The Infinity Horse

The early 1900s saw the popularisation of the automobile. Everyone was jumping on the proverbial bandwagon of this new transport technology. It was cool and exciting so people wanted to be part of it, even if they might not have had full technical understanding of the domain.

One of those movers was a company in the business of raising, selling, renting and feeding horses. The managers understood that horses were a dead-end business and that the future was in motorized vehicles. Thus they started putting a lot of money and effort into creating their own car.

Engineers were hired, meetings were had and factories were being prepped for production. After a few months of work the main obstacles were overcome and the plan to build and launch a car brand were looking good. That is when the CEO scheduled a surprise meeting with the chief engineer of the project.

"We had a top management meetin last week and what we came up with was spectacular! We are going to completely revolutionize the way people think about cars!"

"Really," said the surprised engineer.

"Yes! What is the most annoying thing about cars?" he asked and without giving the engineer a chance to reply continued "Running out of fuel. That never happens with horses, so this is really a step backwards."

The engineer felt like pointing out that there is such a thing as a horse that has run out of fuel. It's called a dead horse and the difference between that and a car was that adding fuel to a dead horse does not make it come back alive. But he chose not to mention this issue, but instead wanted to hear this new master plan.

"So what we are going to do - and this is going to be a world first - is to create a car that never runs out of fuel. We shall call it The Infinity Horse. Marketing department is already creating a campaign for this. I have seen some of the sketches and they are just out of this world!"

"Errrm, never runs out of fuel?" the engineer said with a puzzled look on his face.

"Never!"

"That's not really possible, how are you going to do that?"

"That's your job isn't it? Just make it happen, it can't be that hard."

A very unpleasant two weeks followed. The engineer did everything in his power to try to explain that the aim was impossible, which did not work, and trying to suggest alternative solutions, which did not work either. Nothing short of perfection was acceptable. As an example making the gas tank bigger was not an option because while it made the problem occur less often it was not enough.

"The Vision is The Infinity Horse. Unless we have this feature we have nothing," the CEO repeated every time issues were raised.

This drove our engineer to despair. He was being crushed between the unbreakable laws of physics and the immovable opinion of the CEO. Grasping at straws he started going through automotive parts catalogues. There he saw a new product: a warning light that activated when the car was running out of fuel. And then it came to him.

He took the warning light and modified it slightly. Instead of turning on a light it shut down the engine. This would fulfill the requirement. The car would never run out of fuel, because it could be easily proven that there was still gas in the tank. Said fuel could not be used for driving but it was there. The only thing this modification did was to reduce the maximum range making the car worse by every conceivable objective metric.

The CEO loved it. The Infinity Horse had been achieved and it was perfect! If this system caused people to get stranded, well, that's their own fault for not doing due diligence and adding enough fuel to the tank before embarking on their journey.