VentureBeat

Santa Rosa, Calif. company Zap, a company that has gone through bankruptcy once already, is asking for $25,000 deposits on its electric car that has yet to be built.

The company is making all kinds of promises (first reported by Forbes and picked up by a Wired blog) that seem too good to be true:

It will recharge in 10 minutes and travel 350 miles on that charge. It will go zero to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds and carries seven passengers. The windows are made out of photovoltaic glass that turns sunlight into horsepower. ZAP stands for Zero Air Pollution, quite an impressive name for a car. More details here.

Of course, there is no vehicle that remotely approaches this sort of dream car.

Be wary of hype. Clean-tech is hot, and making wild promises without actually achieving the results in the lab is enticing because it helps you get attention, and possibly money. Steorn has been making claims about making “free energy,” and saying it wanted scientific approval before raising money, but it looks really flimsy so far.

That said, some publications are taking Zap seriously (see Inside Greentech). It is publicly traded, over the counter (ZAAP), and here’s the management team. Any experts out there have any thoughts on this?

Anyway, it’s a reminder that industry bubbles can cause unbridled optimism. Check out this story over the weekend in the St. Petersburg Times about Brent Kovar, who said he had breakthrough satellite communications technology, raised $21 million from his wife’s relatives and many others, but it was a scam. He took people for a ride for an entire decade.

We were skeptical yesterday when we reported on all the hype about a supposed free, clean perpetual energy source. We suggested it was hoax.

Apparently it is. Someone who spoke to a representative of the company, after the Orbo device apparently broke down with a “heat” problem, writes the following:

Most tellingly he admitted before 4 witnesses that there was no load bearing Orbo device inside the Kinetica museum. No weights being lifted by any device. Just a spinning Orbo (still requiring fixing) . He explicitly said that “the load bearing device is back in Dublin”.

Apologies for the distraction.

Steorn, a private Irish company, is making the controversial claim that it has developed a source of free, clean and constant energy — self-generating with no dependence on other materials.

The company calls the product “Orbo,” and says it is based upon the “principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions:”

There’s a lot of hype flowing out of London, where the company is supposed to demonstrate Orbo tomorrow (July 5th) at the Kinetica Museum. It was supposed to be today, but it was delayed. Picture left is from Engadget. Sounds like quite the hoax, if you ask us. It apparently will demo the illumination of a light-bulb, according to a blog following the story.

The company says Orbo produces energy without needing external material sources, that it produces no emissions, and that energy will continue to be produced indefinitely –with the exception of mechanical failure. It says it has declined to take financial support while the technology awaits scientific validation from some 22 world experts.

According to the company:

…Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form…

…The core output from our Orbo technology is mechanical. This mechanical energy can be converted into electrical energy using standard generator technology either by integrating such technology directly with Orbo or by connecting the mechanical output from Orbo to the generation technology. The efficiency of such mechanical/electrical conversions is highly dependent on the components used and is also a function of size.

Orbo technology is subject to continuous development. This development is focused on improving the manufacturability of the technology, production costs and power density. Orbo was initially developed as using stop-start mechanisms (with a power density of 0.5 Watts per cm3), Steorn is currently finalizing the development of constant motion systems and a significant improvement in power density is anticipated.