Rick Cavallaro's Wind Powered Car Moves Faster Than Wind

Rick Cavallaro is surely into some crazy engineering. Rick and his team (California based) have designed a car that's entirely wind-powered; but it can move faster than the wind speed! 😀 The team performed 8 trial runs with its 'Blackbird' and it moved 2.85 times faster than the Wind at 13.5 mph. Impressive!#-Link-Snipped-# The team, in association with San Jose University Aero Department is on the quest to build a vehicle that uses wind power but can make the most out of it to get faster speeds. The car basically an aerodynamic foam chassis attached to a wind turbine, with the San Jose State University aerodynamics department. The wheels turn the car’s propeller, and the prop thrust pushes the car, which turns the wheels, Cavallaro says. It's not a perpetual motion machine, because the prop is also using wind energy as an external power source. Designing a transmission system to transfer power from the wheels to the propeller. Design and construction took almost a year; and it was the most challenging part of the design. “You’ve got to come up with a transmission that can handle those loads, even though it’s not at a high horsepower,” he said. “You break some things, and then you build bigger.” “I thought people would say, ‘That’s cool,’ but they didn’t. They said, ‘Wow, you’re an idiot.’ So we decided to build a full-size one. That’s when we approached a couple of sponsors.” The project is now funded by Google & JOBY Energy. The team's official site has furthe details of the design. If you want to track them; you can do so <a href="https://www.fasterthanthewind.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">FXでは公開情報が重要になるとはどういうことなの？</a>.