Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
Have you ever had an entire car come at you,flipping end-over-end?
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Not flipping end over end, no. But spinning in circles 'cause the idiot driving didn't realize that 4WD doesn't improve your steering control, yes, several times. And what else is new?
Anyway, you're missing the point. You've made up some superficially plausible thing that could go wrong, sort of like the theory that hybrids were going to electrocute rescuers after accidents, or that magnetic fields from electric cars would cause cancer, and try to use that as a justification for not developing what might be a useful technology. The point is that if you bother to actually think about what's involved, instead of running in circles claiming that the sky is falling, you soon see that your superficially plausible threat is nothing of the sort.
Start with your basic thesis: that the bearings of a flywheel might somehow seize up, and suddenly transfer the momentum of the flywheel to the whole car, causing it to tumble end-over-end down the highway. The first problem is that a sensible energy-storage flywheel design uses magnetic bearings, spinning in a vacuum. There's no physical contact, and thus nothing to seize. Second, the flywheels are built of things like carbon fiber, so when subject to a sudden severe stress of that sort, they would harmlessly disintegrate into tiny pieces.
You know, you can actually look up these things on the web. People have built these sorts of flywheels, and destroyed some of them in testing. It's something called engineering, you know.