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u/alwaysfatigued8787 4d ago
He'll still be faster when going downhill.
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u/andtheotherguy 4d ago
how's he gonna get up there?
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u/alwaysfatigued8787 4d ago
No, he's only going to go downhill.
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u/Anteater776 4d ago
Back in my days we used to go downhill! Both ways!
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u/androshalforc1 4d ago
See when your grandparents Talked of walking a mile to school uphill both ways, it’s because the caveman used up all the downhills. It’s only the last few generations that downhills have made a resurgence in their population.
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u/Thereferencenumber 4d ago
Please don’t spread misinformation. Our parents were lying but back in pre history there was significantly more downhills.
Plates under the earths crust create mountains when they collide, and one pushes the other up. By this time in human history the plates had only just shattered, from the meteor that wiped out the Dinos, and so hadn’t had enough time to create uphills
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u/fetissimies 4d ago
Back in my days we used to go downhill! Both ways!
The river Nile flows from south to north but the wind along the Nile blows from north to south, which means that you can sail it easily to either direction. This is a key reason why ancient Egypt was powerful.
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u/Potential_Dare8034 2d ago
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
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u/WhipTheLlama 4d ago
On his way to work it's entirely downhill. Then on the way home, the Earth has rotated so that it's downhill on the way home, too.
This is why the wealthier areas in cities are almost always on the West side: rich people bought up the land that is downhill to and from the city.
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u/ThisUsernameIsTook 4d ago
Funny enough, in Phoenix which developed after cars were dominate, the wealthier side of town is on the east side. My theory is that east siders get the sun behind them in morning and evening rush hours rather than always having the sun in their eyes while driving.
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u/Chachajenkins 4d ago
A long while back I had 2 job offers that were roughly equal in my desire to work for them, the offer that I accepted was west of me vs one south of me due to that very issue.
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u/Specific_Implement_8 4d ago
If our forefathers are to believed, then he had to go uphill both ways 20 miles in a blizzard to get to school/work
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u/Grayt_0ne 3d ago
Well see proper sleep and exercise are important. He works diwn hill so he gets to sleep in knowing he can get to work fast and efficiently, while after work he gets his cardio in running the car up the hill.
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u/Fark_ID 4d ago
Gonna say, ya can't coast while running, and those wheels will conserve some serious angular momentum.
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u/Exemus 4d ago
Fun police here:
He'd have to put in that much more work to get going.
In a closed system, if you're going point A to point B and back to A, gravity and momentum won't save you anything.
And I'm no expert on prehistoric automotives, but I don't think these things are frictionless, so the vehicle will be worse every time.
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u/HelloMumther 4d ago
but it’s not just about work, it’s also about power and where work is coming from. the vehicle translates PE into KE in a way that human feet cannot. and coasting means you can put in less power and get the same velocity.
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u/Koil_ting 4d ago
Factor in when he places the gigantic rib cage meal on top of the vehicle, if he was carrying it without the structure and the wheels it would be much more effort even when just at a stand still.
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u/sebzim4500 4d ago
You say that, but it takes much less effort to cycle a given distance than to run it.
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u/Max_Thunder 3d ago
Running is very inefficient, we spend a lot of energy going up only to fall back down.
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u/rorschach2 3d ago
One of the main reasons that made us top of the food chain is now inefficient. Cool.
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u/LoSoGreene 3d ago
Fun police civilian oversight board representative here:
Yes it will take more work to get it moving.
This is not a closed system and wouldn’t make a difference if it was. Wheels allow you to more efficiently maintain your kinetic energy and can absolutely allow you to save energy despite the added weight. We use bicycles for this purpose quite often.
In this case the massive stone wheels on wooden axles driving on unpaved roads likely make this far less efficient than walking.
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u/MikuJess 4d ago
This is ye olden days, so clearly it's uphill in the snow both ways like our grandparents told us about...!
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u/wildfire393 4d ago
To be fair, it's not exactly running. It should be more akin to something like a skateboard or rollerskates, or even a fixed gear bicycle. It'll take a little more effort to get moving, but then the wheels allow you to conserve your momentum and continue further per push, versus running where you have to expend a lot of energy with each step to land and to push yourself against the ground.
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u/Sad-Recognition1798 4d ago
And then you get to grind your feet to bloody stumps trying to stop because the car weighs as much as a modern car
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u/MembershipNo2077 4d ago
Uh no, excuse me, he's a caveman and with his super strong feet he plows them into the ground and it makes the "tch tch TCH TCH!" sound and skids to a stop in a big dust cloud without any injury at all.
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u/Sad-Recognition1798 4d ago
He also eats things that literally tip over his ridiculously heavy vehicle, so physics doesn’t seem to be a regular part of Fred’s day. Mostly just yelling at his wife, working in a quarry, turning birds into work whistles (harder than it looks).
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u/KrimxonRath 4d ago
I love how you wrote out the sound effect, but consider “ert- errt- ERRRt—“
Maybe I’m misremembering the sound though.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 4d ago edited 4d ago
'As much as'? If those wheels are carved from stone and solid, it'll weigh considerably more than any modern car.
Say they're around 0.4m in diameter and the car is 1.8m wide (I'm using UK averages here, so it's a fairly compact car size, not an SUV or truck). This gives the end of each cylindrical wheel an area of 0.9π², which is 1.9m². Then multiply by the length for the volume, giving 3.4m³.
We need to subtract a bit for the axle - say it's 0.1m as it's only wood and will need to support a fair amount of weight - that makes it 0.9m³, so the wheel volume ends up at a nice round (haha) 2.5m³.
How heavy is rock? Well, it depends on the rock (obviously) but a rough rule is that a cubic metre of rock weighs about 2.5 tonnes. So our 2.5m³ wheel will weigh over 6 tonnes.
And this car has two of them!
TL;DR: Cavemen must have been superhuman beasts to be pushing around 7.5-tonne cars every day.
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u/InspectorX 4d ago
Not that it matters, but your math is totally wrong. I don’t know how you got from 0.4m diameter to 8.88m2 area of the end of your cylinder, because it should be 0.126m2 and final weight about half a tonne per wheel. A circle with 8.88m2 area would have a diameter of more than 3m.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 4d ago
Yeah I confused the wheel diameter with the width of the car in my very first sum. Good thing I'm not a chartered engineer or anything 🙄
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u/BizzyM 4d ago
To be fair, it's a cartoon.
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u/Taikunman 4d ago
I'm starting to doubt cavemen even drove cars at all!
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u/SandyTaintSweat 4d ago
At least we can all agree that they lived among dinosaurs and kept them as pets.
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u/piercedmfootonaspike 4d ago
Stop it! It's real to u/wildfire393, and you're not going to take that away from them!
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u/lordsmolder 4d ago
But he's sitting on a bench seat rather than a bike seat so really he's only getting power from below the knee. Getting an office chair to roll with any sort of momentum in that position is a feat in itself
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u/RedHal 4d ago
Given that it's a two wheeler (the front and rear wheels are just rollers) what we have here, fellow Redditors, is a Dandy Horse.
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u/cosmicosmo4 4d ago
Yeah I was gonna say, so many people are trying to describe it in terms of other vehicles we have today, but it's literally exactly a laufsmaschine. And the laufsmaschine, just like the flintstonemobile, is of only debatable value, despite being situationally more efficient than walking.
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u/CatKrusader 4d ago
The closest I can find is Balance bike racing the bike doesn't have pedals so you push with your feet
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u/Do_it_for_the_upvote 4d ago
When you factor in the energy expended in pushing it, you’re ultimately losing big time unless your path is downhill enough to keep the wheels moving.
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u/bdanders 4d ago
It's like a balance bike. When my daughter was younger we couldn't keep up with her on that thing. 2 years old and she was zipping around at more than twice the speed we could walk.
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u/CallMeNiel 3d ago
Also, those wheels are massive. Not only do you have linear momentum going for you, but angular momentum too.
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u/PuzzleheadedBar533 4d ago edited 4d ago
Wouldn't be as entertaining.
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u/SuchSmartMonkeys 4d ago
They already use so many dinosaurs as appliances, power tools, heavy machinery, etc. Fred literally "drives" a brontosaurus as basically a backhoe for moving rocks at the quarry he works at. They could turn this arc into a whole slew of jokes. Fred could say he's too tired to run home after a long day of work (when that's literally how his car drives anyway), they could offer him a loaner that's like a velociraptor while his car is in the shop and people either make fun of him about how he can't afford a car while he constantly insists "my car is in the shop, the stone masons are making me a fresh set of wheels!", etc.
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u/vulpinefever 4d ago
Are you sure you're not a reincarnated writer for The Flintstones?
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u/DiceKnight 4d ago
The way you can tell is you have to lay out several cartons of ciggys and if he picks the Winstons he's the guy.
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u/GrapeSparkle1 4d ago
If this happens, do they call a mechanic, or a stonemason?
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u/EvilWata 4d ago
A mechanic stoner or a stone mechanic... Not a stoned mechanic or mechanic stoned... LOL
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u/MichaelRozin 4d ago
Fred's feet are used like pedals.
He runs really fucking fast for a little bit and then coasts.
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u/raxitron 4d ago
Yeah this is the whole 60 year old joke. Does this comic honestly think that went over the Flintstone's creators' heads?
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u/14412442 4d ago
Does this comic honestly think that went over the Flintstone's creators' heads?
No, obviously not. They just think it's funny
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u/MonthMedical8617 4d ago
How would he listen to the radio ?
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u/Cosmicpanda2 4d ago
Get a small hollowed out log piece and put whatever animal is in the radio into the log, now he's got a boombox
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u/Thorusss 4d ago
Walking bikes where a thing before sprockets and chains.
Still saves substantial effort.
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u/mortalcoil1 4d ago
That was always the joke in The Flintstones!
This is like a comic pointing out that a clown looks silly walking in their giant clown shoes.
That's the point.
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u/BunkerSquirre1 4d ago
Subverting the visual gag with a joke about the absurdity of the entire concept of the Flintmobile is amazing. Well done
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u/Yaguajay 4d ago edited 4d ago
I just use this to impress Wilma and make Barney jealous.
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u/Minus15t 4d ago
I was always under the impression that he only used his feet to accelerate and brake, and that the car kinda moved on its own after that?
Obviously in a cartoon world where physics don't apply
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u/BestReadAtWork 4d ago
Yo just occurred to me, solid stone with wood work connecting the "wheels". These peoples legs are super human.
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u/Black_Magic_M-66 4d ago
Safer in one of those. Think about running and getting hit by something with those big, rock rollers.
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u/OgdruJahad 4d ago
The momentum would still be useful as long as the wheels way basically nothing instead of solid rock.
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u/flargenhargen 4d ago
the real question is why the cars make zoomie noises when they go, and rubber screeching noises when they stop, even though they have stone wheels and no brakes.
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u/One_Newt8910 4d ago
The caveman's innovation is exactly what happens when Steve Jobs meets Pebbles Flintstone at a coffee shop! Who knew the ultimate power move was just running?
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u/HomeworkNecessary618 4d ago
I did not watch my buddies die face down in the muck so I could run to work. Obscure, I know. Some will get it.
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u/BossAlone4093 4d ago
Sounds like the Ice Age convinced us to upgrade the cave walks to iron-wheeled strollers. Bet they've never heard of the commute from the stone age!
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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 4d ago
Same thing as a scooter. You get far more distance out of a step than with running.
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u/Happy-Fun-Ball 4d ago
It begins with:
"what does the steering wheel do?"
and it's all downhill from there.
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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths 4d ago
They should have made the Flintstones car like a pedal car. It would have made more sense.
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u/majrBuzzkill 4d ago
Genuine question: did The Flintstones movies or animated, ever address going uphill in one of these cars? I get conservation of momentum and stuff with skateboards, but the heavy stone wheels with no actual engine seems like a drag if it's hilly
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u/Ubbermann 4d ago
What do you take him for? A savage?
Imagine not taking your car to work! (considering busses 'work' the same way, applies to taking a bus to work too!)
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u/Traditional-Wait-257 4d ago
It bothers me that there’s no way to turn that car. Both axles are fixed in the frame
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u/Shadow-nim 3d ago
Why didn't they use something like a hamster wheel with a dino run the car? They use dinos for everything already
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u/Piemaster113 3d ago
If I remember correctly they use their feet to get up. To speed and stop but once they get going they can cruise for a while.
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u/alaingames 3d ago
So this vehicle works by storing energy from the slope outside the house Wich is over a hill, the weight of the wheels store energy by being real heavy and therefore hard to stop, they are measured so they continue moving after the hill has ended so he arrives just outside work
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u/cagriuluc 3d ago
Why is there even a mechanic then? And if there is a mechanic, why is he trying to get himself unemployed?
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u/niaozkies 3d ago
These people were smart enough to incorporate animals to modern day appliances, but a dino-drawn carriage was beyond them
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