Sterling Engine Motor-Scooter

(from)

Much as I hate vapourware – it makes me feel tired. Depressed. Overwhelmed by the bullshit of a million well-meaning, attention-clamouring-for liars… well, it appears that Segway inventor Dean Kamen has filed a patent for… putting a Stirling engine in an electric-scooter. It isn’t a photo… or even one of those CGI pictures that are presented as real products on greeny blogs, just a drawing… but apparently he’s thrown a lot of money at it, so maybe it will actually happen.

Anyway – an on-board stirling engine means it can burn pretty much anything to keep the battery topped up (the engine isn’t strong enough to drive a whole motorbike)… although where I come from, “burning anything” means one thing: plastic cups. The originating article also talks about a war-bot that can eat leaves to power itself. A vegetarian then. Seems unlikely. Why can’t it eat people’s brains and drink their blood etc? I don’t understand it.

I actually quite like the idea of stirling engines though – there’s a company in New Zealand that makes a washing-machine sized thing that produces heat and electricity – and I seem to recall various large-scale solar things popping up round the place as well.

So hopefully this will go a little further than the Segway itself, which was a solution to a problem that no one actually had, and which cost about $50,000 or whatever it was. Pity he’s patented it though – basically putting a choke on innovation by other people.