The idea of solar roadways has been around for a while, and I haven’t said anything about it because I thought it was self-evident how stupid it was. I was wrong. The Indiegogo page raised $2.2 million and recently, prototypes have been built, to much applause from the environmentally-minded. So now, instead of just being a moronic idea, this is a moronic idea that a lot of people are giving a lot of money to. And since I am sick and tired of the collective societal delusion surrounding this FLAMING GARBAGE PILE OF AN IDEA, I’ve decided to point out the myriad flaws with it.
Tag Archives: cars
TRANSPORTATION IDEAS THAT WON’T WORK (BECAUSE OF SCIENCE): PART 1
Eventually, there will come a day when people stop listening to “designers” with no background in physics who propose physics-based things. Until then, the word “designer” will continue to mean “dude with AutoCAD/Photoshop skills, a wild hair up his ass, and no connection to the actual world that real people live in.”
Now when you’re designing a lampshade that is made out of thousands of soda tabs for no obvious reason, that’s fine. Lampshades are not important. As long as it doesn’t catch fire or explode, it’s probably fine. It doesn’t have to “work” in any real sense because it doesn’t do anything.
Yes. Good work. The world is glad that you did that.
But when your headline is “Magneter: Magnetic Highway Harvests Kinetic Energy From Cars To Generate Electricity,” you had better know what the fuck you’re talking about. And as usual, they don’t. Continue reading
SIX MORE CATASTROPHICALLY USELESS CONCEPT CARS
I have written about concept cars twice before. First up was GM, whose car concepts sucked in a kind of general way, but weren’t really inherently impossible.
Then there was the list of concept cars on Walyou, which were picked solely (as far as I can tell) because the person who wrote the article is eleven years old and thought they were cool, despite having literally no filter for what reality is and how it applies to things like the whole entire world and also cars.
This was one of them. I called it a dildomobile.
This time, it’s Inhabitat. Inhabitat is a website that claims that “green design will change the world,” and as such they all get massive collective boners over anything that claims to be remotely earth-conscious, even if it isn’t actually green or is, you know, physically impossible.
THE MOST AWESOME SINGLE BUTTON IN THE HISTORY OF BUTTONS
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and have we got a treat for you. I’m going to set this up in my usual disconnected fashion, so deal with it. After this, I promise not to talk about cars for a while.
This is a Panavia Tornado.
If you look closely, you can see that it carries an ungodly amount of explosives.
THE GREATEST RACE IN HISTORY
Two years later would come the worst motorsport disaster ever, when 86 people lost their lives and 120 more were injured. Eleven years after that, a disgruntled Henry Ford II decided that he’d had enough of Ferrari’s victories and thrashed them four years running with the legendary GT40. And 27 years after that, Ayrton Senna ran the undisputed greatest single lap of all time, moving from fifth to first in a single lap at the European Grand Prix, in the rain and against some of the best racing drivers the world has ever seen. But none of that had happened yet.
The year was 1953. The venue: the 21st running of the greatest series in motorsport, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.The car in question was a beautiful, slippery beast of a machine, the Jaguar C-Type. It used thinner aluminum body panels to reduce weight, a rubber gas tank for weight and speed of fill-up, and a 3.4 liter twin-cam straight six producing 180 horsepower. It weighed 2100 pounds without the driver—a mere feather of a car. But its secret weapon was hidden from view: disc brakes on all four wheels. Combined with its wispy lightness, they allowed the car to brake later into corners, recover faster from overheating, and push the envelope on the fabled Mulsanne straight.
