Fucking Futurecar on the Discovery Channel.

The BBQ Pit
1

Dear fucking Futurecar on the Discovery Channel.

Are you fucking high?

Yes, powering a car by compressed air is perfectly fucking feasable. And powering a generator by compressed air is perfectly fucking feasable. And compressing air from a generator is perfectly fucking feasable. A fucking perpetual motion machine is not–I repeat, NOT–perfectly fucking feasable.

A compressed-air powered car can’t have a compressed-air powered generator onboard to compress the air to run the car without some power source to compress the air. And that isn’t exactly a compressed air powered car any more is it? You can’t run the compressed air generator to compress air to power the car and compress the air to power itself at the same fucking time.

Your stupid fucking show stated that by simply adding an air compressor powered by compressed air to the car you’ll have a car that requires no other power source. Except a few fucking seconds of thought would make anyone who has thought for more than a few fucking seconds realize that you can’t power a car by a perpetual motion machine, even a perpetual motion machine that runs on compressed air.

Fuck you.

2

I’m not smart enough to understand what you’re talking about, but if it’s another case of misrepresenting scientific fact in the interest of entertaining people–then I offer a hearty ‘‘fuck you!’’ to them as well.

(I’m growing increasingly pissed at the DC anyways… selling out to pseudoscience, they are.)

3

You must have missed the little hand pump on the side where you have to charge it up before it starts. Just a little.

OK, a lot.

4

Well said, Lemur! I get the alarming sense that many politicians believe that hydrogen-powered devices operate according to a similar magical principle (including especially Bush&Co in their recent desperate flailing to change the subject.)

Thermodynamics is for sissies.

5

I must have missed the part when Discovery Channel wasn’t a sell-out to pseudoscience and nonsense. I remember watching Discovery when home sick from school once as a kid and being engrossed by wonderfully unskeptical specials on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Young though I was, it only took until the UFO sightings special (I was sick for a whole week) before I realized what crap I was being fed.

6

I had been thinking about starting a thread about that, too. But I was too lazy. Because I know that typing expends energy. I also know that moving against friction expends energy. That’s how I know there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion car.

7

Hmm. I’ll have to give that show a miss then. From what I can tell, these are the guys making the compressed-air car featured in the show. Not being fucking idiots, they don’t claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine.

My guess is that they mentioned that an electric outlet or the gasoline engine could re-fill the air, and the interviewers got confused. Of course, working for The Discovery Channel should involve a certain level of familiarity with science that exceeds having visited the gift shop at the local science museum, but perhaps they were the same idiots who do the ghost hunting crap.

Anyway, everyone knows you need magnets in your over-unity machine. Duh.

8

Yeah, the compressed air car guys themselves seemed fine. They just liked building gadgets run on compressed air. And building a generator that runs on compressed air is perfectly fine.

Except you can’t use the compressed-air powered generator to compress the air to run the compressed-air generator, and then use the compressed air to power a fucking car.

I honestly couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It’s one thing to breathlessly hype marginal technology, I doubt very much that many future cars are going to be powered by compressed air, but it’s fine to show one and speculate that this could be the wave of the future. But then they mention the generator as a way of creating a perpetual motion loop, and my jaw hit the floor.

9

They weren’t a sell-out back when I was 10. You know, when ghosts and Nessie were plausible theories. :smiley:

10

Wait… did Discovery Channel REALLY present this as a feasible idea??? Or is it some type of WHOOSH?

11

Hey, they left out the important part. You have to have a garage that is shaped like a pyramid! That way, it all works!

Sheesh.

Tris

12

hooray for fuckwits. I believe I came up with something along these lines when I was like… 8… and didn’t know yet that it wasn’t possible…

Maybe they drive their car in a completely frictionless environment. Maybe inside their head, since a grasp of physics seems to have slid right through without slowing down any…hmm…

13

They may still be scam artists, though. That car was supposed to go on sale in the US in like 2001, and at least one Doper, who’s opinion I hold in very high regard on such matters, believes that it’s a con job.

14

My father liked the ide of storing enery in giant compressed air tanks. Imagine things like dams or wind turbines that produce energy when they can, not neccesairly when it is needed.

I agree with the OP, however.

15

All I can tell you is that it just freakin’ works, c’mon man!

16

Oddly enough, the Discovery for Kids magazine is one of the finest magazines of its sort out there. Full of articles about science, history, with no advertisements or fluff.

Compare that to the National Geographic magazine for kids which is chock-full of movie tie-ins, ads for McDonalds and toys, and all sorts of crap.

17

It works because we believe it will. Same way planes stay in the air.

If it ain’t working, it’s because all you damned skeptics are being a Futurecar buzzkill.

18

Listen, even if the compressed air car guys were con artists, and the supposed compressed air car was really powered some other way, it’s not a big deal. So Discovery channel was fooled by some con men.

But a compressed air powered vehicle is physically possible. It might not be a good car, it might be unsafe, it might have horrible range, it might be a total crap car that no one in a million years would purchase, and it might be that engineering limits will forever relegate compressed air cars to the status of toys and curiosities, just like no one uses compressed air firearms in a real life firefight.

That’s fine. Whether compressed air cars are stupid or not is beside the point. A compressed air rifle WORKS, whether it works well or not is beside the point. It doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics.

So hyping a worthless piece of crap compressed air car is totally fine, and I want to repeat that I have absolutely no problem with a show on future cars that hype marginal or crap products. That’s just standard bullshit, perfectly fine.

But how in hell the narrator could jump from a car that runs on compressed air to a perpetual motion car is beyond me. It just boggles the mind that a show about cars, that at some point someone with a high school diploma was probably involved with, could casually throw out a perpetual motion machine.

Hell, even if they had a show where they hyped a car powered by a perpetual motion machine that would be a different story. It would be “wow, this car violates the laws of physics. Stupid physicists!” At least that would show some understanding that perpetual motion machines are considered impossible, there would be some handwaving about how the free energy wasn’t really perpetual motion, and so forth. It would be a bullshit lying show, but I could understand how it could happen.

But to just casually mention that with a compressed air generator onboard you could just hook the compressor up to the generator and power your car forever from free energy, I can’t understand how that could happen.

19

Maybe another show of Discovery’s can bust this myth. :smiley:

20

Ford built a hybrid concept SUV. Rather than IC/electric hybrid, it was IC/Hydraulic. Energy was stored in a hydraulic accumulator. Such an accumulator compresses nitrogen to very high pressure…so there is high pressure oil involved, but ultimatly, it is compressed gas that is storing the energy.