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Idea vs. Ego
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The ADR™ always slopes in the direction you want to go. Using electromagnets under the road, or hydraulics lifting up the tarmac behind you, or a matrix of buttered toast slices fixed underneath sloping 45° forward, or an array of dean drives in the trunk suitably oriented, the way you wanna go is always
downhill and you do not need an engine in your car.
The starter and battery will have to remain. Since the driveway would slope only one way, you will need to engage the starter to either get out to the road, or to get back in, or, if you have a very level driveway, both.
The battery will be kept charged by a generator driven from the wheels.
Road tax will include the bill for propulsion.
Speed limits will be automatically enforced by the road itself. To accelerate, overtake etc you will have to steer to the middle lanes. To slow down or stop, you just steer towards the edge of the road.
Running out of gas will be a thing of the past. However, occasionally you would run out of road and then will have to get out and push.
NO Fuel consumption
http://www.halfbake...fuel_20consumption!
Oi! I thought of this first (see annotation). Living at the top of a hill to avoid fuel consumption, and buttered-toast-powered cars are both my ideas. My patent lawyers will be calling shortly. [pottedstu, Mar 04 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Annotation:
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Why is this better than conveyor belts, the typical form of the "power the roads, not the cars" idea? |
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I still need a way to change lanes, accelerate and decelerate. Besides, I thought this was baked by those folks who jack up the rear end of their cars... |
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bookworm: 'cause it's gnarlier. |
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Bookworm: Because you can keep stuff in your car that you can't on the usual 'Roads Must Roll' type transportation... |
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Just put bigger tires on in the back than in the front. Then the car's pointing downhill everywhere it goes.* |
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*(except when climbing a steep slope, but then you just need bigger wheels in the back) |
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why can't the driveways all be downhill as well? |
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Dragging the depths of memory, I seem to recall that there's a road in Wales (?) where, due to a trick of the local topography, you always seem to be going downhill. |
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//hydraulics of buttered toast// |
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Since buttered toast always falls buttered side down, there is obviously a force on the buttered side which, acting radially downwards towards the earth's centre, causes the said toast to turn while in free fall in the air so that it is orientated such that the observed behaviour is obtained. |
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When the array of slices of buttered toast is fastened such that they are oriented sloping 45° forward, the force towards the centre of the earth, acting normal to the plane of the side of the buttered side, can be resolved into two components, one component acting along the road in the desired direction of travel and thus modifying the gravitational force acting on the car such that the local topography in the vicinity of the car is favourably orientated so as to simulate the occurrance of a downward sloping road. |
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<disclaimer> I don't always write like this. I've been reading Vernon. </disclaimer> |
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Research needs to be carried out with slices of french fries, obtained from McD's along the way. Once I get the necessary money and equipment and time together, that is going to be done. By me. |
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'stu: no cats, no turning gravity by 90°, no case. |
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This may be possible. I have observed that cars can distort otherwise level surfaces, just by being parked over them. |
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Try this experiment: Drop a small nut or bolt on a "level" concrete floor near a car. It will roll to the exact geometric centre of the area under the car, every time. |
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Conclusion? A car parked anywhere creates a shallow depression in the surface of the Earth until it is driven away, to repeat the trick where next it stops. |
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That's right. Visitors to the Snowdonia National Park are often surprised to see people rolling up the mountain at high speed. The fact is, Snowdon is not a mountain at all, but a big, pointy hole in the ground. Clever lighting makes it appear inverted. |
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UB: so we could tie the small nut or bolt to a sturdy 1-2 ft. cable and hang it from the car's rear bumper. This should indeed propel the car forward. Genius! |
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I bet it'd work even better with a rare and valuable coin or something truly irreplaceable like a grandmother's wedding ring. |
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In fact, using the wedding ring gambit, instead of tying it to the rear bumper, I bet you could tie it to the front bumper and it would tow the car to the nearest storm drain. Then you'd merely have to fish the ring out of the drain with the cable and seal up the drain, whereupon you'd be off again in the direction of the next nearest drain. |
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And do you have a large enough lever, and a place to stand on, UB, to drive the earth away? |
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That's kind of a personal question, isn't it? |
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Dropped parts or tools don't go to the geometric center of the car, they go to the area where they'll be most difficult to find and retrieve... |
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. . . which is under the geometric centre of the car. |
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yes, it is a most interesting concept, the type that UB - well enough of that, I wondered if it were an Australian thing like water going down the plughole in a different direction to the rest of the universe. |
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I have previously been chastised, in these very pages, for wasting water in a series of fascinating experiments designed to prove or debunk that notion once and for all, po. |
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I could find no compelling evidence of a collective consciousness or directional preference for antipodean hydraulic flow. |
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<On topic (sort of)> Rather than tie a nut to a cable from the front bumper I would have thought that a simple gun to shoot nuts out of the front of the car would be the US solution. Of course, this is an incredibly wasteful method of propulsion and would soon lead to doomsayers predicting a worldwide nut shortage and crisis. |
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There would soon be aftermarket nut exchanges popping up all over the place, along with legislative efforts to apply punitive taxes to the sale of nuts in most countries. An amusing coincidence would be the fact that MacAdam (inventor of the Tar MacAdam roadway, or Tarmac), shares his name with the discoverer of the Macadamia nut. |
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Premium Untied Nuts (PUN) would soon be loose all over the country. Young Asian men would be spending huge amounts of Daddy's fortune on solid gold nuts (Higher specific gravity = More valuable= Steeper gradient = Faster) to ensure they enjoyed a competitive advantage over police cars. |
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Finally, a substitute for the penis substitute analogy will be found. The bigger the nuts you have, the more attractive you will be to girls. Oh, baked already you say? |
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like I said, interesting concept, the type that UB - well enough of that - does very well! |
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What you want, I do believe, is a controllable pleat in the fabric of reality.
You set up the Pleat Generator in the car so that it creates a small, gentle hill under the rear tires. As the car rolls down the hill and forward, the pleat moves forward as well. That way, the car will always be rolling downhill off the pleat that it trails behind it, like a surfboard on a wave.
This requires no changes to the roads at all. Since the Pleat Generator changes the very nature of reality, i.e., the road surface, as required; and, after which, the road is returned to its original condition (i.e., not pleated). |
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Magic doesn't work, quarterbaker... |
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Neelandan, if you're on the left side of the car and you drop something, and it goes to the center it's easier to reach from the left side than it would be if it was on the right side of the car. If you're in front of it and it goes to the back, same thing. The center is NOT the hardest place to reach... |
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Ahhh, StarChaser is right, you know. This could sort out the steering! Have the driver moved to the back of the car, on a seat which can slide sideways. The nut is attached to a piece of string (tied to the rear bumper) which is not quite long enough to allow the nut to reach the front center of the car, which according to StarChaser is where it will be compelled to move. If the driver shifts left or right in their seat, the nut will be driven to the opposite corner, thus taking the car in that direction. Maybe. No more steering wheels, means no more steering column to hurt yourself on in a collision. |
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You're missing the point that small valuable objects and buttered toast only go to places you don't want them to go because they're places you don't want them to go to. If you start wanting them to go to those places, they'll stop going to those places. Murphy's law is all-powerful. Your only hope is that someone else wants it to go to another place more than you want it to go to the place you want it to go to, and even then the essential solipsism of the universe will probably screw it up for you. |
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it will go to where neither of you want it to go to - oh don't go there. |
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