I know in junkyards cranes use electricity to make a magnet powerful enough to lift a car, but could a car battery be used the same way? Could it have enough juice to lift a car? Or maybe pull one?
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The short answer is yes, but with a ton of caveats.
* Junkyard magnets consume about 10 kilowatts (10,000 watts) continuously while in operation.
* A typical car battery outputs 12 volts, with a total of 50-60 amp hours of capacity – let’s assume 60 for this discussion. This means it could put out 12 watts of power for 60 hours, or 120 watts for 6 hours.
* There’s also a limit to how fast you can draw power from a battery since they don’t *technically* store a charge, they generate one, and the chemical reaction responsible for that power has limits as to how fast it can occur.
* Assuming you had a battery that could dump all of its capacity as fast as it needs to *and* we’re operating in a hypothetical environment with zero transmission losses, a car battery would be able to provide 10,000 watts of power for somewhere around 4-5 seconds before the battery would be completely depleted. This assumes that my math is accurate, of course, so someone could check me on that.
So with a theoretically “perfect” magnet system (which can’t exist) including a magical battery that can pump out its entire capacity near-instantaneously, you might be able to lift a car an inch off of the ground, but it wouldn’t go far. Swapping the battery out for a capacitor would solve the issue of releasing energy fast enough, but you’re still talking about a few seconds of draw.
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