While others scramble to design smaller, lighter combustion engines, or better fuel-cell and battery technologies, an Israeli startup is totally reinventing the combustion engine to power the hybrid car of the future – a smart electric vehicle.
Chief Marketing Officer and cofounder Gal Fridman tells ISRAEL21c that after just two years in business, Aquarius Engines has filed three patents and signed a deal to test the Aquarius engine in a major European automaker’s concept car at the beginning of 2017.
Because Aquarius uses so little fuel to power the engine and charge the battery, drivers would have to fill the 50-liter (13-gallon) tank only about every five or six weeks.
Whereas conventional automobiles can go 600 kilometers (372 miles) on 50 liters of gasoline, and an electric car can go 350 kilometers on a single charge, a car fitted with the Aquarius engine has a range of 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) per tank.
What’s more the company claims that vehicles made with 20-kilogram (44-pound) Aquarius engines – instead of conventional 160-kilo engines — will be less expensive to buy and to operate than are the regular, hybrid or electric cars of today.
And although it would cost billions for automakers to build new assembly lines to accommodate the Aquarius engine, the founders are banking on the fact that automakers are desperately seeking new technologies to comply with ever stricter pollution regulations.
“The car industry is huge and it’s under threat,” says Fridman. “Manufacturers cannot meet today’s regulations and those regulations will be much tougher in two to five years. In fact, when we started, we wanted to go into generators because we thought cars would be too slow an industry to break into, but the doors opened really fast.”
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