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100-MPG Air-Powered Car Headed To US Next Year
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Feb 22, 2008 11:05 AM
from the x-prize-fodder dept.
from the x-prize-fodder dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Mechanics for word on a New York automaker with plans to introduce a US version of the air-powered car, with which India's Tata Motors made a splash last year. Zero Pollution Motors plans a sub-$18,000, 6-passenger vehicle that can hit 96 mph and gets over 100 MPG, using an untried dual engine — the air-powered motor being supplemented by a second (unspecified) engine that would kick in above 35 MPH. The company estimates that "a vehicle with one tank of air and, say, 8 gallons of either conventional petrol, ethanol, or biofuel could hit between 800 and 1000 miles." The vehicle could be introduced to the market as early as 2009.
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Technology: The World's Cheapest Car Set To Launch 418 comments
theodp writes "Ready for one-automobile-per-child (OAPC)? India's giant Tata Group is on the verge of launching the world's cheapest car. The People's Car, slated to be unveiled January 10th at a New Delhi auto show, will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500), which some analysts say could revolutionize automobile costs worldwide. The Tata is a pet project of Cornell-trained architect Ratan Tata, who helped design it. The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars."
Submission: 100-MPG Air-Powered Car Headed to U.S. Next Year by Anonymous Coward
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But.. (Score:5, Funny)
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
- Honda Insight - 80-90 mpg in real world I-95 driving (mine)
Volkswagen is also building a car that will get 240mpg, although it's only a two-seater. It will arrive late 2009 (europe), and hopefully hit the U.S. sometime shortly after.
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
In South Africa it could be a cattle truck [bbc.co.uk].
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Easy (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit.
No, no, no, shut the fuck up, you're lying.
God the things losers like you will lie about to get attention...
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
As for fuel efficient cars, the most efficient vehicle coming out in the near future is the Aptera Typ-1e/Typ-1h, but the Typ-1h only gets 130mpg when its battery is depleted. And this is a car with a 0.11 drag coefficient (compare to 0.26 for a Prius). It doesn't get much lower than that and still be streetlegal.
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be careful about making generalizations like this. France, for example, has a "special license" category which allows you to drive below a certain speed (I think it's 50 kph) and only on the shoulder. It's useful in rural areas where elderly need to be able to drive but can't pass the more stringent normal licensing test (which, you're correct to observe, is tougher than the U.S. standard).
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
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Answer: Mega Maid (Score:4, Funny)
Ape 2: Oh shit
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Re:But.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Creating high pressure air (4000+ PSI) generates heat. Filling a tank with uncompressed air takes time almost as much for safety as for the actual time to compress. Filling stations could bury high volume, high efficiency compressors, divert the heat using geothermal options, and eliminate the bulk of noise. You could fill up in 3-5 minutes by using pre-pressurized air from massive underground tanks, or even massive above-ground tanks in some areas. they'd cost a bit to install, but over 10 years would pay better returns than fossil fuel stations. At home, if you had a smaller version system, you could either make hot water, or put in geothermal capacitors. The benefit to geothermal would mean in some markets you'd never have to shovel your walkway in the winter again (use heat pipes under concrete to both dispurse heat and melt snow, lol)
It's a bit dangerous though... carbon fiber tanks at 4000+ PSI... If one ruptuers, the force released could quite litteraly throw the car a few blocks. More likely, it would simply rupture, causing the car to act like a bomb, just without flames... Vapor expansion at this level could rip people and metal apart. these tanks need to be REALLY strong to be safe, adding significantly to vehicle weight, reducing storage space, and limiting fuel economy. Sure, we can make one that goes 800KM on a fill up and has room for 4 including luggage, but there's no way the motor safety guys are ever going to allow it on the streets...
I'm skeptical. Keep them out of my country until there's 50,000 or more of them driving around. We'll see then how safe they are.
Also, the vehicle itself is pollution free, but making the electricity to compress the air isn't. If we're moving in this direction we'll need a major investment in free energy sources like solar and wind. Also, compressing the air locally at filling stations requires power. a lot of power. We'll need a super conducting grid to make that happen (if we plan to use clean electricity instead of current local poewr plants). Of course, the same is true for electric cars.
High pressure air can be trucked around easy engouh too. We don't have to make air at every filling station. We could have a few small locations around town and drive trucks from key points to filling stations. This may lower the cost and complexity a bit in favor of logistics.
We'll wait and see.
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Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
* The thermodynamic efficiency of air cars is worse than gasoline engines, often far worse, meaning that you *hurt* the environment by driving it.
* The overwhelming majority of the performance of this vehicle comes from gasoline, not air
* The company has a very bad reputation of making ludicrous claims and misrepresenting stats
* It's made by Indian manufacturer Tata motors, not known for quality
In short, don't bother. If you want an affordable (100 mile range without burning any gasoline, that will be on the road in a year or two, there are really three good options I can think of off the top of my head right now: the Aptera [aptera.com], the VentureOne [hybridcars.com], and the MiEV [wikipedia.org]. The Aptera is for if you want the absolute limit in energy efficiency modern tech can currently provide and want to look like you're driving a spaceship, the VentureOne is for if you want to feel like you're driving a motorcycle, and the MiEV is for if you have more than two people. I've probably missed a couple other good options, I'm sure.
To potential EV buyers: keep an eye out for scammers. Two big ones are LionEV and Spark EV.
To potential hydrogen car buyers: hydrogen cars are worse for the environment than gasoline cars, so don't bother.
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Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
CO2 emissions per mile are proportional to thermodynamic efficiency of the fuel cycle and amount of energy that is needed per mile. With a gasoline car, the well-to-wheel efficiency is about 20%. With an electric, it's ~30%. With a hydrogen car, it's ~15-20%. With an air car that operates on air alone, it's something like 4-20%, depending on whether you're using an onboard or home compressor, or whether you're using a huge, expensive, top of the line regenerative industrial compressor.
Air cars have a whole host of other issues, too. Horrible volumetric energy density, safety (the energy likes instant releases), decaying performance (the lower the tanks get, the slower your car), and so on.
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Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
The scare articles [evworld.com] ignore these basic facts. They also ignore other things inconvenient to them -- most notably, tailings. For example, listen to this quote:
"This means there is less lithium per volume of water, so competitors have to process more water, explained Tahil, adding that there is also the issue of the lithium-to-magnesium ratio. The more magnesium, the harder it is to extract the lithium."
Yes, but that means that you get *more magnesium* out of the process, which also has sales value. Likewise, other mining operations that are seeking various minerals can (and do) get lithium tailings. Currently, these are typically discarded due to the low price of lithium. As demand for a mineral rises, recovery circuits get added where appropriate. This is "value added" mining -- no new mining is going on, but you just get more product out of it. Production from almost any brine pond in the world will give you lithium tailings, but almost none bother to extract the lithium salts from them; they're going after other, currently more valuable minerals.
Some people have this silly notion of world mining operations as though the Earth was some big ball of "nothing" in the crust, and scattered around this "nothing" are little random deposits of one mineral (mixed in with "nothing"), and these couple deposits are all there are of that mineral. And, obviously, the real world doesn't work that way. *Everywhere* is minerals, and a given element can be found almost anywhere at least in *some* concentration, however minimal. All that changes from place to place is how cheap it is to extract (which can vary widely). Likewise, when you produce products from anywhere, you're going to get tailings that include all sorts of other minerals -- and you're mining, crushing, and concentrating them to boot, so half of the work is already done! But if the price of the minerals is low, it's not worth recovering further from the tailings. If the price rises, you recover them; it's as simple as that.
One thing to remember about lithium: it's cheap. It's currently very cheap. So? Well, people don't prospect for cheap minerals. Think for a second of how much oil our insatiable demand has continually turned up over the past century. Now imagine actual exploration for valuable lithium deposits. It's only reasonable to expect major growth in known lithium reserves, probably by orders of magnitude, should lithium suddenly gain any appreciable value.
Lastly -- and here's the real kicker -- lithium is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a lithium ion battery It's price could grow tenfold and you'd barely even notice it (and you better believe there'd be a *lot* of new reserves coming online with that much price growth!) 1 kWh of automotive li-ion batteries currently costs ~$300-$2000, depending on the type. This involves less than a kilogram of lithium carbonate, which currently costs about $4.50 [usgs.gov].
In short: Ignore the scare mongering. There's no world shortage of lithium, and never will be.
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Re:But.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
almost without a doubt they may have exaggerated quite a bit, but the concept seems kinda solid, maybe similar to how a Turbo or SuperCharger works, only rather than increasing the acceleration, the energy goes toward fuel economy.
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Re:I'm skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm skeptical (Score:5, Funny)
My name is Ern Mormoney; I'm employed in the public relations wing of General Motors Corporation. We would like to offer you a free educational seminar on the grossly exaggerated representation of global warming and fossil fuel consumption trends seen frequently in the media. Your seminar will feature an all-expenses paid trip to sunny Detroit, where you'll be treated to a weekend of fun in the sun with the following perks:
1. Unlimited access to mood-alterning chemicals of all kinds.
2. Hookers. Lots of hookers.
3. Informative lectures on new breakthoughs in mathematics ("New Math" for short, dealing largely with how to use appropriately visualize fuel prices).
4. Fun-filled games of "chicken" in company-provided Corvettes.
5. Did we mention the hookers?
We've selected you for our special promotional getaway because of your "insightful" commentary on this website. Respond with 24 hours to confirm your seat; they're going faster than our stock price decline!
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Re:I'm skeptical -- me too. (Score:4, Insightful)
>>400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg. Pretty goddamn good for a 6-passenger vehicle.
Yeah, but notice they say "six passenger vehicle" and not "vehicle with six passengers." BIG difference.
With very low-hp automobiles, the extra weight of even one passenger can have a tremendous impact upon performance and economy. (I drive a 40hp 1964 VW Beetle so I know from whence I speak). Driven alone, my car actually performs as well as most modern cars. Add a couple passengers and suddenly it's sluggish and MPG falls into the mid-20 range.
>>Say we halve what they claim for most practical uses (city driving), you still have 400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg.
Judging from the tone of the press release (they don't seem to believe it) the 95mpg figure doesn't seem likely at all. And if we take half that figure, 50mpg as you suggest, it's still better than most gasoline vehicles, but roughly on par with turbodiesels. But we need to consider this a bit further. Because low-hp vehicles are greatly impacted by laden weight, if we were to take this 6-passenger vehicle and add a couple passengers I think we'd see that 50mpg figure fall further, possibly into the range of traditional gasoline vehicles which puts it well BELOW that of turbodiesels! It takes approx 35 hp to maintain 60mph in a vehicle with average aerodynamic drag. This vehicle has approx 75hp equivalent. That leaves 40hp to accelerate a vehicle with up to 900 lbs (6x150) of passengers plus the weight of the car. Subtract parasitic losses such as alternator (headlights, heating??) or a/c compressor drag (-5 hp) and it's anemic at best. Meaning it will struggle on hills, and passing on the interstate will be difficult.
Disappointing, but it helps us realize just how efficient a fuel-injected, turbo intercooled internal combustion engine is.
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Re:I'm skeptical (Score:4, Informative)
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I just want to know (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I just want to know (Score:5, Funny)
I was over at Spaceball City the other day and a gallon of Schweppe's Air was $4! Spaceballs: The Air was even more expensive at $5. They had some cheap off brand air for $2.50 but you never know what you get with the generic stuff.
On Mars, there's just an outright tax on air that everyone pays. It's like 15% of your income but there are expemtions for midgets and girls with 3 hooters.
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Re:I just want to know (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to know how the air tank would be refilled, though. I mean, gas stations already have air compressors for your tires, but would that put out enough pressure to fill the tank in your car?
Or will this strictly be an 'around town' sort of car, and you'd have to rent something for long trips?
Re:Interesting concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine a barter system in the future where we might have to get on an exercycle type of machine to pump up an engine. The local diner might charge either $10 for a meal or one hour on the pump. Homeless and working poor could thus eat for the cost of an hour's exercise.
If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, just get out the pump from the accessory compartment in the trunk, hook it up, and start pedalling. After 3-4 hours of fat burning cardiovascular workout, you will have enough stored energy to move your car 20 miles down the road to the service station. And as an added bonus, you'll be in fantastic shape!
Buildings could hook up pumps to revolving doors as a way to "steal" energy to power their lighting systems, etc. Even the floors might consist of pistons hidden under the carpet that are compressed as you walk on them. Walking down a hall would feel like climbing a stair, something the health newsletters advise us to do more often anyway.
Of course, people in windy areas would probably want to use windmills to directly pump up our cars overnight.
It's interesting stuff to think about.
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simple (Score:3, Funny)
Re:simple - rip off (Score:3, Funny)
That's a rip off - around here, you can buy a politician for a lot less than $5000.
MadCow.
Rental (Score:4, Interesting)
"Zero Pollution"? (Score:5, Informative)
In considering the environmental impact of a particular vehicle, there are a number of factors to consider:
There are probably more factors, some very difficult to isolate. And there are safety factors - gasoline is flammable, but easy to detect if it starts to leak. Hydrogen, on the other hand, you would not notice at all until your car decided to emulate the Hindenberg.
Zero pollution is a good goal, but unless all of the factors are considered, it's just marketing hype.
Re:"Zero Pollution"? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, though - and on a tangent for a sec - he's got a point. No, not about a hydrogen-fueled car ACTUALLY bursting into flames a'la the great Lakehurst weenie roast (that's why he used a smiley-face, I guess) but - unwittingly - about the public's perception of the implications of having hydrogen on-board a road vehicle.
The truth is, technology wants to go in a safer direction. The US DOE is spending a lot of money - well-spent, in my opinion - on developing components of an automotive approach to hydrogen fuels, including infrastructure, end-to-end efficiency and cost, and of course materials science and engineering.
Check out http://hydrogen.energy.gov/ [energy.gov]
The long and the short of it is this: the current standard is to store compressed hydrogen on-board in 5000 psig tanks; the tech maturation for this approach is to up the ante to 10000 psig. Yikes; no wonder the public has the wrong idea - that's a lot of mechanical energy stored up in there. Some of the more interesting (but not new) technology DOE is funding is for "absorptive" storage, both liquid- and solid-state, wherein the hydrogen isn't at high levels of compression - rather, it's safely (for the most part) tucked away inside the molecular structure of a parent "carrier" substance. At fairly low pressures (~15-150 psig), for the most part.
Okay, tangent over. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a hydrogen materials engineer. And I'm WAY more frightened of gasoline vapors than I am of hydrogen in any form.
Cheers,
--joe.
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Well, if it meets their claims... (Score:3, Insightful)
I do dread the inevitable tech support calls, though.
Great, environmentally friendly cars! (Score:3, Insightful)
As for speed, again, if you are driving in a city, there is no need to drive more then ~60 kilometres an hour (~30 miles an hour I think).
(Of course, I still prefer my (push) bike, bikes are a heck of a lot safer then cars, imagine if everyone had a bike instead of a petrol guzzling car. There would be a lot fewer accidents. Of course, sometimes you need to carry more stuff or more people, simple, just ring up your local car sharing co-op!)
vaporware (Score:4, Funny)
Re:vaporware (Score:4, Funny)
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Pirate Car? (Score:4, Funny)
Arrrrrr, Matey!
Looking Forward to It (Score:5, Insightful)
My immediate family is lucky, economically--we live in New York and don't need a car; but that doesn't exempt us from the environmental consequences of the internal combustion engine.
But even environmental consequences aside, the rising cost of oil has put the squeeze on the rest of my family who aren't fortunate enough to live in areas where public transportation is available/reliable/efficient. When you consider the relative share of annual income that they pay for basic transportation versus mine, it's dramatic how high such a fundamental cost of living is in the United States.
So, ask yourself--how competitive can an economy remain when it spends such an out-sized amount on such a basic service? It should be driving the costs of transportation down to the level of a utility and investing the surplus in cutting-edge technologies.
Energy state conversion (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, so you use an electric engine to drive a compressor which then drives the wheels. Or - even worse - you'll use a gasoline engine to compress the air. It's true that you'll get "zero pollution" while driving, but this vehicle is going to use significantly more energy than a vehicle that uses an electric or gasoline engine to drive the wheels directly. And that means *more* pollution, not less. There is a reason that we don't use compressed air to anything larger than toy cars and rockets - it has an incredibly low energy density compared to a tankful of hydrocarbon-based fuel.
This is yet another "clean energy" idea that preys on the naieve.
Pressure (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold Weather Friendly? (Score:5, Informative)
Arguably one could compress one's own air in the garage with a wind or solar powered compressor and fuel the thing for "free." Certainly that would be an option for some (in windier areas) people and even filling stations. Otherwise, of course, we're just moving the pollution from the streets to the power plants that then have to power all of the compressors.
The thing that kicked the idea for me is that the car seems potentially impractical for those of us that live in temperate regions. For a large part of the year, our vehicles need to generate heat for the passenger compartment. In your typical gas-powered motorized vehicle, this is heat taken from the cooling system. Sure, the old VW Beetle had an electric heater in it, but anybody who had one in sub-zero climates can tell you that they don't always cut it. It's probably the case that the improvements in seat-based heating and technology in general will make the heaters more useful. Perhaps the size of the cabin will help. It also needs to be considered that the light-weight construction of the body may not allow for an awful lot of insulation.
Along the same lines, those tiny wheels wouldn't make it through the snow. A 75HP motor seems like enough to power some larger wheels, but what's the torque like, and how much impact is that larger drive-train gonna have? And once you start adding that bottom weight, how much is that going to force changes in the rest of the car, and will it spiral out of control such that the power plant is no longer sufficient?
In warmer areas, like I'd like to move to, it seems a very practical commuter vehicle. I have to imagine someone has thought of routing the exhaust through a cooling system, allowing the engine to cool the cabin without needing an environmentally unfriendly air conditioner. On good paved roads the tiny wheels might only be a hindrance to top speeds, where larger wheels might be needed for rougher roads, like those with cracks and potholes. (Yeah, I may have a thing against tiny wheels...)
There is also a safety factor. In places where everyone drives small cars, this will fit right in, but in the US, too many SUVs and large sedans compete for the same road as these. It'll probably be the same as with motorcycles; they're safer when you get a bunch of them together than individually ripping through traffic. Once there's a lot of them on the road, this should shift so that the small cars will dominate, and the larger ones will be the exceptions.
Heck, someone should suggest to "reverse" the HOV lanes and force the big vehicles over there, allowing the smaller vehicles to have the other lanes; which could probably be narrowed, and would be less congested as all of the vehicles would be shorter and everyone would be closer to their destination by the time the traffic jam started .
Has anyone ever seen this thing? Vaporware? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a drivable prototype of this thing? Has anyone from Motor Trend or Auto Week ever had a good look at it? For any real car, the prototypes precede volume production by several years.
Accusations of fraud are flying between the Air Car people. [theaircar.com]. Apparently there are two Air Car groups, and they don't get along.
Tata Motors has nothing on their web site about the "air car". They do have a page of their concept cars [tatacarsworldwide.com], and the Air Car isn't on there. They're coming out with the Tata Nano, at $2500. The Tata Nano is conventionally powered. There's an electric version of the Tata Ace mini-truck [autoblog.com], and those should be coming to the US this year. But there is no Air Car or "City Cat" from Tata that I can find.
This looks like vaporware.
Danger, Will Robinson (Score:5, Interesting)
A twist on that by which the energy industry could rake in profit is by declaring it unsafe to use compressed air. Instead only compressed CO2 or Nitrogen should be used, to avoid fire hazard.
O'course, that kind of undermines efficiency for braking, which should best be done by compressing air. Maybe they could use two tanks and use the difference in potential (pressure) between the two in a closed system.
Snake oil (Score:5, Informative)
Compressed air is a terrible way to store energy. There's about 250 times less [wikipedia.org] energy in compressed air than in gasoline. Do the math. It's impossible to make a useable car that is powered solely by compressed air. The energy just isn't there.
It's possible, however, to make a working hybrid gasoline-compressed air vehicle. But as far as the hybrid component goes, batteries are a much better candidate.
The car in TFA is based on the MDI AirCar, which is a greener version of the Moller Skycar. In other words, a scam. Whenever the company needs money, they write a few press releases, and some naive investor falls for it.
The company has allegedly dozens of licensing deals all over the planet. But not a single production vehicle has been built. It was supposed to be coming out "real soon now" 10 years ago. In 10 more years, it will still be "right around the corner".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Indirection solves yet another problem!
Re:Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe because they aren't really giving high priority to the market or feel that the "environmental hippies care more about function than looks". Truth is, the there is a growing market of "environmental hippies" that have both money and sense of style. Maybe its time they took some of their industrial designers off their 10 tonne Enviro Pollution Vehicles and actually applying them to making environmentally friends vehicles which look good.
In short: yup, I agree with you
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