CAIRO – A group of Egyptian students has designed a vehicle they say willbattle rising energy prices and promote clean energy by running on nothingbut air.
The undergraduate students, who built the vehicle as part of theirgraduation project from Helwan University just outside Cairo, are rollingout a prototype one-person vehicle that runs on compressed oxygen.
The go-kart-like vehicle comes as Egypt pushes ahead with painful economicreforms that include deep cuts to energy subsidies, measures tied to athree-year $12 billion IMF loan program it began in late 2016.
The students say their vehicle can hit 40 kilometers an hour and last 30kilometers before needing to be refueled, and it only costs about 18,000Egyptian pounds ($1,008.40) to build.
“The operational cost of the vehicle… will be almost nothing. You arebasically using compressed air. You are not paying for fuel and also you donot need cooling,” said Mahmoud Yasser, a student who helped design it.