Creepy Crawler
June 4, 2026
Alex KiersteinA dream finally realized: A car that can crawl, in a lurching, surreal sort of way.
A dream finally realized. A car that can crawl. Crawl not in the cute baby sense, but in the stumbling-on-all-fours sense. In the army-crawl-away-from-supernatural-demon-danger sense.
A stretch, pause, stretch, pause, sick syncopated cadence. This is no way for a car to move, and I’m a proponent of the biggest tent possible for automotive and automotive-esque transportation. Amphibious e-bike? Sure, if you can make it work! Mag-lev tricycle last-mile delivery convertible? Craft a sensible case for it, and I’m in—pretty high bar in that case, but you know, keep an open mind.
But then there’s a plain-faced, unambiguously stupid idea, presented in a way to encourage disbelief (and, of course, investment). That idea is the crawling, air-powered Rosmar H, which could be a satire of vaporware culture. Or, more viciously, it could be an earnest proposal. Because it’s couched in such breathless hyperbole as to shock, even [waves hands around at everything] in this broader discourse of absurdity.
Compressed air is a power source; or a reservoir of stored energy, really. You can make a compressed air car, and many have (or tried). There is a sticky issue with the whole idea, though, and that’s the energy density of that stored air compared to almost every other source, and the energy required to compress air. Compression produces heat, which is wasted energy in all but the most exotic or industrial applications (where it is put to other use, or stored).
Compressed air could be great as an inexpensive overnight energy storage system in a large solar farm, maybe. I’m not a professor. Compressed air is not a great solution for a general-purpose consumer vehicle, until the fundamental laws surrounding compression and storage are altered by, I dunno, actual magic.
It’s been tried, as I said. It’s just that, on closer inspection, a vehicle powered solely by compressed air just doesn’t make a lot of sense. The other big selling point of the Rosmar H makes even less sense as a primary propulsion system: reciprocating wheels.
Rather than trying to explain it, just watch. And you, who may or may not be a professor, or engineer, or sensible non-expert person with a general conception of mechanical properties, ponder this: why?
Why would you cycle the axles forward and back, creating an ever-changing wheelbase? How do you steer and propel the car at the same time? Are we participating in a mass delusion by looking at this?
There are a million other ways to get the energy out of a compressed air tank, and I’d put pumping the wheels back and forth longitudinally at right around 1,000,001 on my list. It’s possible I’m missing something. It’s also possible—nay, probable—that Rosmar H is doing the overpromising thing with verve.
Please take these verbatim quotes from Rosmar H’s website under consideration:
“A revolutionary compressed air propulsion system based on controlled mechanical impulses. 0-200 km/h in under 1 second.”
Ah, sure. Highly improbable, not necessarily impossible. Hyperbolic to the point of hilarity, though.
“First system to combine vacuum-based traction control with linear acceleration. Vacuumatic wheels that prevent slipping on hazardous terrain.”
Excusemewhat? Am I to understand that the car pulls a vacuum through the pneumatic tires to create traction? You’re going to need to draw me a picture or something. My brain hurts.
“Max Velocity: <600KM/H”
Brother, the glass of water on my desk here can do less than 600 km/h. Literally everything can do less than that. We can all share in the Rosmar H’s ambition. We are all Rosmar H.
It’s not often you get to marvel at an automotive proposal so outrageous as to be unbelievable in such an engrossing way. There seems to be an endless supply of vaporware supercars, generic looking things with monumental claims that disappear into the fog of unfunded dreams. But most are simply on the ambitious side of the possible, tethered (however loosely) to reality.
Rosmar H is none of these things. It’s a stupid idea. I hope it works out for them, because if I’m going to be wrong about something, it’d be glorious to be this wrong. So wrong it doesn’t make sense to be right. That would be something else.
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