> During the Second World War, almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was converted to use firewood.
How is this the first time me (or anyone else in this comment section) is hearing about this? It seems like a pretty major deal.
I had no idea these were actually made in significant numbers.
>even a modern woodmobile requires up to 10 minutes to get up to working temperature
That was my first question, and I can't imagine it would be great to have a parking garage of these things warming up / outputting gasses for 10 min each.
I didn't know about this, and initially suspected the article was an LLM-generated prank (photos and all). Now I entered the rabbit hole of water gas, wood gasification, Gustav Bischof, Lowe's gas... HN is such a great place of the Internet!
> If, one day, the availability of (cheap) oil comes to an end, the omnipresence of the automobile will be history.
I think the years since this was written has shown this to be false. BEVs are steadily replacing ICE vehicles and we have more cars than ever.
Related, Colin Furze experimented with using wood gas to run an IC engine, somewhat successfully: https://youtu.be/FK2qK-NCQH8
I remember John Cohn, an IBM Computer Engineer, was on some TV show called The Colony and built one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkH6mFlfH3o and I seem to remember it getting much further than this clip.
I wonder if a wood powered tractor for farming would be more practical than a wood powered car for transportation
Alright, for those who want a big dump of practical knowledge on building and operating small-scale gasifiers here's the old GEK wiki:
http://wiki.gekgasifier.com/w/page/6123718/FrontPage
Be warned, there are a myriad of reasons this technology never became commercially successful for modern applications.
Amusingly(?), the Juha Sipilä character mentioned in the article later became prime minister in Finland from 2015-2019.
wood gas is still explosive gas. be careful; but it does work, for things you'd use propane for, at greatly reduced efficiency and probably longevity of any moving parts. with wide variance. including your lungs.
One of the BBC series covered this, I think it was Wartime Farm.
The title made me wonder if you could actually put wood in the fuel tank and heat the tank to generate wood gas. Turns out no, you need more than that.
Given the times, these vehicles need a bumper sticker that says “This is not an IED.”
Jeff Lane has a few of these in the Lane motor museum in Nashville. Just about everything in the museum is in operating condition and he likes to show his collection off on weekend demo days, but I haven’t had a chance to see these run. Great car museum, all oddball cars, nothing normal. They recently finished building an accurate reproduction of the Fuller Dymaxion. https://www.lanemotormuseum.org/collection/cars/item/dymaxio...