stop-starting around the city all day
プジョーシトロエンが開発をしている新世代のハイブリッドテクノロジーのクルマはなんと空気を使うハイブリッドだそうです。日本語の「ストップアンドアドゴー」に相当するのがstop-start(ing) around the cityです。念のため。（GP）
The car of the future that runs on air
In these desperate times, however, there was one solitary flower growing up through the concrete. In January this year, Peugeot announced that it had developed a car that ran on air. It officially launched the Hybrid Air vehicle to the world at the Geneva motor show this month, and revealed that it would be in production by 2016. The car did not solely run on air, of course; the new technology was twinned with a petrol engine. But Peugeot believed that it had significant advantages over battery-powered electric hybrids, such as a Toyota Prius.
Their cars would be cheaper to buy, for a start, and extra savings would come from a fuel economy of around 34 kilometers per liter. If Peugeot could back this up, Hybrid Air would shake up the whole car industry. The ailing French giant could certainly do with it being a success — its long-term survival might just depend on it.
At a Peugeot technical center in Carrieres-sous-Poissy, a few miles west of Paris, two engineers — project leaders Karim Mokaddem and Andres Yarce — show me a Hybrid Air vehicle. From one side, the car looks no different from the compact hatchbacks that Peugeot and Citroen are famous for, but it has been sawn in half to better illustrate the new technology.
Most visibly, running down the middle of the undercarriage, there is a blue, 122 cm-long accumulator — what Mokaddem calls, with a wry smile, “the scuba tank.”
The pressurized steel tank is filled with around 20 liters of nitrogen, plus some hydraulic fluid. Much like a Prius, Hybrid Air vehicles recover energy every time the driver brakes or decelerates. But instead of using this kinetic energy to charge a battery — as electric hybrids do — the Hybrid Air system has a reversible hydraulic pump that compresses the hydrogen in the tank and then unleashes it the next time the driver pumps the accelerator.
“It’s mainly a …” Yarce searches for the word, “a syringe. The nitrogen compresses or decompresses and actually pushes the oil and the hydraulic components to transform this energy into a force that makes the vehicle move forward. It’s as simple as that.”
The system does not produce vast amounts of energy — in fact you would struggle to drive even a mile before the petrol engine was forced to kick in — but if you are stop-starting around the city all day then the savings in fuel could be significant.
“We named the prototype cars Kiwi One, Kiwi Two, etc, because the amount of energy stored within the scuba tank is exactly the same amount you’d find in a kiwi fruit,” explains Mokaddem.
