Two Germans Travel Across Australia in a Wind Turbine Car [with Video]

When it comes to crazy-cool engineering, nobody can top ze Germans. If it’s even vaguely plausible, you can bet that some German crackpot inventor has done it. Well, now two Germans – Stefan Simmerer and Dirk Gion – have broken three Guinness World Records in a ... wait for it ... wind turbine powered electric car.

That’s right, an EV that’s powered by a wind turbine, those big robotic looking windmills you may have seen in farms atop hilltops in Scotland or Pennsylvania. Here’s how it works:

At night, Simmerer and Gion park the Wind Explorer – that’s what it’s called – and erect a nifty looking collapsible wind turbine. While they sleep, the lightweight turbine generates enough energy to recharger the Wind Explorer’s batteries. If they’re running low on energy during the day, they can whip out a kite that helps powered the vehicle forward.

Simmerer, Gion and the Wind Explorer have recently completed a 4,800 kilometer (2,983 mile), 18 day trek across Australia where they either broke or established three Guinness World Records: the first to cross the Great Southern Land in a wind powered car, the longest distance travelled in a 36 hour period and the most distance travelled overall in a wind powered car.

You can check out some sweet videos of the Wind Explorer’s journey below.

By Tristan Hankins

Source: Wind-Explorer

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MotorTrend Pits the Corvette Z06, Shelby GT500 and Nissan GT-R Against Each Other

What weights ten tonnes and costs more than US$240,000? If you said, “a gold plated bulldozer”, you’d be close but no cigar. The answer is three sub-100k supercars: the Chevy Corvette Z06, Ford Shelby GT500 and Nissan GT-R. These three industry titans, with nameplates stretching as far back as the 1960s, were the recent subjects of an epic comparison test by MotorTrend. Here are three would-be-supercars – over 500hp and 3 second 0 to 60 mph times – that don’t command the supercar price tag.

The US$55,330 GT500, US$90,950 GT-R and US$98,010 Z06 are all within the budgets of most mid-life crisis suffers (providing you sell the house, the kids and the dog) and offer the sort of performance that was once the sole reserve of great Italians like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati.

And they’re not stripped out racers either. The Z06, for instance, comes with such luxuries as heated leather seats, Bose audio, Bluetooth and sat nav. You can’t buy a second-hand Lamborghini with that sort of equipment for US$98,010.

If you want to find out who wins this legendary battle, you’ll just have to check out the video. Even if you don’t care who wins you should check out the video anyways for a sweet-as drag race between the Z06, GT500 and GT-R. Now that’s something you don’t see everyday...

By Tristan Hankins

Source: Motortrend

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