• Question: What would happen if you poured water and oil into a petrol-powered car? Will it break down and why?

    Asked by anon-181914 on 25 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 25 Jun 2018:

      Yes, it will break down because of the internal combustion. The internal combustion engine needs to combust to run, so if you add something like water (which neither compresses nor combusts) it cannot run 🙂

    • Photo: Liza Selley

      Liza Selley answered on 26 Jun 2018:

      Lauren’s right, to use the engines that we currently have in our cars you need to burn a fuel to get the energy for movement.

      Some companies claim to be able to fuel car engines with water as well as petrol but it is likely that the chemical reactions that take place with the water just increase the amount of energy that the car can get from the petrol. So technically the car isn’t running on water after all!

      We do have biodiesel though. This is an environmentally friendly alternative to diesel or petrol where fuels are made by reacting vegetable oil or waste cooking oil with alcohol. Biodiesel is currently mixed into normal diesel to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that we use. It can run a normal combustion engine and produce almost as much energy as normal diesel while producing fewer toxic exhaust gases 🙂

Comments