Airing the CAT can reduce Global Warming

These last two weeks have found me thinking a great deal about coming up with a car design that is going to solve some of our global warming problems caused by conventional fossil fuel burning automobiles. Having read about Hybrid cars and Electric cars I wanted something new. To be quite honest I did come up with one and it excited me to no ends. I Googled it only to find out that MDI (Moteur Developpment International) in France had a seven year head start on me.

It brought back to mind all those lost opportunities when years ago I had this great idea to make a general purpose remote control to switch on household lights and fans. I dilly dallied and several months’ later similar stuff was flooding the market. So it was a sense of disappointment when I noticed some one had beaten me to this idea too.

MDI of France has been perfecting the design on Air powered motors and over the years they have come up with a car which can travel upto 200 kms without a recharge of air. There is yet another version the dual fuel version that uses compressed air to turn a piston from a tank and the tank itself is recharged by a compressor run by a fossil fuel engine. Personally I think the dual fuel version is quite similar to the hybrid vehicles save for the fact that Hybrid fuel vehicles use electricity and fossil fuel instead of air and fossil fuel in this case. I was truly surprised and impressed too that TATA motors India had already signed an agreement with MDI to apply its Compressed Air Technology (CAT) (The picture is of the miniCAT). I am sure this move by TATAs - the world’s fifth largest auto manufacturer - is surely the right step to lead the rest of the Indian Auto Industry from the front as a true Market leader.

Setting the disappointment aside I did some more thinking out of the box and I wondered why we can’t take the same design one step further. Even the dual fuel cars from MDI require air and fossil fuel. Now that does not really help reduce CO2 emissions does it? Fossil fuel no matter how small should be an absolute “NO” if we are even attempting to combat Global Warming.

I wonder why one cannot compress air using a compressor run by solar electricity? Will it take the load? Will it make the car too heavy? Will we get the required mileage? I don’t have the answer to these questions yet but I am curious to find out. I am tempted to try and build at least an air powered vehicle (2 3 or 4 wheeler I don’t know) using the light of locally available materials. Finances are a constraint no doubt. But for some reason this time I feel I should not let that get in my way of proving to myself I got there FIRST. Lets see how far I get. May be when I eventually get there I will call my new design the FPV - FART (Free Air Rotary Turbine) Powered Vehicle

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