Air-Powered Cars

As Americans see gas soar to the $4 per gallon range -- thanks to the environmentalist assault on energy production -- BBC News and Raw Story report that India's Tata Motors is gearing up to produce cars based on French technology of compressed air.

I have to admit this idea of running cars on compressed air had never occurred to me. You can pump air directly into the car or plug in the internal compressor. Tata is also working on a carbon-compression hybrid that BBC News reports can yield 120 miles per gallon. Clever.

Of course, as BBC also points out, the cars are light-weight and therefore, I suspect, quite a lot more dangerous than the cars to which Americans are accustomed. Still, they might be fine for slower-speed city driving. If they catch on a toll-road might even find it useful to create small-car lanes.

Obviously, compressing air is not free. It requires energy. I'm interested to learn how the Indians plan to compress the air. I'm also interested in what the energy loss is between the first power source and the power of the compressed air.

I wonder whether it might be possible to harness wind to compress air, rather than use wind turbines to generate electricity. (We may never know, because now all the subsidies are going to the turbines.)

A huge problem is that compressed air seems hard to transport. A nuclear generator could power the air compression, but unless we're talking about new, smaller nuclear plants it seems more effective to transport the electricity rather than the compressed air. That seems more promising for electric cars, if people can ever figure out how to produce better, cheaper batteries. I guess the question, then, is whether it's more effective to convert electricity to battery charges or to compressed air. And which system promises to provide the longest drives?

Even though the new technology runs into numerous immediate problems, it's interesting.

The best way to promote new technologies is to cut government spending and taxes, eliminate special-interest pandering, cut controls on production, and generally restore the government to protecting individual rights rather than mismanaging the economy.

How It's Made

Last time I had access to cable TV, I watched several episodes of the show "How It's Made." It's a spectacular show that reveals how various products are mass produced.

What has mass production done for us? In short, a lot fewer people can make a lot more life-advancing stuff. That allows more people to enjoy the products. Practically all of the clothes we wear, most of the food we eat, and just about every product in our homes was mass produced (or significantly assisted by mass production) using advanced technical processes.

Many of today's labor-intensive jobs are made possible by mass production, which frees up labor for other jobs. When the country first started, most people worked in agriculture. Now a tiny minority do. Today, businesses exist to wash your dog or provide it with therapy. "In 2003, more than 15 million people practiced Yoga, according to Yoga Journal magazine," writes one practitioner. Several massage clinics have recently opened up near my house, and chiropractors are everywhere. These are just a few examples.

Yet who pauses to recognize the profound improvements to their lives made possible by science, technology, and a market free enough to develop the wonders of mass production?