Celebrating a historic milestone in automotive innovation, a team of researchers confirmed Tuesday they had successfully used a hydrogen prototype to fire a retired Royal Air Force pilot across a salt flat at 406 mph. The test run proved that next-generation clean fuels are fully capable of hurling a senior citizen toward the horizon at life-threatening speeds.
The record-setting run required strapping pensioner Andy Green into a pressurized tube of history’s most notoriously flammable gas. Observers noted the vehicle functioned exactly as planned, accelerating to over half the speed of sound before its occupant could safely reconsider his proximity to a highly combustible fuel tank.
Green, who remains the only person to have broken the sound barrier on land and apparently found the experience insufficiently harrowing, praised the zero-emission prototype for offering an entirely new way to violently approach the earth. “The ground comes at you very, very quickly,” Green told reporters, flatly describing the sensation of being propelled across a barren wasteland inside an untested chemical cylinder.
We looked at the roadmap for clean transit and realized the best way to prove hydrogen's safety at scale was to strap a retired pilot to a pressurized tank and launch him at the speed of a commercial airliner.
Fiske noted that while the current prototype lacks a windshield or functional cup holders, the telemetry gathered from accelerating Green until his vision blurred will be seamlessly integrated into tomorrow's commuter sedans.
Following the successful run, the engineering team is reportedly exploring whether the basic laws of physics will allow them to load the 64-year-old into a solid-state lithium-ion centrifuge and spin him at Mach 2.