Down with gasoline - we drive due to inertia

Many people remember how an inertial flywheel moves a car from childhood, when the spinning wheels of a toy made it move independently for a long time. This happens due to the energy of a spinning flywheel connected to the axis through a gearbox. What if something similar was built on a large, real car? No sooner said than done, said the enthusiasts from the Garage 54 channel and got down to business.


To do this, they used the most classic Zhiguli model – the “six”. A huge flywheel with a diameter of 1 m and a mass of 200 kg was installed in its trunk: torque will be transmitted from it. This is power! But first I had to install the gearbox and connect it to the engine, which is under the hood. We use a conventional transmission, belt, through pulleys. Before “putting into operation” the flywheel needs to be balanced, which is what we do.

Once everything is installed, all that remains is to test it in real conditions. We start the engine and watch how the flywheel spins. This is happening quite hard. But that doesn’t stop us, there’s a training ground ahead. The main question that worries experimenters is how long will a car travel just due to inertia with the engine turned off? Do you want to know too? Watch the video!