We’ve written about pure electric cars, hybrids and plugin hybrids (PHEVs), but here’s something new: a car powered by a compressed air engine. Zero Pollution Motors is working on a car powered by a compressed air engine; the engine technology was developed by Formula One race car engineer Guy Negre.

How it works?
So, at slower city driving speeds (below 35 mph), the car runs entirely on compressed air. The air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the car because the engine runs it through a series of filters before it enters the engine to remove anything that could affect performance.

At faster speeds, some kind of fuel is needed to heat the air before it enters the engine. According to their website, this produces emissions of just 0.141lbs of CO2 per mile. They claim that is a quarter of the average vehicle and less than half the emissions of a Toyota Prius.

Zero Pollution Motors is the US representative of Guy Negre’s French company, Motor Development International, who design and build the Air Car. ZPM will be building and selling air cars in the US.

Video

You can see more videos at the ZPM website.

Tags: air car, compressed air, guy negre, mdi, zpm

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