• Question: Could you make a car that runs on chicken nuggets?

    Asked by Amy+Leona to Andrei, Dominique, Mark, Masha, Sarah on 15 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Catherall

      Mark Catherall answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Yep, chicken nuggets contain about 300 kilocalories per 100g, and the don’t burn readily in air, so you’d have to run the car on a steam engine (or a steam turbine if you speak nicely to @Sarah), like an old train. And you’d need a lot of chicken nuggets, because 300 calories is about 1.2MJ, so chicken nuggets have an energy density of 12MJ/kg, whereas coal is about 30MJ/kg. So you’ll need twice as much weight of chicken nuggets as a steam train would need in coal, and chicken nuggets are not as dense as coal, so it’ll be a way bigger pile than the coal. Petrol is a good choice for cars because it’s easy to burn, easy to store and move about, and it’s packing 46MJ/kg.

      So in short, yes, but it’ll be a rubbish car.

    • Photo: Sarah Hunt

      Sarah Hunt answered on 16 Nov 2016:

      Hahaha the answer from @Mark is an epic answer to your question 🙂 I’ve seen a car run on coffee beans before and another one on cow manure so people have tried to experiment with other ways to power cars. A chicken nugget car would certainly smell a bit nicer!

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