I did spend a little time looking up stuff on this on the interwebs. It seems like it was brought to the salt flats in 2008. It caused a big stir at the tech inspections even got written up in Popular Mechanics. They built it with the intentions of reaching a top speed of 30mph in a mile run. Unfortunately it seems it never actually ran.
The specifics of the car are a bit of a mystery. as best as people could tell half the rubberbands powered one wheel while the other half powered the other wheel.
All those bands where wrapped by some kind of ratcheting method, and the power was transfered to those skinny rear wheels by chains
No idea how much tension they were putting on each band, or how much all those bands weighed but there sure looked to be a lot of them.
While there were rumor of it showing up other places I can't see any information of it ever running anywhere. I guess it could be an elaborate joke and never would actually work, but it seems like alot of work to do that. Either way it was a pretty novel dream and looked pretty cool.
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Hello! I'm writing about this rubber band-powered beast for Jalopnik -- May I use (credited, of course) some of these pictures? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteoh, and you can reach me at jason[at]jalopnik.com. Thanks!
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