Solar car races, the hydrogen economy, biofuels and ethanol, ‘killed’ electric cars, … Not a day goes by without another article in the newspaper about the cost of mobility with respect to climate change and experiments to meet the challenges we face.

Now, Indian car manufacturer TataMotors is developing another solution : the air car. No hydrogen, no biodiesel, … tabula rasa … imagine a car engine running on mere air. To pull this of, Tata teamed up with Guy Negre’s small but sophisticated MDI Group in France who pioneered the engine running on compressed air.  Refuelling of the car can be done at a station delivering compressed air or via an on-board compressor (3-4h full recharge time). Aside its environmental friendly character, the MiniC.A.T. as it is called,  also runs at an extremely low cost of about a euro per 100 km (1/10th of a petroleum-based car).

Taking it a step further, why not making the car actually clean the air it ‘breathes‘. Just to hammer home again the notion that we should learn to look beyond break-even, zero-emission, zero-waste technologies to those that add to the quality of our environment.

If Tata would use its critical mass to speed up the development of the cars and roll them out in a timespan as groundbreaking as the technology, it would not only rip open the market for sustainable mobility solutions (if taking cues also to develop the car itself in a sustainable way, cf. Ford’s Model U), but also show a wonderful example of leapfrogging at such a major scale.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 19:50 and is filed under business, design, future, sustainability, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.