MDI Air Car
Will the oil-driven car grow extinct in the decades to come? Guy Negre (Fr) thinks so, for he invented: THE CLEAN GREEN DRIVING MACHINE! Utopia is near; this (toy) car runs on AIR that can be ‘tanked’ by plugging it in at home, where a compressor fills it within four hours – or at a special air pump where this process will take only a few minutes. Even by pushing the brake, the car will use its energy to fill a minicompressor. The three air tanks will let you drive to 100 km/h = 62 mp/h. Of course there are other alternatives for the car – machines that run on solar power or on hydrogen, but the revolution was never this cheap: the Air Car will cost about 7.000 Euro / 9.500 Dollar. Let’s all breathe fresh air again and start freezing up those glaciers!
theaircar.com | video (cnn) | Related posts: Drive in a fish | Aquada | Sexy car
Unfortunately, the longest documented trip by this vehicle is about 7km, and there seems to be a fairly general consensus that this car will never be able to do what is claimed. It has been about a year away from production for most of the decade, now. Noteworthy is that it was predicted to be 6 months away in January 2004 – but what actually happened that July was the inventor scrapped his engine design to make use of ideas patented by others decades before. Wikipedia’s talk page on the air car is especially illuminating. Even if 100% of the energy could be retrieved from the air, it would need a monstrously large tank to have any reasonable range.
Hmm, I’m reminded of the Moller Skycar…
All of which is to say that our emission-free hopes still rest on improvements in boring tech like chemical batteries, hydrogen, and bicycles! But I hope someone will figure something out, one day.
If this is an internet-hoax, it certainly fooled me. Great stuff! We’ll keep track of the story, for it might add to a mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy some day…
Unfortunately, this isn’t just a hoax on the internet.
MDI has managed to sell licenses and collect option fees for distributorships from 56 different groups, while never delivering a car even after claiming repeatedly since 2000 that sales would start “next year”. Always 12-24 months away.
They prototypes pictured above have been abandoned for a golf cart sized vehicle with performance roughly that of a golf cart. Except that they range claim is still unproven. Still no cars (oops, I mean vehicles/carts) delivered.