Stan Mayer’s Amazing Dune Buggy

By James Donahue

There is a story that Stanley Allen Meyer of Grove City, Ohio, invented a water fuel cell that he used to convert a Volkswagen “dune buggy” engine to run on water instead of gasoline.

A video that was released in 1995 showed Meyer and his stripped down buggy which he claimed to have driven from Los Angeles to New York on only 22 gallons of water. Meyer also appeared on the local television news with his amazing vehicle.

To make it work, Meyer said he also replaced the spark plugs with injectors that sprayed a fine “electrified” mist into the engine cylinders. He claimed that the fuel cell split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas and that the cells performed electrolysis using less energy than conventional methods known to science.

It was said that Meyer demonstrated his dune buggy for Professor Michael Laughton, Dean of Engineering at Mary College, London, Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin, former controller of the British Navy, and Dr. Keith Hindley, a research chemist. All agreed that the Meyer cell produced more hydrogen-oxygen mixture than simple electrolysis.

In spite of doubters that declared Meyer a fraud, he managed to get a few interested investors and even attempted to market his invention. But he was soon caught up in litigation and in 1966 an Ohio court declared his fuel cell fraudulent.

Meyers died suspiciously on March 20, 1998, while dining with his twin brother, Stephen, and friends in a Ohio restaurant. Conspiracy theorists say they believe he was poisoned before he could market his device, which threatened the oil industry. An autopsy, however, determined that Meyers died of a brain aneurysm. He was 57.

So was the Meyers dune buggy the real thing or did the Ohio man, known for his many inventions and patents, perpetrate a strange hoax on the world?

Writer Philip Ball declared Meyers claims as “pseudoscience” in a story that appeared in the journal Nature.

Ball wrote: “It’s not easy to establish how Meyer’s car was meant to work, except that it involved a fuel cell that was able to split water using less energy than was released by recombination of the elements.”