The VW hover car is a concept that is about 500 years premature. It will obviously use a weak force generator, anti-gravity beam for levitation. Then for locomotion it would require interaction with say, the Earth's geomagnetic field. You'd have to keep the magnetic force low enough so it didn't dangerously attract nearby loose magnetic material like other vehicles! Acceleration would therfore be very, very slow.
Actually, the ideal hover craft would use, instead of complex collision avoidance electronics, the concept of additional graviton fields that would sense the approach of other objects and repel itself from them, essentially slowing down. Moving forward on the highway would be as simple as falling in line behind other moving traffic as though you were a bumper car. You'd join other traffic and couple magnetically or with graviton fields as car couplers in a long train.
The power plant would be a grapfruit sized fusion power reactor with direct conversion to electrical and gravitational energy. :-)
Hell, these guys are floating in mid air w/o a car. And it was reported on an official government web site:-)
At least the animation in this one was really good. I agree with the earlier post that the can being pushed out of the way by the force field was a nice touch, good attention to detail.
This is a work of fiction, not a real vehicle. Although, yes, it IS a concept.
Is it really ZERO EMISSIONS? No. That's either a lie by someone who knows better, or the ignorant utterance of an advertising wonk. The power has to come from somewhere, and wherever it's sourced, there are emissions.
Will it really just run on the roads in Chungdu? Canal water! The density of heavy metals cannot be high enough to enable this... besides which, the riches in exotic materials in the Chungdu area of Sechzuan are in mines, not on the surface.
There ARE maglev vehicles... trains above rails, in fact... and to have maglev cars, we'd have to have special roadways built.
But I have to hand it to Vee Dub... they've managed to prove PT Barnum right:
The idea of personal magnetically levitated hovercraft doesn't seem very practical. The greater the air-gap, the less efficient. Further, and probably of greater significance, the energy required to support the weight of the craft, in comparison to a wheel/bearing/axle suspended system (which would also be capable of use off the grid) seems wasteful. Maglev trains require a lot of precision alignment and maintenance but the high cost is offset by the utilization density.
This is all marketing hype and no real technology. Not something DesignNews should be reporting on. I'm starting to wonder how many of these "design news" articles aren't just advertisements presented with an engineering flavor to dupe us into reading them. How many more articles on 3D printing and Indy "tech" are there?
I don't think Design News should publish things like this. Too many gullible people. Look how long Moller lasted. It wasn't the technical guys who shut him down, it was the SEC and Isaac Newton.
Ditto to Charles and Tim's comments. Let's say for the sake of argument, it is true then this car would only work in places that had the unique minerals.
I like the idea of the car since and the video it gives the impression that it is so easy to drive that you can just get in and go without any training. lol
Charles, I agree with you. The video may be legitimate, but it seems a little too good to be true. It is amazing how Chendu in China has the unique minerals that allow the car to float. If you float out of town, would your car grind to a halt.
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