How many electric eels would you need to power a Tesla?
An electric-eel-powered Tesla? Jason Torchinsky does the math at Jalopnik.
We can get a jolt of 600 watts from an eel, but only for one hundredth of a second, and we can get up to 50 of these pulses per second. With each eel giving 50 pulses of 0.01 seconds, then we could use two to get a full second of electricity. At 600 watts, that would take 2.4 times to equal the wall outlet’s 1,440 watts.
And that means if 1,440 watts give four miles per hour and 5.85 feet per second, then we can reasonably expect—since the charging rates seem pretty linear, that our 600 watts will give us 2.44 feet per second of eel-charging.
That’s about 146 feet per minute, and 8,784 feet per hour, or about 1.66 miles per hour of eel-charging.
Image: Jalopnik/Jason Torchinsky