A car with a wind turbine 2.86 times overtook the speed of a tailwind

With the sponsorship of Google, a car with a wind engine was created , which with the help of wind power was dispersed almost three times faster than the wind itself. However, the ridicule of the scientific community over the inventor of the car does not subside even after a successful experiment conducted on May 17, 2010.

Over the past few years, thousands of pages of online forums have been written in endless debate about whether it is theoretically possible to accelerate a car on a wind turbine to a speed exceeding the wind speed. Theoretical physicists , using formulas, argued that this was impossible, since it contradicted the law of conservation of energy ("perpetual motion"). Opponents gave their heap of formulas and answered that modern yachts can move five times faster than the tailwind, so why can't cars?

The American engineer and aerodynamics specialist Rick Cavallaro dared to refute the theoretical physicists and the laws of common sense. About a year ago, he published on the Internet his own calculations, which theoretically proved the possibility of creating such a car. “I thought people would say how cool it was, but instead they said,“ Wow, that’s an idiot. ” Therefore, we decided to build a real model, ”says Kavallaro in an interview with Wired . A sponsor was found for the project - Google, whose logo was placed on a windmill stand. The blog FasterThanTheWind.org was opened and the work began to boil.


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Construction of the car took more than a year, and on May 17, 2010, the first successful tests took place. During the most successful race, the car accelerated to a speed of 2.86 times the speed of the tail wind (at a wind speed of 21.7 km / h).



First, the car is accelerated manually to exceed the wind speed. In this case, the wheels of the car spin the propeller, and from the propeller the air flow is fed back to the wheels, accelerating them in turn.

It looks like a “perpetual motion machine”, which was the reason for the squall of criticism of the inventor. He replies that this is not a perpetual motion machine, because it uses the flow of energy in the form of wind.





The graph of movement made during the tests below shows how at some time intervals the vehicle speed (red line) at peak times (6) after the end of manual pushing (5) exceeded the wind speed.