Final Thoughts

After completing our car, we concluded that it was not as successful as we wanted it to be. It was not able to roll very far using just the force of gravity and even with a push, the car did not roll far. The first version of our car included small wheels in the back with washers attached but the washers caused the rolling to be uneven. Even after switching the back wheels to larger ones, although improving the car's stability and ability to roll, it was still not enough to make our car successful. In the future, we would like to further improve our car by doing more research about how it could be successful. An idea that we already have is to have the axles roll instead of the wheels because when the axles roll, the dowels are smooth so there is less friction as compared to the wheels which have a lot of friction when the cardboard rolls. This friction force was a huge problem as it also wore down our wheels quickly. Another idea is to increase the weight of our car because when the mass is bigger, then the force of gravity will be larger and the force will be strong enough to push our car down successfully but this will only have a chance of working if the friction force can be minimize and if we can stabilize our wheels.