bepps

Aside from the autonomous driving, functionality wise, this car is quite similar to what I was thinking of doing with my truck. Except I just wanted to make something that was negatively buoyant and would drive along the ocean floor. I figured it'd be too difficult to keep the truck neutrally buoyant. Besides, just driving on the ocean floor would be good enough. Although it'd be nice to be able to at least do short hops in the event that you come up to an obstacle like a canyon that you wouldn't be able to drive through. That'd be a lot more work though, so I doubt I'd worry about that. However watching that video did give me a good idea of having jets in the front and back that would blow through slats in the fenders.

I was gonna put 3 er 4 used argon tanks (like what we use for welding) in the bed and fill them with compressed air for breathing. They're huge, really available, and real strong. Most importantly, there'd be tons of volume there. At 50 feet below the surface those things'd last quite a while. Even if they're only charged at the 600psi that an air conditioner compressor would compress them to. That'd be the best thing to do is to use a standard air conditioner compressor. Some folks use them to charge their tanks for their air bags that they use for suspension to hippity hop til they just can't stop down the street. They're not the best for constant load like the airbags need, but for charging up air tanks in the back of the truck for such a rarely used thing like that they'd work great. Although using a two stage 2500psi compressor would triple the underwater time.

I wanted to have a battery box in the bed of the truck with a few deep cell batteries. That actually would be quite cool because I'd have tons of battery power to start the truck and I could have a computer running in there for pretty much indefinitely. Which'd be much better than having my lil gobook. While the gobook is cool, it's always nice to have a real desktop type computer. I'd have to build a case for it that'd be able to handle 60psi of pressure but that isn't that big a deal.

The batteries would, of course, drive electric motors on the front wheels. It'd be nice to have all four wheels driven, especially since there'll be so little weight on the tires underwater, but then I'd have to have a much more complex drive system. Unless I were to put the motor in neutral when I'm driving. But doing that would make the truck not be a true hybrid.

That's the real gold about doing this. It'd be turning the truck into a hybrid making the endeavor a tax deduction. Depending on how good my tax dude is I'd probably be able to get him to deduct the value of the truck, the cost of materials, give myself a decent wage for the time utilized, and I'm sure he could think up some other things. Possibly not, but it sure would be a lot of fun to make it.