- Have you ever taken a road trip to the mountains
or somewhere high up and noticed
that your little city car isn't putting down the power
like it usually does back home?
Well, that makes sense, right?
There's less oxygen higher up,
which means less power.
But how high is too high for a car?
With the right parts,
can a car keep driving to the highest peak of Everest?
I mean, what if we had an infinite road,
could it go all the way up to space?
Well, today we are going to find the answers
to all those questions
by drawing up what mods my Camaro would need
to make this theoretical journey to space.
A journey that no man or woman has done before.
Let's go.
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Now, let's get back to B2B, baby.
(laughing)
We all know an engine needs oxygen to mix with fuel
that then gets ignited to create combustion.
And we get that oxygen component from air,
and the air around us right now is 21% oxygen at sea level.
And for proper combustion,
an engine needs three parts oxygen
for every one part of fuel.
And with the oxygen content of air,
that ends up being about 14.7 to one.
But at high altitudes, the air begins to get less dense.
The oxygen percentage stays the same,
but there's less air in a given volume.
So the engine can't take in as much oxygen
and starts losing power.
No, no, we don't like that.
So how high can a car actually get before it totally runs
out of power?
Well, the world record was actually just set
in 2019 with some Mercedes Unimogs
climbing the world's tallest active volcano in Chile.
Now they reached an altitude
of 21,962 feet above sea level,
but they were really only limited by terrain.
They were less than 700 feet from the peak.
So close to 22,000 feet is pretty high,
but what if they had been on an infinite road
leading to space?
Now, before we can put a car on our infinite road,
we got to make the road, let's call it the Jerry Turnpike.
There's gonna be some tolls, sorry,
it costs money to go to space, people.
Now this road, essentially,
just going to be a straight road
going all the way up from Los Angeles, straight up to space.
But the interstate system can only have a max incline of 7%,
but this is the Jerry Turnpike
and we don't gotta follow those rules.
So I'm gonna make it a steep 20% incline,
San Francisco style, like my favorite type of bread,
where my sourdough fans at?
Jerry's French toast. Check out the recipe.
Now that we have our road,
what vehicle are we gonna use as our starting point
to take us on this journey?
Since this is my road,
we're gonna run this experiment with my car as well.
The old Catfish Camaro.
Now this car weighs about 3,500 pounds.
It's a beefy boy.
So when I'm driving straight like this on a road
that's relatively flat, doesn't have any inclination,
I don't really need that much torque to propel forward.
All I need is enough torque
to resist the frictional force
of the tires to the road.
And that's probably around 10 foot pounds of torque.
But on a 20% incline, we got gravity,
and it's trying to get me to go back down the hill.
I need 685 pounds of force just to prevent me
to stop rolling.
But luckily, I got 340 foot pounds
of torque in this Catfish,
and some gearing to help me out.
(engine revs)
Now this is how much power we need the engine to make
to keep going.
If air gets too thin to make this much power, we're stuck.
So knowing that, we need as much oxygen
to at least give us 25% power,
otherwise we can't go forward.
So if I tried to take my car up this imaginary road,
the air would be getting thinner and thinner.
And by only about 20,000 feet, I'd be down to half power.
And just before 40,000 feet,
my LS1 would be making just enough power
to not roll back
and I would have to have been
in first gear for like the last 20 miles.
So clearly this isn't gonna work.
We're gonna need more torque.
So why don't we try to give the catfish
a little more torque.
Let's give it a diesel engine.
One that produces the most torque from the factory today.
The 6.7 liter Powerstroke V8 Turbo Diesel
found in the F-350 Super Duty.
And it makes 1050 pounds of torque.
Now I know I probably should be using a Duramax engine
in my Camaro.
So Chevy, Ford guys, you guys are just gonna have
to deal with it.
We're gonna have to come together
to create this magic machine.
We'll call it the Chord.
So by factoring in the weight of that Powerstroke engine,
and the new gearing we have,
we now need 93 foot pounds of torque just to stand still,
but that's okay because that's less than a 10th
of our new peak torque.
We've got so much torque that we wouldn't run out of air
until 60,000 feet.
That is twice the height of Mount Everest.
But oh how I wish it was just as simple
as just having enough torque.
Now as you may know, the higher you get in altitude,
the more the temperature drops.
That's why there's snow on the mountains, Tyler.
Our new engine, as torquey as it may be,
is a diesel engine.
And diesel's go through a weird process when it gets cold.
It's called diesel jelly.
Meaning as the temperature drops,
diesel fuel begins to thicken, it becomes more viscous.
So we put some diesel in the freezer
to show you exactly what happens.
Now, diesel jelling can start as high
as 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
And as the fuel thickens up,
it gets harder and harder to spray it through the injectors.
So this spray bottle is representing a fuel injector
and inside it, we have diesel at room temperature,
and as you can see, it sprays out nice.
It's a nice, fine mist.
But as the diesel starts to gel up,
you can see that it doesn't mist through our spray bottle.
It actually gets clogged up and doesn't spray out at all,
which makes it pretty much useless.
So for our space car build, we could use winterize diesel,
or we could use a block heater.
So our diesel doesn't gel like this is right now.
But, by 30,000 feet,
our temperatures reached -50 degrees Fahrenheit,
and we know that we're eventually gonna run out of oxygen.
That's gonna be our limiting factor.
Therefore our diesel engine, it's not gonna cut it.
So I think we're gonna need another engine transplant.
So, let's chuck out the old Powerstroke
and drop in a powertrain that isn't oxygen limited,
a Tesla battery pack and motor.
So now we've got a Tesla in a Camaro, a Tamaro.
Our Tesla motors, they make plenty of torque.
The equivalent of 900 foot pounds.
And that torque doesn't decrease as we travel higher
and higher, but,
and there's always a fricking but,
the colder temperatures increase a battery's
internal resistance, making it harder to pass energy
to the motors.
So by zero degrees Fahrenheit,
most batteries are operating at only 50% capacity
and air temperature can get to zero degrees Fahrenheit
as low as 15,000 feet.
But hold on.
There's no way that this is where our car stops.
I mean, we've had working cars on the moon for 50 years
and the moon gets like -238 degrees Fahrenheit.
So how did NASA managed to overcome this temperature issue?
Let's look at the Mars Rover, Curiosity.
Curiosity has to stand up to martian surface temperatures
as low as -146 degrees Fahrenheit.
And the Mars Rover keeps its battery warm with two things.
The first is a special layer of insulation
called silica aero gel.
I'm sure YouTube has recommended Derek's video
on veritasium, it's really cool, you should check it out.
But this substance is super, super unique.
It's a silicone based substance a thousand times
less dense than glass
and it's made of 99.8% air.
Now this powerful material blocks heat
from leaving the Rover.
And the second thing Curiosity Rover has is eight
radio isotope heater units.
And those are one watt heaters made from a decane,
low grade isotope.
The sucker is literally radioactive.
Okay, so if we know that, let's get back to the Camaro.
With its new Tesla motors and Tesla battery,
we're adding the air gel insulation around the whole car
to keep both the battery and the cabin warm.
We got oxygen tanks for me and my girl Blanche.
She's riding up there with me.
And we're also adding in the RHU heaters
near the battery and maybe some lead shielding,
'cause I don't want to grow a third arm
from these radioactive heaters.
And since we've got an electric motor,
we don't need to worry about losing torque,
so we can add some weight without issue.
Now the Catfish is kitted out
for high altitude travel
and the battery should be able to withstand over
100 degrees below operating temperatures.
So that gets us well past the 15,000 foot mark,
where our batteries would have only been about 50% capacity.
But again, pretty soon we're going to hit a new problem.
Wind speed.
So as we go further from the Earth's surface,
the wind speed increases.
You might've watched a video of ours where we talked about
the laminar air and boundary layer air on an F1 car.
And this is a similar effect, but on a massive scale.
Basically, air closer to the surface gets slowed down
by the presence of the ground itself.
While air higher up can move more freely.
And the result of which is that at about 20,000 feet,
wind speeds can reach 150 miles an hour,
about the speed of a category three tornado.
Luckily, our Camaro is weighed down a bit with the batteries
and lead shielding, but by 35,000 feet,
even the modified Catfish would be struggling
to stay on the road.
But we've just barely made it to the stratosphere,
the cruising altitude of most jetliners.
So at this height,
we're gonna want to make a few more modifications.
We need to pressurize the cabin so that Blanche
and I don't lose oxygen.
We need to deflate the tires from the inside
to make sure they don't pop.
And actually Humvees and Unimogs,
they have a system like this to lower tire pressure
for tougher off-roading.
So let's fit some Humvee wheels and axles
on our little red sports car.
Now that'll add some weight which will help us avoid getting
blown off the road, which is good,
but let's add some more batteries,
some external oxygen tanks and solar panels,
just to make sure we make the whole journey.
Now we've got a car that can go the distance.
And as we set off again for a little while,
it's gonna be smooth sailing, we'll be fine.
But as we drive through the stratosphere,
we'll cross the ozone layer.
And beyond that, temperatures will begin to rise again.
And the effects of wind speed would also drop
as the air keeps getting thinner and thinner.
Now at the upper part of the stratosphere,
air is a thousand times thinner than at sea level.
It's so thin that no plane wing could generate enough lift
to keep itself aloft here.
At 127,000 feet, we'd be passing the height
Felix Baumgartner set the sky dive record from.
Even weather balloons would be maxing out at 160,000 feet.
But as long as we've still got power,
we're gonna keep on going into the mesosphere.
And at about 62 miles above the Earth's surface,
we'd reach what's known as the Karman line.
This is the boundary to outer space
and the end of the mesosphere.
This is where the last bits of air pressure are gone
and we truly reach the vacuum of space.
Now gravity, it would still be very much in play,
but without any atmosphere,
temperatures up here would drop below what the Mars Rover
was designed to withstand,
about -150 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is probably the limit of what our battery heater
can handle, but guys, we did it.
We got the space.
Woo!
Where my Catfish boys at?
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode
of "Bumper to Bumper."
If you want to know more about real cars dealing
with performance at high altitudes
and not just me making up this crazy scenario,
you should go check out this episode
of the Donut podcast on the history
of the Pikes Peak Hill climb.
Hit me up on Instagram @JeremiahBurton,
hit frickin Donut up on Instagram @donutmedia.
Till next week, bye for now.