How can a car reverse directions without using any energy?

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Something I don’t quite understand from a physics standpoint. Imagine a car going down a road approaching a roundabout, on neutral; it can follow the roundabout 180 degrees and start going in the reverse direction while only losing a little speed/energy. But the car did a lot of “work” in the physics sense — a multi-thousand-pound vehicle completely reversed direction in a few seconds. How is that energy redistributed (force diagram, etc) to show where the energy for all that work came from?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, we know where it came from; the existing momentum of the car and the newly added chemical energy of the wondrous engine. The force is “normal” to the direction of travel during the turn (think ball on string twirling around or planetary motion).

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