frostbitten to death. You see the Eskimo’s like the aborigine’s before them shied away from hunting merely for pleasure. A pack of dogs on the other hand is a bit more reliable, one dog carks just chop him up and feed him to the others and if he’s still warm you are home in time for tea or seal, whatever.

At 8. Petrol is admittedly an oddity with the world record standing at 12,665 miles per gallon it should perhaps feature slightly more prominently in our thinking, instead, cars are heavier than ever because of all the crash regulations. Hang on a minute, isn’t hitting a heavier car more dangerous, well I never, isn’t the energy of a collision proportional to the square of the velocity multiplied by what’s that I hear you say… the mass?

At 7. it should be more like the largest prime number but here it is at 7. E=MC2 energy is mass and vice versa, currently we can knock out about 5% of the power of a piece of mass using nuclear energy and that isn’t exactly conducive to safe motoring. Combustion is way lower in terms of getting efficiency from mass and its technically liberating the energy stored in bonds between mass by converting petrol into smaller carbon units like CO and CO2 and bits of stuff like nitrous oxides and sometimes PM10s or PM100s which we aren’t supposed to talk about.

Nuclear warheads are also a means of propulsion. Its actually pretty well researched that you can ride the shock waves of a nuclear explosion in space and successive explosions, accelerating each time because, as its space, there’s no air to slow you down. Unfortunately you can approach fractions of light speed (c) this way, theoretically, but you won’t outrun the gamma rays who most definitely can clock up 1c and they will kill you a lot faster than driving your skidoo into a reindeer. Think of it as the opposite of dying of cold.

At 6. All fossil burners out there be warned water engine design has produced many garage based examples of perpetual motion machines that have been used to create drive. This is mad but people really believe in it. You take two counter-rotating coils and you create vortices of water between them as they quickly spin. I’ve seen some enthusiasts speaking enthusiastically on the subject but I don’t know… I’m just not sure.

At 5. Cold-fusion. Damned by the Scientific Community this technology claimed to be able to produce surplus energy at room temperature from an ostensibly simple experimental design. Difficult to reproduce it fell fowl of the international press. However, if you are a real paid-up anorak who believes in this kind of thing you will have followed the story to find out that cold fusion was allegedly slammed in the press by none other than the Hot Fusion labs with billion dollar budgets (No agenda there then). More worrying, a lot of this technology doesn’t simply fall from public view or research in the West. Both cold fusion and water engine research have been pursued by Japanese Research Institutes who quietly spirit away the materials and personnel from these projects to continue them behind closed doors in Japan. If that isn’t scary then you haven’t seen Godzilla.

At 4, its mad and its suspended by fridge magnets - its Maglev. The bullet train, perfected in Japan, tinkered with in Germany and confusing to the English, “leaves on the magnets old boy” besides its difficult to make the system run three minutes slower in the winter. Instead of investing in better trains we have flummoxed the whole planet with a dastardly plan to elongate train platforms. Who needs faster trains when you can have longer platforms? Think of the export market for train platforms.

At 3 I’m not done with rail, not even warmed up. Isambard Kingdom Brunel didn’t just do bridges, he also had a line in railway tracks. He knew this problem - although engines produced dozens of horsepower they also weigh about as much as dozens of horses creating an obvious problem, dragging you is easy, dragging itself is the hard part. Its never more true than in the case of railway design, dragging compartments of people