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Stored energy
I think the way it has to work is the energy is stored somehow. A hamster on a wheel generates almost no horsepower. You'd have to store the energy by using it to maybe incrementally compress a spring, lift a weight, compress a gas etc in very small amounts etc. You'd have to wait weeks until you had enough energy saved up to push the car...a few feet.
A much better alternative would be to use the hamsters *as* fuel. Hamsters are not in short supply, are not a monoply of OPEC nations, and are easy to catch. Once vaporized at high temperature in a non-oxygenated environment, the resulting gas be cooled and used to fuel a conventional engine. Or the hamsters could be liquified and the resulting sludge cracked for a variety of oil-based fuels which could be used to run turbine engines. You'd need a LOT of hamsters, but you could concievably use hamster-ene instead of jet-A to fly the Concorde across the Atlantic or run a power plant.
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