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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

What if they had a Tesla merry-go-round where instead of charging your Tesla, you connected it to this giant horizontal ferris wheel that spun it around and charged the battery? It could be wind powered!

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I guess conveyor belts under the wheels would have similar results, probably with less moving parts.

But then... why bother, just plug the car to the power source making your marry-go-round go round! Otherwise this is a lot like putting salt on a birds tail to catch it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_a_bird%27s_tail

Is the argument that if you could have salted the tail you could have just caught the bird?

You said this as a joke, but I found myself (at least for a little while) wondering whether this might be more efficient than having the wind turbine generate electricity and then have that electricity power the charger. But then I remembered that there is the cost of moving the relatively heavy vehicle on the merry-go-round and realized it wouldn't actually work.

What if you had a driveable wind turbine? They have solar panels on Priuses, might as well add wind to Teslas. The faster you drive, the more wind there is!

Now if you had a solar-powered Prius towing a wind-powered Tesla on the deck of a nuclear-powered carrier, you're just one creative accountant away from starting your own renewable defense company.

You're still converting to electricity somewhere, and moving around electricity is vastly more efficient than moving around mechanical energy. Always convert at the source.

Even when your output is mechanical it's hard to beat electrical wires. But here the output is battery charge; no contest.

Yes, I did say that as a joke, but I guess some took it too seriously. It would never work but it was the first image that came to mind, a merry go round of Tesla's.

I had a similar idea which involved a large amount of gerbils in a giant wheel. They can convert sunflower seeds (which are of course solar powered) into energy 24/7. Thanks to your stroke of genius instead of using a generator and charging your EV you can just put a wheel next to it and leave the Tesla on it now. I haven’t worked out what to do with half a ton of gerbil corpses, shit and sunflower seed shells yet though.

Biogas, obviously !

If this technology improves enough we should eventually be able to mount the gerbil wheel inside of the Tesla.

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