Parallel concepts - vehicle powered barges

The idea's been around for awhile.

 

Heck, As long as we are toying with that idea, a couple of turntables scavenged from a front wheel alignment machine,coupled to the correct linkage, and you could control the rudder with the car's steering wheel

 

That's actually a clever idea although it would preclude the use of front wheel drive vehicles. Seriously, if you used a Hybrid car it would also be able to supply all your power when you were moored too. All of those cars are drive by wire so all it would take is to plug the barges control harness into the car and you could run the throttle and in some cases steering, if you wanted, from the boats helm station. As a river or canal home concept with the ability to have access to the road network for sightseeing or provisioning it has a lot of appeal to a retired guy.

You would need some exterior cooling fans since the cars cooling system is sized to need the extra airflow when running at high throttle settings while not moving through the air.

Actually, why not just use electric motors and power them through the cars charging port? That way you need only drive onto the barge, strap the car down and plug in the cord to the charging port. Then walk up to the helm, start the car and power away using the hybrids batteries and generator. You could use any hull type you wanted and place the car where it needed to be for correct CG. Can it be that easy......?

 

Wow ! The last few post have shown some great examples, and some useful design info. Thanks for the posts