Too good to be true? Negre doesn’t think so. After almost a decade of work, he’s putting the finishing touches on his factory and expects to start producing air-powered cars early next year. That would give Motor Development International, the company he founded to exploit his invention, an early lead in the worldwide race to replace the combustion engine with a cleaner alternative. The main competitor–hydrogen-powered cars that produce zero emission–have won the backing of the big auto companies, but they won’t be ready for the road for five years at the very least. By then, Negre hopes to have proved his Air Car’s potential. MDI claims that the Air Car will render the combustion engine “as obsolete as the black-and-white television with the arrival of color on our screens.”
The Air Car certainly wins points for cheapness of fuel. Fresh air, compressed to 4,500 pounds per square inch–about 150 times the pressure used for the standard car tire–is stored in reinforced carbon-fiber tanks beneath the chassis; the pressure is then used to drive the engine’s pistons. The air engine requires no combustion and produces far less energy than a standard combustion engine. “What we have is a car that’s totally clean and very economic,” says Negre. Refueling takes just three minutes from a special air pump at a filling station or up to four hours at home using a household plug to provide the energy for the car’s own compressor.
The idea, as Negre is quick to admit, isn’t new. As far back as the 1860s, science-fiction writer Jules Verne predicted that compressed air would power much of Paris’s traffic by the late 20th century. When Negre was an engine designer of Formula One racing cars, he learned how compressed air was used to start engines. He began his attempts to design an air-powered car in the early 1990s. Since big carmakers weren’t interested in his dream, he pieced together financing from more than 150 private investors. Money is tight: the work force, including Negre’s son Cyril, formerly an engineer at Bugatti, still numbers fewer than 40. Negre has used only widely available hardware. The fiberglass tanks, for example, were already developed to hold fuel for gas-powered cars. “It’s really just like a normal car, only put together in another way,” says Cyril Negre. Most investment has gone into the lightweight bodywork–a shell of polyurethane and reinforced foam on a framework of aluminum tubing.
Negre’s business plan has all the novelty to be expected from an inventor operating on a shoestring budget. The company will control only the parent plant in Nice. Most production will be in the hands of licensees who are willing to pay $10 million for a turnkey MDI factory that can turn out up to 9,000 vehicles a year. “It’s really a bit like McDonald’s,” says Negre. Already 32 companies and entrepreneurs have taken up the offer.
In order to save the planet, the Air Car obviously will first have to catch on. For all its green charms, its performance is less than dazzling: its maximum speed is only 68 miles an hour, and it needs refueling every 120 miles under normal city conditions–making it essentially a short-distance city car. Understandably, customers may be wary of spending $8,000 to $10,000 on an unproved technology. Even the greens aren’t wholly satisfied. “Compressing air is just a way of storing energy,” says Rob Gueterbock, a campaigner at Greenpeace. “It’s how the energy is made that really matters.” In the case of the Air Car, electricity from the grid is expended in compressing the air.
These quibbles miss the point, says Negre. The Air Car is designed for the gridlocked, smogbound metropolis of the 21st century, which needs a cheap, reliable vehicle that won’t add to the street-level pollution. Negre’s ultimate green solution is to locate stations next to rivers so they can use turbines to compress the air. He’s already patented the idea. Now all he needs is another small army of investors.
