Photo: eV2

EMP – ElectroMagnetic Pulse

EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) are often featured in movies – characters in The Matrix: Revolutions used them to defend against the sentinels, and do you remember Ocean’s Eleven? In that movie, a character is seen pulling into a parking lot in a white panel van that’s holding a giant machine, which he powers up and uses to knock out the power to the casino a block away. That’s an EMP attack.

Very basically, the targeted car is blasted with high-power radio frequencies and microwave waves, confusing the electronics system until the engine just gives up and shuts down. – Autonet.ca

That’s newspaper writing, in blog writing:

Radio Frequencies (RF) are pulsed at the car, which just melts the electronics like, you don’t bounce right back from an EMP attack.

Neat eh, movie-kinda stuff indeed.

Until UK company eV2 built the one above, and demonstrated its device to the BBC on an unused airport runway.

It was touted in the press as:
the device that would end car chases

Wrote about it at work, here.