Compressed air bikes may be the future of biking and may even compete with battery powered ones. Dean Benstead made one for himself and shows the concept to the world.
Compressed air has been one of the fields “in vogue” a few years ago (namely, four or five), ever since the invention of the DiPietro motor and the dreams of a French company called MDI Cat. However, the DiPietro air motor is now owned by an Australian Company, EngineAir, who gave one unit to Dean Benstead, who built a prototype motorcycle with it.
Although this area of automobile science abounds with skepticism, especially from the outsiders, Benstead says that the Yamaha WR250R bike he retrofitted to run on compressed air can go up to 100 kilometers on a “charge,” and that it’s only a matter of seconds to get it from empty to full, with a proper air compressor.
One nice feat of Benstead’s bike is the max speed it can reach: 140 km/h (87.5 mph).
Drive.com.au posted an interview with Benstead, which they posted here (sorry, they didn’t have an embed option).
Now, the “my opinion” part. My opinion is that it’d be nice to have bikes and cars go only on compressed air, since such a car wouldn’t ever need anything else (at least virtually). The bad part is, as with the other methods of propelling vehicles, The Storage. What kind of recipients would a vehicle such as a motorcycle need to really beat gasoline in terms of energy density?
Hydrogen is a gas, too. When compressed, it turns into a liquid, and the same happens to ordinary air, but they did find some solutions for hydrogen which I think could be adapted for other types of gases, too. However, such solutions aren’t publicized enough just because they would rise too quickly and the masses would suddenly find out there’s something better and cheaper than gasoline, and that wouldn’t please the multi-billions-per-month oil companies. This guy built his motorcycle around a scuba tank.
So, what can we do? We can write about these small inventors and innovators, about their audacity to think out of the box and for wanting a cleaner planet where we can move cheaper. If the ability to move equals freedom, then we’re sinking deeper and deeper into a type of slavery that even the Egyptians couldn’t fantasize of. We’ll eventually all be happy to be “free” to go to work and come back home, but we won’t have any money to travel as freely as we did in the past 50 years.
Evolution? Don’t think so. Promote these inventions in the best way that you can and fight for your evolution, or otherwise they’ll steal it from you and us.
[thanks to Mark Redden for the tip]
