Product Review: Car Inflator

At Saucci.net, we strive to bring you reviews of the latest products and advancements, and we are always looking for innovations to bring to your attention. Recently, a potentially valuable new item caught our attention, and we put it through our usual rigorous testing regime.

Many travellers are reluctant to take long trips on account of the possibility of experiencing a car breakdown and the concomitant inconveniences and difficulties that inevitably follow. When driving, one often sees a camper with a car in tow and a bicycle mounted on the rear of the car just in case the camper and the car become disabled, which is quite a sad state of affairs.

Those days may finally be close to an end. Several automotive manufacturers have long produced inflatable vehicles that could easily be stored as spares in a trunk or even a backpack, but their usefulness was limited on account of the lack of practical ways to inflate them when needed. An injured hiker may not be in a position to blow up an inflatable vehicle manually, and a car that breaks down in a dangerous area needs to be replaced with an inflated spare very quickly. The "Car Inflator" looks as though it may bring a solution to this vexing problem.

Our first candidate was this Mini Cooper. The Car Inflator made quick work of it, getting it completely inflated in an average of just sixteen minutes. In our test drives, it remained fully inflated and all components functioned properly. Watching the vehicle quickly go from a flat pancacke to a usable vehicle was quite exciting and rewarding. It stayed fully inflated for the hour of testing we gave it on each of the three repetitions of the evaluation process.

For the second test, we chose an Audi sedan. Here we started to see issues. While the sedan appeared to inflate fully in an average of twenty-eight minutes, in our test drives we found that key components had failed to inflate and were unusable. The most significant of these was the windshield wipers, which we discovered when a light drizzle started during our second test drive. Our engineers traced this to an uninflated electrical connection. On the third test, we drove through a mock customs booth and attempted to lower the driver's window-- but the button for the electric window had lost its inflation, and the staffer simulating the customs agent had to break the glass in order to inspect our documents.

The third test is where things started to deteriorate. We chose this modest orange Volkswagen cargo van, but as is evident from the photograph of our best attempt, it failed to inflate fully despite our efforts. We stopped the test after an hour, figuring that if the inflation takes that long, other, more useful solutions will need to be considered. We also note that a van that is not fully inflated will have reduced storage space-- and if deflation occurs while the van is loaded, the driver may have to stop and discard parts of the load so as not to exceed the remaining available storage space.

Finally, just for giggles, we attempted to inflate this inflatable tractor trailer-- usually done at a licensed inflation facility, so don't try this at home-- with the Car Inflator. The device barely was able to get the cab inflated, and even after two hours the trailer only got as far as is seen in the photograph. By the time we threw in the towel and snapped the picture, the cab had already started to deflate, indicating that the Car Inflator simply would not be able to handle this more demanding task.