I’ve been driving around the local area where I live lately in a van and I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that there’s this one particular spot on this one particular road where, when I drive through it, the van seems to lose power.
It doesn’t cut out completely, it just loses power. The only way to describe it is if you imagine driving down a road and then someone suddenly throws a big hook over the back of the vehicle. The hook is attached to a rope which is attached to a car behind which is braking. So the effect is the van I’m in slows down although the engine keeps going.
It only happens for about 10 metres or so and then the van returns to normal. The first couple of times it happened I didn’t think much about it but then it kept happening and it always happens on the exact same stretch of road. It started to freak me out. It’s happened too many times now and always on the same stretch of road for it to be coincidence.
It happened again today when I drove over this stretch of road. Just to make sure I’m not going mad I turned around and drove back over the stretch of road and it happened again then I turned round and went back and it happened a third time.
I decided that paranormal explanations such as some kind of mini Bermuda triangle or aliens are probably unlikely at this stage and I started to look at what else there was around that could be causing this effect. The only thing different about this stretch of road that I can see is that there are some power cables overhead - the ones that supply electricity to the country (national grid pylons).
But I’ve never heard of these affecting engines before but then I don’t know enough about engines. The other weird thing is this only happens in this van. It doesn’t happen when I drive over this stretch of road in a car.
Could these power cables be affecting something in the engine that makes the van seem to “drag”?
It certainly is possible. I had a car once (a Subaru) that on one certain road, in front of one building, would have the tachometer die suddenly and the engine stumble for about 100 feet or so, then it would come back to life and the tach would function. The tach was the only electronic gauge on the whole dash, so there was a clear connection. There were power lines near the spot, but they also ran along the road for some time. I figured it must have been a particular RF signal that interfered with the computer, but was never able to discover what or why.
The car would always stumble on that spot, and only that spot, for 10 years. Until it was sold for scrap.
Electronics are used in the ignition system and the fuel system. Electronics are susceptible to RFI and magnetic fields, which can be produced by the current flowing through power cables. Different vehicles have different sensitivities to this.
Older cars have a fairly simple electrical system. A rotating piece called the distributer makes and breaks contact to the various spark plugs to make a spark which ignites the gas and makes the engine go. There’s a coil of wire in the circuit to increase the voltage to make it easier to make a spark, but that’s about it.
A modern car, by comparison, has little computer chips all over the place inside it. The typical car today has significantly more computing power than the spacecraft that took the astronauts to the moon. Computer controls are much more sensitive to radio frequency noise and interference, due to the fact that computer circuits use fairly low voltage signals. Car manufacturers know this, and do try to keep the car’s little computers shielded from RF noise, but sometimes a car will be sensitive to certain narrow frequency ranges. Different model cars will have different frequencies that they are sensitive to, and older cars will generally be less sensitive to this sort of thing than newer cars since computers control less in older cars.
High voltage lines will often have a little bit of arcing which generates a lot of RF noise (so does lightning, which is essentially the same thing on a much bigger scale). Power companies try to keep the arcing down to a minimum, since any energy lost to arcing is a loss to their system and costs them money.
Power companies will also often send their own radio signals down power lines so that different stations can communicate with each other. Usually these signals don’t radiate out much where they can cause a problem, but maybe in your case they do.
Another possibility might be a cell phone or communications tower of some sort nearby. Antennas broadcast most of their energy in one direction, but they usually have “sidelobes” where a little bit of the energy leaks out off to the side, or in your case, down towards the road.
My money is on the power lines arcing. It’s too much of a coincidence that it happens right near those lines.
FYI there’s a device some law enforcement groups have tested to disable a car. It’s just a small device that they lay out on the road, and when your car passes overhead it blasts it with RF noise, frying the computer and shutting the car off.
Just had another thought. You might try tuning your radio on the AM band to someplace where there’s no station nearby, and listen to see if you get a whole bunch of static as you go under the power lines. I suspect you will.
I guess I can stop looking for aliens now and I can cancel that appointment with the shrink. One thing I forgot to mention was that it tends to only happen when it’s raining. The vehicle is a fairly new Mercedes so that fits in with what’s been said. Although it’s diesel so it won’t have spark plugs.
The natural follow up question I have though is: Is there any danger to me from this arcing? I’ve heard scare-stories about these electricity pylons being able to sterilise you. I’m guessing that these rumours are unproven (at least). Just because the RF signal affects electronic equipment doesn’t mean it can affect me, an organic being with no internal computer chips.
If you were foolish enough to climb up the pole, you could get shocked without ever touching the wires. The voltage up there is high enough that it can arc directly from the wire to you, jumping over the gap like a miniature lightning bolt (which it is). You’d have to climb all the way up to reasonably close to where the wires are. A few thousand volts isn’t going to jump too awful far. Lightning only goes as far as it does because it’s a few million volts.
Radio waves have never been proven to do much of anything except heat you up. If your body received enough radio waves it could concievably cook you to death. After all, that’s how a microwave oven works. But standing next to a power line, you aren’t going to get anywhere close to this level of radio waves. Heck, you can stand directly under a high power radio transmitter (like for an FM radio) and not even get enough radio waves into your body to hurt you. I’ve done it. It’s kinda cute. You can tune your little pocket radio to any channel (AM or FM!) and still only hear the radio station from the transmitter. But it still won’t cook you.
I’d like to say power lines are 100 percent safe, but there is a slight statistical correllation in that people who live next to high voltage lines don’t live as long on average as people who don’t. This is one of the things that started people thinking that electric fields and such were possibly bad for your health back in the 70’s, which grew into the whole cell phone and brain cancer scare and folks walking around schools with field strength meters in the 80’s. 30 some years later, after millions or maybe even billions spent on research, no one has yet proven a clear link between power lines or cell phones and any ill effects on you, but the fact remains that folks who live next to those wires tend to die earlier. As one of my college professors back in the 80’s liked to point out, maybe healthier people just don’t want to live next to 'em. This subject has come up many, many, many times before, so let’s not hijack this thread with it.
Just driving by occasionally, you’re safe. Don’t sweat it.
<ot> Reminds me of a storm watching trick I discovered accidentally while sitting in a car in a storm. Had the radio down low and just before a lightning strike, there would be a burst of static. I impressed my kids with my amazing “predictive” abilities for a while with that one ;)</ot>