MUGI – My Unique Gift Idea

I just bought a car, and I live in Israel, which happens to be the only Middle Eastern country without ungodly massive amounts of oil reserves. That, and the countries that do have them around here don’t exactly like my country, so this makes gasoline riot-inspiringly expensive. It’s about $6.30 per gallon. If you had that in America, there would be mass demonstrations, calls for impeachments, and I’m betting there would be many, many riots in major cities with the National Guard being hauled out and the president fleeing to an undisclosed location. Here, we just suck it up and pay.

I bought a really small car that gets about 38 miles per gallon on a good day. That’s good, but I want to make it better. So I had an idea. I remember when I was a kid I was fascinated with the idea of an alternator. This is a little machine that when you spin it really fast, produces electricity by alternating a magnetic field. Your car battery charges itself by being connected to one of these things, which is spun by your engine’s conveyor belt. The problem is, it takes A LOT of energy to spin an alternator, because the resistance is what creates the electric current.

What you have is your engine spending all this energy turning an alternator, instead of using that energy in moving you, the driver, from point A to point B. If you ditch the alternator, that frees up a lot of energy for just this purpose. The result is much better mileage out of your car, and a few hundred dollars less in fuel costs a year. The only problem is, you need to charge your battery somehow.

I found this little guy to help out. It’s a solar car battery charger that you just plug into your cigarette lighter. This can’t fully replace your alternator, and will probably take a few days to fully recharge a battery after a drive without an alternator, but if you add something like a hand crank like they had in the 20′s, you could probably do it. The question is finding one, which is why I’ll try to locate it and blog about it soon.