Diet Coke and Mentos LEGO Car Hits 25 MPH

September 8th, 2011 by: Technabob

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They whole Diet Coke and Mentos thing is long past its prime, but that doesn’t mean the powerful, fizzy reaction isn’t always going to be great fun to play with.

Mikael Nyberg and a team of engineers at Finland’s Abo Akademi University Department of Chemical Engineering have harnessed the intense energy of Diet Coke (or in this case Coca-Cola Light) and Mentos to power tiny cars.

These little LEGO cars are powered by the fizzy compressed gas which bursts through a nozzle and causes a spool of fishing line to spin. This, fishing line in turn pulls the LEGO cars along the ground at a high rate of speed.

Top speed for cars pulled by their system – dubbed the “CoMet Machine” – is 40 km/h (~25 MPH). See it in action in the video clip below:

That was cool, but I’d really like to see them come up with a car that’s actually filled with Diet Coke and Mentos juice, and skip the whole fishing line part. Oh, right, that’s already been done – with slightly less speedy results.