impressive....but at 18K? Thats a bigger rip off than the Prius..... so uhmmm, where will the electricity come from to power the compressor?


yea...okay.

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"The captain has turned off the `No Dubbing' sign. You are free to speak any language you choose."

Off the top, my guess is that they would use the gasoline that it does consume to compress the air, or some such thing. I doubt anyone is proposing perfect conservation of energy in useful form.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

It still is impossible. There is no free lunch...

Kramer

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“We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. … The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism.”

TheNation, June 7, 2007

With my five hundred miles a day, I certainly hope I'll be able to pick one up.

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During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent act of stupidity.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow

All good socialists have villas in Southern France. That's not the point.
-Eurosocialist

Well, in the US there would be the simple solution of solar-thermal electricity production...

The technology is available since the 80s and the US is blessed with some huge desert areas.

In Spain they are building 3 of those... each with 50MW... very simple and effective technology. (for comparison... Nuclear Powerplants usually have about 1000-1500 MW electricity production)

What you should not forget is, that besides incredible high construction costs, Nuclear Power plants ALSO are consuming fuel... Uranium is not free and with several nations going extensivly nuclear (for example China) the price for Uranium will not go down I suppose.... same for coal... Soon mining in Germany could even become profitable again! (at the moment, highly subsidized)

Wind Power has a really high potential... so does Solar-Thermal energy... it is widly underestimated...

We got alot of windpower in Germany, but overall it's just 20.000 wind mills... that's incredibly few!
Now there is alot of "old shit" among those... but it is covering about 7.5% of the German electricity consumption... several states even cover more than 30% of the electricity consumption using windpower...

Modern Windpower plants have an output of 5MW each (6MW is the most at the moment)

There are quite some areas where there is steady wind... especially offshore or at the coastlines (US has enough) and especially at over 100 meters above the ground..

Considering the fact that even offshore windpower plants produce the energery that was required to build,transport and put them up in about 5 month, they are the greenest and best developed technology currently available.

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At this time:

56 percent of our electricity is produced by burning coal.
22 percent of our electricity is produced by burning natural gas.
78 percent total.

At the current retail price of gasolene using $ 2.50 per gallon and getting 20 mikes per gallon driving 1000 miles would cost
$ 125.00 dollars.

Rough calculation indicates a two hour fill of compresswed air to be about $ 3.59 per kWh. The 1000 milws would cost
$ 7.14 (cross country coast to coast for $ 28.68 dollars.)

"All" electric cars can produce similar savings.

Before we bail aut the auto mfgrs. tell them they get the money only if they produce air or electricity driven vehicles.

you''ll have to pry my Cobra from my cold dead fingers. Screw those bubble butt cars.

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"The captain has turned off the `No Dubbing' sign. You are free to speak any language you choose."

Yeah but there is the environmental impact of producing the batteries. With compressed air cars, you could just have the engine and the air tank.

I really like this compressed air car idea because of it's simplicity. And I'm no believer in AGW.

I just hope that the designers have quick release safety valves in them so that the instant the car detects it's in a hard crash, the valves open up and start releasing the air from the tank.

Kramer

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“We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. … The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism.”

TheNation, June 7, 2007

Nevermind.