A Pakistani man is the latest person to claim to have invented a way to power a car with water.
Wouldn't that be great? Instead of filling-up your Chevy Suburban with expensive gas, or God forbid, downgrading to a vehicle that doesn't so much resemble a tank, you could fill the tank with regular water instead of expensive gas?
Granted, at $1.25 for a 16 oz. bottle of Dasani, we already pay about $10/gallon for water and, given that it is both scarce and essential for life, burning through water as fuel source could pose some existential problems for pretty much everything.
Don't worry too much about it, though. As Jalopnik points out, the idea of a water-powered car is basically the mechanical engineering equivalent of homeopathy--a pipe dream rooted in bad science.
Jalopnik: The idea itself— to build a car that runs on ordinary water— is total crap, scientifically. It violates at least one law of physics, and pisses off a few others. But the idea behind the idea— a car that runs on something so plentiful and cheap it's almost valueless— will never go away. It's just too tantalizing to give up.
The fantasy of a water car has been an efficient method of separating fools from their money for nearly a century. One "inventor" in the 1980s even convinced backers to buy him two (gas-powered) Rolls Royces and a Pebble Beach home for his miraculous water engine. Nice.
YouTube is littered with videos explaining how to convert your car to water power. And yet people keep buying gas. Probably because the international petro cartels in league with the Bilderberg Group have convinced the sheeple into...blah, blah, blah...or maybe, you know, the laws of physics.
Given the water car track record and scientific reality, it's probably best to remain skeptical about this latest H20-power claim.
Still, this is a great lesson of aspiring conmen (and conwomen): You can't go broke convincing people you've defied the laws of physics. -- JTW
