Oh yeah, SPEEDholes

Written By: - Date published: 7:29 am, December 22nd, 2009 - 7 comments
Categories: climate change, humour, transport - Tags:

Could making the surface of cars rough be a cheap and esay way to boost fuel efficiency, thereby saving oil and helping tackle climate change?

The idea comes from the dimples on golf-balls, which hold a thin layer of air to the ball, lessening turbulence and drag. And, amazingly, it appears to work:

[the full segment on the car is here but doesn’t embed]

Without any testing to find the perfect size of the dimples and using clay (clay!) the Mythbusters improved the car’s fuel efficiency by 10%. Incredible.

The idea isn’t actually new. America’s Cup Yachts and fighter planes use rough ‘sharkskin’ surfaces to similiarly reduce resistance, and textured paints are banned in Formula 1 for the advantage they give.

There’s got to be a way this could be used commercially. I’m not suggesting big dimples like on the Mythbusters episode. People probably think it looks ugly (I think it looks cool) and my guess would be that smaller texturing would work better anyway. But surely some kind of patterning on panels or textured paint could be used. A cheap way to get better fuel efficiency and cut greenhouse emissions. Hell, we could even have domestic industry in New Zealand retro-fitting vehicles. Probably not the way that Homer went about it, though:

7 comments on “Oh yeah, SPEEDholes ”

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  1. felix 1
    22 December 2009 at 8:22 am

    Wow, so even with the extra weight of the clay they got ten percent? That’s awesome.

    Also don’t worry about how it looks, most people are completely brain dead when it comes to style and just go for what they think everyone else likes. If a couple of these are made by an established popular company and endorsed by a couple of all blacks they’ll just fall into line like they always do.

    I can see this going down well with the boy racer crowd too.

    • Pascal's bookie 1.1
      22 December 2009 at 8:51 am

      “I can see this going down well with the boy racer crowd too.”

      I guess you could get some pretty things happening with a clever paint job.

  2. the sprout 2
    22 December 2009 at 9:51 am

    it’s the turbular flow vs laminar flow issue.
    turbular flow, that created by the bumps, ‘sticks’ to the surface of the vehicle better, which in turn creates a very slippery skin that reduces friction between the vehicle and the greater body of air/water it moves through. those big bulbous bits just below the waterline of large ships is there for the same reason. the same technology is also used to make submarines go much faster.
    on aircraft you sometimes see ‘strakes’ or little fins that stick up verticaly out of the main wings, that’s also to create turbular flow but not to reduce drag, rather it’s to make the air flow more sticky so it keeps flowing over the control surfaces.
    if only politics was as simple as fluid dynamics 😉

  3. Bill 3
    22 December 2009 at 10:05 am

    Or…..why not convert all cars to golf balls and bury any left over bits in the dimples?

    • Bright Red 3.1
      22 December 2009 at 10:54 am

      but then we would have all these golf balls and the government would try to get us all to play golf – Labour would try to make it complusory and National would make rounds tax-deductible (clearly, favouring the rich)

  4. randal 4
    22 December 2009 at 12:08 pm

    what about just one big hole in the head for politicians.