Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Palestinian Ingenuity

The story is a few days old, but I love it.

Gazan engineers Wasim al-Khozendar and Fayez Annas recently designed a car that runs entirely on electricity as a solution to the fuel scarcity caused by the nearly a year-long Israeli blockade that has included severe cuts in fuel imports.

The previously fuel-run, French-designed engine of the car has now been completely replaced with an electric engine that runs only on battery power. Al-Khozendar, who co-designed the engine with his colleague Annan, says that they came up with the idea almost one year ago just prior to the start of the crippling siege on Gaza.

"Myself and my colleague decided to start working on transforming the car's engine into an electric one, which is environment friendly, unlike the fuel-run, ordinary cars," al-Khozendar said.

"The electric motor of our car is an AC motor, unlike the DC motor, which is costly and unavailable in the local market. When we started running the car in the Gaza streets, we were surprised by the population's reaction," he added. "In the local market we have electric devices to manufacture 20 to 30 cars, and this is definitely not enough for the high demand, which hit more than 1,000, since we began running the car last week."

Imagine if they marketed it worldwide and everyone was driving around in...the "AntiZion".

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