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

The energy before and after is the same – while speed comes with a direction energy does not. If the force on it pushes sideways, neither speeding it up nor slowing it down, then no work is done.

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