Most of us use a single car battery to start our cars. Drake Anthony, known as styropyro on YouTube, looked at this little ambition and said, “Hold my coin.” The result? A 28,000-pound wall made of 400 lead-acid batteries wired together, capable of producing enough electricity to make grown engineers cry under their goggles.
The two-hour experiment exposed a variety of everyday objects to this apparently irrational electrical current, but the real highlight comes at 1:16:20. That’s when the steel suspension springs—the kind that do heroic work silently supporting the corner of your car every day—are connected to the battery array. It glows an intense deep orange, then erupts into flames and slowly and dramatically decomposes.
Somewhere, a suspension engineer had a strange feeling but didn’t know why.
why it happens
The reason the spring puts on such a wonderful show, while other objects either evaporate instantly or escape the influence of the current entirely, is due to its length. This length allows it to work like a resistor, reducing the current flow from a staggering 8,000 amps to about 1,000 amps when melted. It’s this slower reaction that creates those jaw-dropping visual effects. A chain also nearly steals the show — briefly glowing, like a cameo in a Ghost Rider movie — but it doesn’t quite seal the deal.
As for why specifically lead-acid batteries? Their ability to sustain high current output for long periods of time makes them the right tool for this particular style of madness. The custom switches and connectors alone required over 1,000 pounds of copper to handle the load, and the magnetic fields generated were strong enough that the entire cable layout had to be carefully designed to prevent things from getting even more confusing. A car enthusiast who spent three weekends running subwoofer cables under the carpet now has some perspective on what a “difficult wiring job” actually looks like.
The whole thing is a reminder that truly massive amounts of electricity can cripple even the sturdiest hardware your car relies on. If steel springs rated to support thousands of pounds of vehicle weight can be reduced to a glowing puddle of regret, the rest of us might be wise to keep battery counts in the single digits.
If you have Anthony’s video, it’s definitely worth the two hours. This isn’t a car video by any means, but it’s an experiment that makes you appreciate the crazy extremes of physics and the very smart engineers who made sure none of this happens in your driveway. perhaps.
