Air-Powered Cars Now in Production

I just read a very interesting article over on Yahoo about air powered cars. Apparently ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre has developed a working and efficient “Air Car“. The car will be put into production in India by Tata Motors, the largest automaker in India.

If you click the link above you can check out images of the car, how it works, and several news items related to the car’s development. The server hosting this site must be getting a lot of hits lately because it was really slow when I was trying to sift through it just now.

Apparently there will be 6,000 of these roaming the streets in India by 2008, according to projections. The car is not likely to pass crash tests in the US however. We have some pretty big cars and just from looking at the Air-Car I would guess that it wouldn’t fair well in a crash with an SUV. The Air-Car is cool, but is going to be a lot slower than a normal car. It looks like the car will max out with a top speed of around 70MPH. Not slow by any means, but, I bet it doesn’t get up to 70MPH nearly as fast as gas powered vehicles. Either way the Air-Car only costs around $2 to “re-pressurize”… Compared to the $50 or so that a normal car costs to refill right now, the speed sacrifice could easily be well worth it.

All in all this is some exciting news for anyone who is concerned about A, gas prices, B, the environment, or C, all of the above. With gas prices expected to hit $4 and $5 a gallon over the summer it’s nice to see that some companies are taking the steps to build more fuel efficient vehicles. Hybrid cars are definitely going to become more popular in the coming years, but, hopefully even better technology is on the way to becoming mainstream.