it's doing its job.

By: Carl M

Carl M — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:23:00 +0000

As they say ... ymmv.

If you push those turbos, I'm thinking that the mpg might be slightly less. :)

I'm still a Point A to Point B kind of guy. If a vehicle does that, it's doing its job.

By: Allan

Allan — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 04:38:28 +0000

30 mpg?

Get an air car :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A3XHFT5qc&mode=related&search=

Be sure to watch part 2, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq8aZVLpf-c&mode=related&search=

In copying and pasting those links, I found a neat little keyboard shortcut in firefox I didn’t know about: Option-clicking a link (on OS X) is a short cut to “Save Linked File As”; cool!