Muscle Car

The following line of thought started with my observation of how efficient the human body is at converting food into energy. A marathon runner can eat a pork chop and run 26 miles. Your car can’t do that.

Then I thought about how scientists created a heart out of human cells grown in a lab. It’s a muscle that actually works. So how much of a leap is it to imagine vehicles powered by lab-grown muscles, with artificial digestion systems, powered by your leftovers from dinner? All it would take is a small electrical stimulation to make the muscle contract in time to pedal a generator attached to a motor.

We probably wouldn’t want to use human cells to create those muscle cars. Other creatures have more efficient muscles. Maybe a huge muscle made from an ant’s leg would be good. Those tiny bastards can lift many times their own weight. I want my car powered by giant ant muscles.

The great thing about a muscle car is that the more you use it, the stronger it gets from the exercise. The downside is that you’d have to keep the muscle warm enough so it didn’t freeze, and not so hot it died. But I think science could figure that out. Maybe the muscle would be part ant and part polar bear.

The artificial digestion system would be optimized for whatever food you have in your area. If you modeled it after a cow’s guts, it could run on anything from lawn clippings to licorice. You could stop at McDonalds and order a Big Mac for yourself and a milkshake for your car.

This feels somewhat inevitable to me.

Comments

[Christopher Glen]

Inevitable? I hope not – lol. It definitely brings a new meaning to "Horsepower" though. I don’t think my "Mustang" would last long if I kept bringing it to McDonalds.

[Joy Forever]

Here's something along these lines...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080317-muscles-video-ap.html

[Vinod]

Funny but misinformed. Fuel combustion engines are way more efficient. The only advantage Scott's machine has is it uses food for energy. But like others have pointed out those things used to be called horse carriages.

[leonardtambunan]

Horses put their shit on the road.
This one have no shit, right Scott ?

[peter]

It sounds ridiculous now...but so did flying machines 150 years ago!
Good Luck with it! My only worry would be the junk food diet!

[TJ]

hey Scott,

Get a job!! you give me creeps...thank God u r not one of the Policy-Makers in department of renewable energy sources!

[Luca Masters]

My car is a lot heavier than I am and is designed to be most efficient at higher speeds than a marathon runner can sustain. Heck, higher speeds than a sprinter can reach.

Except I have no car.

[David Cheung]

Why stop at cars? we should be thinking about flying vehicles! like dragonfly or something

[Paul Hosler]

Scott it's already been done!!! Check this out...
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w316/pahosler/mexsuv.jpg

[zume]

...its called a "horse."

[Leo Greenwolf]

So your car would be alive.

Animal right activists are not going to like this!

[John]

Hmmm... If you could engineer it to run on managers you'd have plenty of hot air readily available for the airbags and it would have an environmentally friendly, inexhaustible supply of fuel.

[n]

eeeeks

[Tyro]

Ant muscle?

Every time its about to rain, all the cars start driving around like crazy.

[Oz]

Technically, the DeLorean from Back to the Future was always powered by gasoline. The plutonium reactor (and later the Mr. Fusion) was only used to power the time-travel machinery in the back.

[exiledsurveyor]

Maybe we also need to create an organism that eats plastic and turns it into oil, or eats water, CO and CO2 and produces natural gas?

Trash into power

I wouldn't mind a house I could move from place to place too while you're at it.

[aaron]

'we used to call these cars "horses"'

brilliant.

[Jimbo]

Uh... you think the human digestive/circulatory/muscular system is more efficient than an internal combustion engine? *Seriously*?

A diesel VW Golf can drink a quart of cooking oil and haul several thousand pounds ten miles. A human runner... well, we're not going to get into the details of what he'll do if you pour a quart of cooking oil in him, but it definitely doesn't involve a few hundred KWh of work.

[V]

...and if you feed your car beans, be ready for a take off!

[aahhrrgg]

Sounds like intelligent design to me. And just as crazy.

[Andrew]

The runner in your story doesn’t get much faster than 10mph, and doesn't carry more than 5Kg of stuff. Design a 100Kg car (fully loaded) and drive it at fast walking pace and you would have a pretty impressive set of results.

[Mark]

we used to call these cars "horses"

[just_human]

Cows are only meant to eat grass. They get sick when you feed them anything else. I think you're mistaking them for goats.

[Jack @ The Tech Teapot]

Wouldn't the cars crap everywhere?

[Michal Malkowski]

Hey, but the interior won't be as crappy as in BS: Galactica, right?
Altought it'd still beats that cheap chevy plactic...