Home air purifiers have been slowly gaining mainstream popularity over the past decade, yet, oddly, there are few products that can clean the air you breathe inside a car. That is no small oversight. Research has shown that commuters who sit in traffic for an hour every day are exposed to air pollution equivalent to passively smoking 180 cigarettes a year.
Worse still, tests by King's College London in 2013 found that an ambulance driver was exposed to far higher levels of particulate matter than a cycle courier over the working day — a discrepancy that comes down to how air gets trapped inside modern vehicles. Some drivers assume they are protected by their car's air-conditioning recirculation function, but they are not. There is no car on the road today with filters capable of removing nitrogen dioxide gas from the air — not even a Tesla, for all its large HEPA filters and "Bioweapon Defense" mode.
Enter the Airbubbl, a new British-Danish device that does carry such a filter. It promises to clear the cabin of harmful particles and gases while trapping and killing nearly all airborne bacteria and viruses, the coronavirus Covid-19 among them. Resembling a Bluetooth speaker, it attaches to the passenger-seat headrest using a metal, crash-tested strap and buckle. The key to its design is a formidable filter working in tandem with advanced airflow dynamics: vents at each end push filtered air in a pattern engineered to reach the driver's nose and mouth. According to manufacturer AirLabs, keeping the car's fan on its lowest setting and directing incoming air into the footwell improves the device's effectiveness considerably.
The endorsements have followed. Last April, the English healthcare transport provider HATS Group announced it had installed an Airbubbl in every one of its London-based ambulances. Matthew Johnson, professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen and chief science officer at AirLabs, framed the priority plainly: "Our focus here is on reducing exposure for workers who cannot avoid close contact with coronavirus patients, and for anyone working in essential jobs in enclosed spaces. The science shows that by installing an air filtration device, like Airbubbl, you remove more than 95 per cent of airborne particles. By decreasing the concentration of airborne particles that could contain the virus being breathed in by workers in critical environments, we reduce the risk of them being infected."
The unit can be controlled remotely via an iOS or Android app, which also serves up airflow-management statistics and achievement badges tallying the quantity of air cleaned. AirLabs says it designed the Airbubbl with three users in mind: the school-run parent, the commuter and the professional driver. On the evidence, all three — and the rest of us — could do with one.
