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131 From design to brands 10 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS According to Guy Negré, what are the advantages of air-powered cars? Make a list of adjectives in the article which refer to cars or technology. Which are: positive? negative? neutral? What other adjectives could describe the AIRpod? Examples: compact, fun, … Look at this sentence about the AIRpod. Compared to electric cars, air-powered cars cost a fraction of the price to buy, they don’t need expensive batteries to be replaced every five years or so, and crucially they take only a fraction of the time to recharge. The recharging time of air-powered cars is two minutes. The recharging time of electric cars is about five hours. How else could you express this difference? Use these expressions. You may need to change the order of the sentence. much less  several hours  about 150 times Think about how the comparisons might continue. Which could use: than ? as ? of ? that ? How can you measure these differences? Express the comparison in as many different single sentences as you can. 1 Vegetable oil costs €2 a litre. Extra virgin olive oil costs €8. 2 Our old flat had 3 rooms. Our new flat has 6. 3 We used to live about 2 km from the school. Now we live about 4.5 km away. 4 The painting was actually worth $50,000. He managed to buy it for $15,000. 5 There were 60,000 burglaries from homes in London last year. Only 5,000 of the homes had burglar alarms. 6 The average British schoolchild spends 22 hours a week at school and 30 hours a week watching TV. 29 a LanguagE fOCuS 30 Describing technology b a LanguagE fOCuS 31 Measuring differences b c On the road with the AIRpod air-powered car How would you react to someone who tried to sell you a car that runs on fresh air? Perhaps you would think he was peddling potentially planet-saving technology. More likely, you would dismiss him as a conman or a fantasist. Yet, that is precisely the pitch being made by French auto engineer Guy Negré, a good-humoured man in his mid-60s who claims to have developed a state-of-the-art car powered by compressed air: one that produces a fraction of the carbon emissions of a standard engine, reaches speeds of more than 30 mph, travels 65 miles on a one-minute recharge and, best of all, costs just over £3,000. Negré is quick to point out the drawbacks of existing eco-car technology. “Whatever people may tell you about hybrids, they are only marginally less polluting than the most efficient combustion engines,” he says. “Hydrogen power is expensive and impractical. Fuel cells are expensive and unproven and electric cars are reliant on expensive, unreliable battery technology.” Given the number of false green-auto dawns, you might wonder why air-powered cars should be any different. While Negré’s air cars have similar carbon emissions to electric cars (it all depends how the electricity to power the pumps that fill their air tanks is generated), he argues that air power is a superior technology. “Compared to electric cars, air-powered cars cost a fraction of the price to buy, they don’t need expensive batteries to be replaced every five years or so, and crucially they take only a fraction of the time to recharge.” I confess I was so sceptical that I reserved judgement until I had driven one of his cars. The version I drove was an early prototype, a three-wheeler with no bodywork, steered by a joystick. OK, it didn’t deliver the smoothly upholstered power so beloved by conventional car enthusiasts. And it possessed all the glamour of a souped-up lawnmower. But it worked, easily reaching speeds above 25 mph in the limited space of the factory car park, which doubled as my test track. Environment Travel and transport Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv