Teqniqal; I'm not sure what the power difference is between toast with jelly and bread with butter. Although I think the lowest power rating would be bread with margarine. This would be a good military-funded research project to diecover which anti-gravity engine has the most power / heaviest lift. Perhaps the lifting power is relative to the size / breed of feline ? Maybe a siamese for a compact, perhaps a lion for an SUV, maybe a cheetah for the sports cars ?
Disney had all these ideas decades ago. VW's only advance is a slick video. Nothing new or practical here. Nothing actually a working prototype- rare earth geology complete BS. Good reveiw of current mag lev trains at wikipedia. Get real.
How I despise these kinds of articles - they are chock full of idiotic eco-speak nonsense. Who picks this crap for and otherwise respectable engineering e-mag?
"Zero Emission" Right - what about the emissions from the massive electrical generating plants required to support millions of levitating cars? what about the emissions created to dig up and retool millions of miles of roadbed? What about the emissions from the traffic jams as this work is being done? What about the emisssion to mine, smelt, refine, process and ship the copper, steel, and aluminum required for this pipe dream?
If anyone will stop snorting their own perfume long enough to use some common sense, they'll quickly see that the existing infrastructure is a huge investment with high value which continues to deliver a great service to a wide variety of existing customers.
Focus our energies on maintaining and improving that infrastructure, rather than trying to obsolete it wholesale for a pipe dream.
Otherwise, if we're talking pipe-dream, then break out the jet packs and flying cars. They make a lot more sense than levitating cars running on millions of miles on nonexsitant roadbeds requiring billions of pounds of nonexistant copper, steel, and aluminum to create...and the engineering problems are actually far less daunting.
Quite a few years ago I designed the controls system for a maglev train car, which did not require any active elements on the car, other than a large aluminum plate as the base, and motion element of the motor. In theory it could work, but the sad reality is that the power to make it work would be quite heavy, probably far more than the lift that it could provide. And the roadways would have to be fairly good conductors. So any videos of cars floating quietly are actually cartoons. At least until we have a major breakthrough in power generation technology, or superconductivity for AC in strong magnetic fiels.
This really isn't as far-fetched as one might think. This car flies the same way spaceships from other worlds do. Inside they have cats in harnesses that have jellied toast strapped to thier backs. The basic physics of the universe become unstable because the 'cat always lands on it's feet' force is counteracted by the 'jellied bread always lands jelly side down' force. The result is levitation! No German engineering involved.
Using CGI to demonstrate a concept outside the realm of physics is fraud. Why is this having any more serious discussion among engineers than the latest Chris Angel YouTube video? Entertaining yes, science? ...any learned person knows there's not a chance in hades this ccould happen with anything else other than the worlds most powerful super conductors burried into each pathway. Simply entertainment.
The idea of hover cars and hover boards that work by pushing against an installed metal grid or naturally occurring mineral veins in the ground is directly lifted from "Uglies" by Scott Westerfeld. It is a pretty neat concept, but the cloud labeled "then a miracle occurs" is a fairly sizable thunderhead. Other than the "car" that the couple sits in, this is certainly CG. I especially like the part where they take an elevated off-ramp - must be relying on the rebar mesh in the concrete as they would be pretty far from all those in-ground minerals up there. Also, I didn't see any seat belts. What do you think would happen if a car that's shaped like a hampster wheel and no saftey restrainst finds a 10 meter stretch of pavement that didn't have underlying "minerals"? I'm thinking "worlds roundest coffin" or "largest runaway tire".
I am totally in agreement with you Eric. Design News should not have posted this article even if they did should have said at front this is a fake animation but..
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