Toyota has a new commercial series out, going by the moniker “Ideas for Good.” The gist of it is using technology that they have invented, or at least use, and point it to new applications. The first one I saw was crash modeling and using it to analyze football collisions to help reduce concussions. Great.
But the next one was taking regenerative braking and putting it on roller coasters, so that we could “create the world’s first self-sustaining amusement park.” Which sounds suspiciously like perpetual motion. You can’t do it. You will always have losses of your useful energy (heat), and can’t recover all of the mechanical energy to use it again. Maybe they meant something else, but if they did, the execution was off.
Here is a link to the commercial, in case you want to watch it.
“self sustaining” in the colliqual sense tends to involve the odd bit of solar power here and there or maybe a wind generator, so I’d assume they were talking about an amusement park that was efficient enough to run off that sort of energy source.
One places the really fat folks in the rearmost car. That gets you the Second Law increment on the way down. “8^>)