“Fastest Tree” Is Of Course An Electric Car
Originally published on EV Obsession.
The Guinness World Record for “Fastest Tree” is apparently an electric vehicle, according to recent reports.
Did you have to read that twice? What am I even talking about? Well, apparently, there’s a rather bizarre record category for world’s fastest “motorized tree or log.” I really have to wonder how this category got started… (bored, drunk loggers?)
The tree car that you see above can actually reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour (90 kilometers an hour) — not bad, though not near the claimed “theoretical” limit for the vehicle (225 kilometers an hour).
Our sister site Gas 2 provides more info:
Brian Reid of Bella Bella, British Columbia has claimed a Guinness World Record in the Fastest Tree category. What’s that? You didn’t know Guinness even had a fastest tree category? You are not alone, friend.
Here are the rules for the competition, in case you have cabin fever this winter and want to power up your own tree. “For the purposes of this record, a motorized tree or log is a tree trunk which has been carved to allow an engine, wheels and controls to be fitted within the body of the log. The motorized log must be drivable by a person sitting within the log.”
Don’t know where Bella Bella is? Go to Vancouver and head north. Way north, up where giant cedar trees grow. Brian Reid harvests those trees for a living. (His company also plants new ones to promote sustainable growth for the future.) He selected a 240 year old western red cedar log, hollowed it out and stuffed it full of 529 pounds of batteries and a 35 horsepower electric motor.
Following this, Reid then apparently added two industrial-strength leaf blowers (20 horsepower a pop) before taking the creation to the local drag strip to play, where “it managed to top out at 55 miles per hour at the end of the quarter mile.”
Hmm… I admit to not particularly liking this… I think it’s just that the vehicle is so damned ugly compared to a living 240-year-old redwood. While this electric vehicle (EV) is no doubt certainly less environmentally destructive than one made of metal (factoring in mining, refinement, shipping, etc), I still can’t help but get irritated looking at it… Maybe that’s just me, though.
Images courtesy Brian Reed
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