…and the car starts right up. See here for the video.
Found via this thread on FALFiles.
british show called top gear did a segment on EMP
took a car to Kirtland AFB in New Mexico and sat a car under their emitter and lit it up.
the car cranked right up afterwards, only thing they had to do was reset the radio stations.
EMPs effect on a car is nothing to worry about, the things a huge Faraday cage
–Indy_Muaddib
Thoughts? I’ve got this nagging suspicion that EMP’s effect on an individual microchip circuit is not going to be the same as a lightning strike on the car body in which it sits, but I don’t have the electronics background to say anything intelligent.
UPDATE: Note that the Top Gear segment takes place at Siemens in Berlin, not Kirtland AFB; it’s SIX hundred thousand volts, not 200; and the radio preset appears in the video to be unaltered.
Well, that’s good news. How does that level of power compare to the EMP created by a nuke (i.e. was it a realistic test)? Further, what happens to every desktop and laptop, not to mention all the computers that control the electric grid, water, gas pumps, etc.?
Maybe our cars will work, but you may not be able to get gas, food deliveries will stop, etc.?
Ummm, I was in the Strategic Air Command navigating B-52s when they first built that test rack, and one of the first tests was on a B-52, since we were expected to fly in a nuke warfare environment. It seemed strange to all of BUFF jocks that the test supposedly simulated getting within 8 miles of a nuke blast, and NOTHING happened to the BUFF. Put it this way: the engineers attached to Boeing and SAC HQ never wrote the first letter saying no worries from NuDets. They didn’t trust the test then, and I don’t trust it now.
If all that pulse did was wipe the memory of the radio, why then are all the power-grid engineers, bank data managers, etc so worried? They have their physicists and engineers, too.
Nope, going to err on the side of caution: you wanna be able to motor after the Mullahs or the Russ send up their nukes to paralyze us, keep that 60s-early 70s ratmobile in running shape. I’ve still got my ’68 Bug….
….besides, IIRC, didn’t the envirowhackos get an agreement out of the dot-gov a while back limiting the power that could be used on those tests? Given that this wasn’t an essential dot-gov test, I suspect that the facility was limited to emitting low power only.
I don’t think a car acts as a faraday cage. It does provide protect against voltage (like the video shows), but an EMP is not voltage alone.
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I think this is the video you are looking for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj54FcI7_dE