Go to the main content Arrow right icon

Eight hours of hoeing for the best twenty kilometers of your life

  • Design

Gijs Schalkx student Product Design, has built the 'Slootmotor' for his graduation project. A vehicle that runs on fuel, collected in a reservoir on the back with some kind of large condom in it. In order to fill the tank, you will neeed to hoe for no less than eight hours… in a ditch or a pond.

Slootmotor - Photo: Gijs Schalkx
Slootmotor - Photo: Gijs Schalkx

Where we are going, speed is not desired. More speed means more horsepower, which means more cc's, resulting in higher fuel consumption. What if we could  provide our own fuel and have an engine to run on it, without being dependent on large fuel companies?


Gijs extracts fuel from the water for the engine himself. For this rather unusual idea, he dived into several books. “There I came across a peculiar story about a fisherman. Every time he went fishing, he hung a special tank behind his boat. When he got home, the tank had filled with methane gas. This way, he was able to fry the fish at home on methane gas he also caught himself. Totally awesome. Methane occurs in all ditches and ponds in the Netherlands. And you can turn that into fuel. So I set out to develop that idea. Because that way you can drive fossil-free.”

Read the full story of Gijs here on BN De Stem. Watch the video below of the very first 'Plompstation' in Musispark in Arnhem. More information can also be found on the project website: www.uitsloot.nl.