Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2013. It is a news item from that time, and it gives no follow-up on the invention or the patent.
Three engineering students in Arequipa, Peru, have managed to convert a petrol car into a 100% electric one that never needs to be plugged into a power socket. It uses the kinetic energy of the wheels’ movement to generate new energy that recharges the batteries by itself.
To the students’ surprise, when they went to patent their idea, the patent was refused because their invention supposedly breaks the laws of thermodynamics: “You can’t get more energy out than you put in.” The students are determined to prove this wrong. They insist that it CAN be done and say they will demonstrate it. Needless to say, no university wants to take on the invention, let alone support them.
The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether or not they can actually obtain energy with this system, because one thing is clear: working or not, this invention would never see the light of day. These passionate students are forgetting that they are up against not only the car industry, but also the oil companies and, by extension, governments, because if a system like this ever reached the market, the losses for the oil companies and for governments themselves would run into the trillions.
It would be the same story as the businessman who made light bulbs that last 80 years (with no planned obsolescence) and received threats to make him stop, except that the light bulb industry is a couple of ants next to the army of lions that the oil companies would be.
So our sincere congratulations to these three students, but their fight is not against the laws of thermodynamics. It is against the economic laws of capitalism. Here is the Canal N video in which Luis Núñez, the man behind this discovery, explains his invention.
Watch: Canal N report on Luis Núñez’s self-charging electric car
Source: El Comercio (Peru)
Featured image: TaurusEmerald, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
