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Fed up with rising petrol costs? Try hitching a sail to the car and harnessing the power of nature.
That's the advice from an enterprising Auckland sculptor, Dan Tucker, who sailed his Land Rover up Northland's Ninety Mile Beach on pure wind power.
"I talked to a few people about it and they said it couldn't be done. That just made me more determined to do it," said Tucker, 32. "The beaches are perfect - you have steady winds, a flat surface, and it's wide and generally quite straight."
The vehicle hit speeds of up to 30 km/h in winds gusting up to 40 km/h.
When the wind died down to 10 km/h, Mr Tucker got out and pushed to supplement the wind.
Mr Tucker grew up as a sailor. His parents, John and Barbara Tucker, have lived on a boat for the past 15 years, first in Auckland and for the past four years in Hobart, Tasmania.
He believes sailing is poised to make a comeback as the oil era ends.
"It's crazy. Even today I went in to fill up my car and it was $2.07 a litre. It just keeps going up," he said.
"It's not going to drop down, that's the scary thing. We are facing the reality that we are going to run out of oil.
"We'll go back to the old days of sail power rather than flying, but with modern materials boats are getting faster and faster."
Commercial shippers are already harnessing wind power. A German company, Beluga, launched a freighter late last year with a kite the size of a football field that it said would cut fuel use by up to half.
Californian company KiteShip is making sails to fly logs out of remote forests, as well as for ships.
Mr Tucker said sailing vehicles were never likely to be feasible on crowded city streets, but were ideal for beaches.
"You'd almost get from Auckland to North Cape by beach sailing."
His Land Rover didn't make the full length of Ninety Mile Beach because it took most of the day to rig up the sail with bamboo.
"We could have gone all the way to North Cape if we'd had time."
www.dantucker.8m.net
