Local inventor believes latest invention will change automotive industry
Ray Sherry, a Cleburne inventor, has invented a "Kinetic Drive" system that makes both gas and battery-powered vehicles more efficient and powerful.
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CLEBURNE, Texas – While the automotive industry seems to be moving to primarily electric vehicles, Ray Sherry, a Cleburne inventor, has invented something he believes will put the industry on a different path.
Sherry, a lifelong inventor and owner of 26 patents, has invented a “Kinetic Drive” system that makes vehicles more efficient and powerful.
“They just got done putting billions and billions into all this battery stuff and now we’re introducing something that would only need one fourth the batteries,” Sherry said. “It’s gonna have more power. [And] If it’s engine-driven, it needs a much smaller engine to drive it.”
By storing the vehicle’s momentum while it decelerates and while it’s stopped, Sherry’s invention allows the vehicle’s engine to work less, thus making it last longer and be more powerful, according to Sherry’s research.
Sherry’s been inventing since he was a kid. He began rebuilding lawn mower engines when he was 10 years old.
After graduating from Penn State with a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1981, he moved to Texas, where, he said, the climate is better suited for his inventing.
“It (the Texas heat) doesn’t matter to me,” Sherry said. “I’m still thawing out.”
He believes the Kinetic Drive system, which he patented in 2016, will be his most successful invention and will change the automotive industry similar to how Tesla has.
“Ford and Chevy did not want to make electric cars, but Tesla pushed them into it,” Sherry said. “And it’ll be the same thing with this. They’ll be pushed in.”
The technology, which can be excited off both gas and battery-powered motors, holds 95% of a vehicle’s momentum while it’s stopping and gives it 8,000 horsepower per second, Sherry said.
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Sherry’s finished building a proof-of-concept vehicle with a Kinetic Drive system and expects to finish building a system that can be added to a car within approximately three months.
Adding a Kinetic Drive system to a car will quadruple its gas mileage, Sherry said.
Before Sherry can get the Kinetic Drive technology to market, it has to be crash-tested. Sherry isn’t worried about the safety of the technology, but he believes that’s what big car companies will point to when they reject the technology, which is Sherry’s expectation.
“They’re not really interested in changing the path that they thought was the path,” Sherry said of the major car companies. He added that before his invention changes the automotive industry, it will first piss off the major companies.
Sherry sees this technology as an inevitability for the automotive industry because it solves the problems of using fossil fuels in gas engines and lithium in electric ones by making the engines work less.
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Wow! Very interesting! I’m not a proponent of electric cars because of how the things used to make the batteries are mined. I would love to see this in action!