Finrod said:

and which has (in my opinion) never recieved its due recognition.

Join the club! I came up with a new concept for a squirrel cage motor. Mine is different from other designs in that it actually has a squirrel in a cage to power it. It will provide unlimited green energy and the only thing you had to do to keep it running is give it a few nuts and acorns once in a while and replace the squirrel when it wears out (dies)

I’m still waiting for my government grant money and my public recondition.

Don’t forget to include that it has a zero carbon foot print (notwithstanding all the things you mention in post #13) and comes with 14 Gorecredits. You might want to include that each car comes with a trained, band-winding polar bear (bred to increase the polar bear population and prevent the extinction of this cute and cuddly animal). Color options: green or green. Interior option: hand woven grass seats or folding chair. Other options: solar powered key winding motor for those to infirm to wind the key; hand generated emergency radio; solar powered AM-FM radio; carbon-based chassis (only $380,000 but worth it as the car will be much lighter and travel 14 feet further per band winding); and racing stripes or flames in green to make the car go .00003 mph faster.

We need names for dealerships. Suggestions anyone?

        Frank Kandrnal said:

I am in a hurry to buy some stock in rubber plantation. The stock is soon to skyrocket when the Media announces that Steve’s “Green Automotive Rubber Works” received $100 million federal grant to produce a car that uses no gasoline.

Yeah, you might want to buy some stock in the oil companies too. Our plan involves the use of massive amounts of petroleum-based energy to run the tractors and transport for the rubber plantation and for the rubber refining and production. We also will be using enormous amounts of petroleum-derived solvents in the processing of the rubber. Of course, we’ll use a hell of a lot of coal to power it all, but one nice thing is we can reuse some of the sulfur from the coal and heavy oil in the vulcanization of the rubber bands.

We don’t talk about that as much though. We take out cue from the bio-fuels industry. Since the car doesn’t actually run on gasoline we just pretend none is involved at all.

However, certain commenter who seem to harp on the same topic over and over and never really get it but keep bringing it up in unrelated threads are the kind of thing that just give me a headache out of a combination of frustration and annoyance.

The rubber band car is funny. I like the overuse of the word “green” and the “reduce by 30%” the chances of rolling over the subject. The powerkey? Advanced copper-zinc alloy? Hmm, that sounds like a brass winding key. But I guess it’s an advanced one, maybe you can connect it to the internet or something to show how high tech it is!

It’s not so much worse than a pneumatic car.

        Bruce said:

Your post is funny, there are some silly schemes out there, but I think its a good thing that Obama and the DOE has stimulated people to start investigating some of these ideas. Many of them won’t work, but if a few do it will be a good payoff.

So we should finance ideas that may or may not work on government money? There’s already an entity that produces incentives for good ideas – it’s called the market place and historically it’s the one that does the best job. Everything from the airplane to the telephone to Google to the microchip came from allowing people the freedom to tinker with their ideas and to profit from them.

I have some news for you about the “some of them won’t work” concept: In many (most) cases anyone with a little knowledge can tell when something won’t work before it ever gets built. Like for example, floating balloons to the stratosphere and then compressing it down to the sea level won’t cool anything. Anyone who knows the ideal gas laws can tell you that. You don’t actually need to build one to confirm it.

Yet we are hemoraging money to air powered cars, solar roads, piddle-power solar projects, compressed air energy storage and other things that anyone who actually understands math and physics could see through.

Does repeating the same thing in differing words but never pplicable to the post as a whole actually mean nothing to you? For someone so concerned about the greater societal good, it’s surprising that useful contributions mean so little.

Here’s something else from another good site about this:

http://www.damninteresting.com/why-not-a-wind-up-car

They also, have some good posts about the dangers presented by nuclear, such as the accident at Cherblyinsk Russia.