Having just watched the classic film LeMans again I was reminded of the dangers of carrying petrol around in a vehicle.
Today’s invention is an alternative way to transport petroleum spirit at high speed. Instead of sloshing around in a fuel tank, which, even with foam inserts, is bad for weight distribution/handling, the fuel would be loaded into cylindrical ‘bullets’. Refuelling a car would be a question of dropping a bandolier of such containers into a hatchway.
The bandolier would be engaged with a feed mechanism not unlike that on a machine gun. Pellets of fuel would be sequentially pierced (by a firing pin device) and drained into a small feeder tank. In the event of an accident, these discrete pellets would be very much harder to break open, making an explosive ignition much less likely.
If the vehicle were subject to a serious shunt, accelerometers might be used to detect this and to automatically jettison the remaining bandolier over the crash barrier.
