Title text:
"How does the spring not run out almost immediately?" "We pull it back REALLY far."
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3244/
Put another pullback motor in but backwards and you’ve got yourself infinite energy
You've just revolutionized green energy! I expect your Nobel Prize is in the mail!
Better start working on a speech!
Nobel committee? Yes... that one right there... they've just solved the world's energy problems forever, please give them all the medals!
Sorry we don't give medals anymore. Last time we gave out a medal to someone, Trump invaded their country and only left when the medal was given to him. Our insurance company just won't allow it anymore.
You invented recuperation braking. Nice.
Put a big wind-up key on the back for when it runs out.
i've seen people do that with vw beetles. it's cute.
Hand-crank starters were in production until the 90s apparently. The lada niva (a small weird truck thing) had them through 1998. Who knew?
I know it’s not quite the same but.. wind up key part is! I was gunna find a pic but there don't seem to be any showing the crank in use, only videos.
That was a great read, thanks for sharing!
or dont do that for planned obsolescence
Exactly what I'm looking for, I live on a mountain and work in the valley.
For this to work, you've gotta bring more weight down than you do back up.
Thankfully, you can just leave all your hopes and dreams at the workplace to make your car lighter on the way back!
Also your poop, drink coffee on the way in
Or get free delivery of dumbbells and other heavy stuff to your house and send them back from your workplace.
So you reverse the car to work and then coast your way home on spring power? I guess you'd have to go the long way into work.
Sounds like a gravity battery.
Imagine a spring large enough to last 200,000 miles.
sounds like a great what if post
I feel like I had one installed over my garage door.
I can't remember which car but an early hybrid vehicle did charge up a flywheel instead of an electric battery…
I heard about a version that used springs as well. Basically a pull-back car: When you break, it puts tension on the springs, then it releases that tension when accelerating. Apparently it was very good for city-driving, since you get an absurd number of cycles with very small "charges", which makes it very good when you do a lot of start/stop driving in slow traffic. I'm not sure why I haven't heard any more about it in more recent years.
*brake*
Idk about you, but I usually build tension when I break.
I build tension before I break, but maybe I'm weird.
That's right the actual moment of breaking usually releases tension, but the overall process of breaking includes building it up!
Maybe its some sort of human degradation fuel system, as you break down it powers the car?
Bcz springs wear out is my guess. That's the first thing I'd worry about in the design is how many cycles can it handle before performance is degraded. Might be a lot, but even if it's a couple years, people aren't going to be happy when their car performance suddenly drops off right after they finish paying the thing off.
You're probably right, at the same time, a spring that isn't overloaded can usually take an absurd amount of cycles: Just think about how long the suspension on a car typically lasts compared to a lot of other parts.
i think it was a bus, and it was used in hills to get extra energy while going down and using ot while going up.
I heard about racing car having spinning wheels too, instead of br~~e~~aking before turns, accumulating energy into them, then after the turn, releasing them for huge acceleration
*braking*
If its a race car it does both
Thanks for the fix ;)
Unironically, how you recharge a Rivian if the battery is dead.
This would have been cool for myth busters to try out.
Well, I think it's clear that this would work. The only question is what distances it could reach? 100m? a kilometer? more?
This reminds me of the advanced spring powered devices in Syberia (the adventure game). I wonder if it is even remotely feasible to store that much power in springs, probably not.
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