If you could spend $208 on a small device that fitted to your car engine, saving you up to 40 percent on your gas consumption, the earth from pollution, and which also gave your car more power, you’d think it was too good to be true, right? Well this is exactly the promise of a new invention, the Z5, devised by an Israeli teenager Zion Badash when he was only 16.
After two years in the works, Badash started selling his device a few months ago, with road tests to prove it. Car manufacturers around the world are lining up for stakes in this wunderkind’s new device.
Badash came up with the idea while he was walking down a smoggy street in Tel Aviv one day, and noticed all the pollution belching out of the cars. “That bothered me,” he tells ISRAEL21c. He hadn’t even started studying for his driving license at that time, and had no idea about the cost of fuel. It was the environmental cost of pollution that put his gears in motion.
“Especially being a young kid, I had no idea what was the cost of gas or the fuel consumption for regular cars,” says Badash, now 18. “I realized if [the solution] comes before the combustion itself, the effect will not only be on emissions — it will also affect emissions, save fuel and make the more car powerful,” the young brainiac continues.
Of course, more energy savings is “a big and important effect,” he says, but it “wasn’t my main concern.”
Though Badash learned physics at high school and is already doing math at university courses, the knowledge he needed to come up with the special metal alloys in his device didn’t come from either of these places. “I realized that there has to be something with all the technologies around us that isn’t done, that could be,” he says.
The device he developed changes — for a fraction of a second — the way air behaves when going into the combustion chamber. This change allows the engine to use air more efficiently, saving fuel and giving more thrust at the same time.
After developing the prototype of the Z5, Badash went on to found a three-man company. It’s a family business run by Badash’s brother-in-law Eli Mor, with headquarters in Tel Aviv and a manufacturing and distribution outlet in Turkey. The Z5 is now available through mail order via the company website, and already thousands of units have been sold so far.
All of the world’s large car manufacturers have been in contact with Mor, he tells ISRAEL21c. They are looking for ways it can be fitted directly into their vehicles. “Ford, Mazda, all the large companies have been in contact with us, and we are in talks with them,” says Mor, who sees the environment as the main priority for the business: “This is the top of the work. We don’t look at fluctuating gas prices.”
What the alloy is made from is a secret, of course, and Badash admits he isn’t quite sure how it works, but road tests on emissions show that it certainly does work. It can be fitted to new cars, or old ones, diesel, hybrid, buses — basically any combustion engine, even power plants – says Badash, who is about to be recruited to the army.
“Using it in an open combustion chamber brings a maximum effect. You can see fuel consumption [go down] very clearly,” he says. “It can be used everywhere. I am not exaggerating,” says the teen convincingly, pointing to the company’s website and recent emissions monitoring done by the authorities in Israel.
Fitted onto the air filter that goes to the combustion chambers, the Z5 is as easy to use as changing a tire. And for $208, this teen may be onto something that could revolutionize the auto industry. His brother-in-law seems to think so. He thinks Badash should win a Nobel Prize for the Z5.
{ISRAEL21c, Yair Alpert-Matzav.com Israel}
