Bill Nye Green Screen

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For famed science educator, comedian, and author Bill Nye (the science guy) watching a NASCAR race with his family is bittersweet.

The super-fast cars zipping around the track is “exciting,” Nye explains in his latest book, “Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World.“

But the technology is “depressing,” Nye writes because:

“Here I am trying to envision the smart, efficient transportation technology of tomorrow, and there is NASCAR celebrating a very old transportation technology of yesterday. You might call NASCAR the anti-NASA.”

In his book, Nye explores the many pitfalls of climate change and the numerous available technologies that could turn things around. He dedicates an entire chapter to the multi-million dollar business NASCAR, asking: “What if NASCAR became more like NASA?”

It’s not an absurd comparison. Both NASCAR and NASA hold competitions where they present a money award to the winner. The only difference is that NASCAR awards the fastest, whereas NASA awards the smartest.

Battle of Bristol

AP

“There’s no reason why NASCAR couldn’t be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies,” Nye writes.

There’s no reason why NASCAR couldn’t be like [NASA]: a race with rules designed to reward the coolest, most advanced vehicle technologies

To spur this kind of change, Nye says it would only take a single change to NASCAR’s rule book:

Place a limit on how much fuel teams can use during a race. Nye suggests no more than 21 gallons — about half a tank for most modern cars.

Right now, NASCAR racing vehicles get around 3 miles to the gallon.

Even if racers were allotted 50 gallons for a race, you could easily beat them in 2004 Toyota Prius — that’s how inefficient NASCAR race cars are.

“We could drive this real ‘stock’ (off-the-showroom-floor) car around and around the course for a while. Then we could stop and have pizza. We’d get back in the car and win. No other [NASCAR] team could even finish the race,” Nye writes.

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NASCAR vehicles are great at going fast, but terrible at everything that forward-looking companies like Tesla are trying to do, which is to design vehicles that produce little-to-no greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the EPA, transportation accounted for 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions between 1990-2013. Cleaner cars could make an important impact on our nation’s carbon footprint.

And Nye says that NASCAR could be an important leader in this change:

“I get it. I understand the appeal of a stock car race. It’s just exciting, and I’m all for it,” he writes. “I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream. I want the circuit to produce vehicles that could compete in races anywhere int eh world, and win. I want the racing series to spin off new tech that will do more with less. For me, as an American mechanical engineer, I hope NASCAR decides to look forward rather than backward.”





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