This hybrid car can run entirely on air

Are you interested in switching to a hybrid car, but you're still concerned about the environmental impact that results from producing the batteries that current models use? If so, you'll want to check out this new Hybrid Air car being produced by the French automaker Peugeot.

Like all hybrid cars, the Citroën C3 Hybrid Air has a gasoline engine for an added boost during highway driving, and when you're just travelling around the city, it uses a zero-emissions system to power the engine. However, unlike other hybrids, which use expensive, bulky lithium-ion batteries to power the engine at city-driving speeds, this one runs entirely on the energy stored in a compressed air cylinder.

According to PopSci:

The system can use the gasoline engine to repressurize the accumulator, but it also uses something known as regenerative braking, which reclaims some of the waste heat energy from applying the brakes, and converts that into energy used to repressurize the gas.

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Although current hybrids can greatly reduce a person's personal carbon footprint due to driving, there's still an environmental burden to overcome with these vehicles — due to the mining, processing and even transport of the minerals that go into the batteries, and due to the electricity that's needed to charge the batteries (depending on how your local electricity supply is generated). Designs like this compressed air version don't have this same burden, and since they're lighter, they even consume less gasoline than a similarly-sized battery-powered hybrid.

According to Peugeot, this compressed air system will be available in their cars starting in 2016 models, and it's very likely that we'll be seeing this option available from other car manufacturers soon as well.

(Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

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