Wind-powered Blackbird vehicle up for sale after rewriting physics

Rick Cavallaro has been called an idiot more times than he cares to remember. After posing the theory that a wind-powered vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind, negating centuries of scientific belief, the Internet and its readers pointed, laughed and ridiculed the mad scientist. But on July 3, 2010, Cavarallo and his cronies silenced the doubters by constructing a wind-powered vehicle that travelled close to three times faster than the wind itself.

For those wondering where one might buy a scientific-defying wind-powered machine, head over to eBay. The car nicknamed Blackbird is now for sale.

How can a vehicle powered entirely by wind travel directly downwind faster than the wind itself? If you asked Nobel Prize winners a few years back, the verdict would be unanimous: It can’t.

Cavallaro disagreed: “You lose the power of the wind when you reach the wind speed, because there is no relative wind at that point,” he once told Wired.

“Skeptics think that the wind is turning the prop, and the car is turning the wheels, and that’s what makes the car go,” Cavallaro said. “That’s not the case. The wheels are turning the prop. What happens is the prop thrust pushes the vehicle.”

While this may sound like perpetual motion, it’s not. The wind is harnessed as an external power source, allowing the additional power to propel the vehicle faster than the speed of the wind.

After Internet ridicule, Cavallaro and his associate John Broton sought to prove the concept by creating a small model. Having established that once wind speed is reached, there is no wind across the chassis, all that was needed was a moving floor wind tunnel with the wind turned off. Or, in scientific terms, a treadmill.

The theory was simple: Set the treadmill to a certain speed to simulate the moving ground, place the model on the treadmill as if it’s traveling at the same speed as the wind, and if it moves forward up the treadmill, it’s moving faster than the wind.