Flying cars are moving closer to reality, according to Juraj Vaculik, CEO of AeroMobil, the company that has built such a prototype. AeroMobil plans to begin taking orders for its flying cars next year, with delivery scheduled for 2018. At this point, pricing has not been established but Vaculik said he believes orders will be received from customers globally.
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It's not what you want to hear, but flying cars shouldn't be for everyone. Not in the short term. Not for a long time. In fact, according to multi-disciplinary inventor Dezso Molnar, who's about to launch the world's first flying car race series, anyone who's trying to build a multi-seat, VTOL flying commuter is wasting their time, building a heavyweight energy hog that's over-engineered for the benefit of passengers that just aren't there most of the time. Molnar says it's time for a reality check; there's dozens, maybe hundreds of existing roadable aircraft out there that fly as well as they drive and work within both sets of rules - and that's the small segment he sees a big future in. Here's part two of our rapid-fire interview with Dezso on a road trip in California.
To learn more about some of Dezso's credentials as a pilot, rocket scientist, inventor, land speed record chaser, musician and X-Prize judge, check out part one of our interview. Then continue on, as we drive towards San Jose, where Dezso has a plane to catch.
On flying carsI decided I wanted a flying car when I couldn't get out of Los Angeles one day. That's when I started the gyrocycle project, which I felt was the best combination of existing aircraft and road vehicles to get in and out of congested areas.
Lots of flying cars have been built. Many brilliant people have done development, and I really want to challenge the position that if you invent something that's interesting or works well, that you need to dumb it down to fit a huge market. Not everything in this world is for everybody. I'd like to provide a positive spin and spotlight for the existing flying cars already out there.
One objective I have now is to create the flying car racing league, which will give these machines a place to shine, and a place to create the conversation that will drive development of something worth having. It's good for aviation, and it's good for ground travel.
On what flying cars can be good forThe number one danger for small aircraft is when people fly in bad weather. It usually happens when the weather goes wrong between airports. They crash while struggling to get to an airport to land. If you can land anywhere in between, with impunity, then you're more likely to do it.
A lot of pilots don't like to land on a highway, because they'll end up spending the rest of their life giving urine samples and explaining to CNN and the police department why they set down on a street. But the fact is sometimes that's the right thing to do. Having the ability to land and drive away in a storm can help. Also, driving from an airport that has bad weather to one that's clear and less windy or foggy to take off … there's a lot of value in that for pilots.
As for ground travel, traffic is often very congested and getting worse. Sometimes the best path is not to take a street, maybe there's a better path through the air. There's a value for both.
On resistance to the idea of flying carsPeople still chuckle about the idea of flying cars. The worst dissenters are the ones who say "a vehicle's going to be bad if you try to do two things with it." Well, ducks wouldn't exist if it wasn't better for them to fly and walk and swim. Bugs wouldn't exist with legs if it was better for them to only be able to fly. I really reject these arguments that don't recognize that through evolution, every single bird can walk, ok?
You can't travel on the ground with a 747. You get to the gate and you're stuck taking a bus. You can't take an F15 on the freeway. They are trapped at airports. Evolution shows that there's a lot of value for creatures to be able to travel through different environments. That's best applied to machinery as well.
I want to create a venue to accelerate the development of flying cars and emerge with vehicles that we want to use ourselves – with no concern about whether or not somebody else wants it. And that happens in racing on all spheres, from F1 to foot racing to bicycles to motorcycle racing, et cetera. I simply want to form a racing league that will help develop and promote the use of these machines.
Flying cars should not be for the masses – at least, not yetA key obstacle facing flying cars is the opinion that the only reason to finance development is to create a mass market commuter's product. That's what's killing it. That's the failure model that's been tried and tried and tried, and failed and failed and failed. The car and motorcycle markets vastly outnumber the tiny aircraft market, so that eventual opportunity is built in if you can just get out of the gate.
What's important right now is that people who really want flying cars can have them; they've been around for 100 years, so they need to focus on getting one for themselves and continue making improvements to perfect it.
We have to get beyond this approach of making incredibly compromised mass-market designs. Just get on with building stuff as well as you can and use it. That's it. That's what flying cars need. We need a couple hundred traveling around every day, passing people on the freeway, passing people in the air and just getting on with traveling and racing. If people want to reduce their commute times, I suggest they move closer to work.
I don't really care about people that want safe vehicles. I care about people that want to BASE jump. Those are the people that drive things in the new world. I'm not designing for people who are focused on their fears, or to provide opportunities for their fears to be extended and coddled. People in the motorcycle and experimental aircraft culture are cautiously optimistic. I support them.
I want to focus on people that want make things better, find ways to do it, and have the sensibilities and the situational awareness to do it in a safe manner. There's a lot of people like that. People like Richard Petty, he's gonna die of old age, not from car crashes. He definitely pushed the limits, and he's still with us today.
People like Buzz Aldrin, who go to outer space and come back, and live a full life and have fun. I don't need to make things for safe people when I can make something for Buzz! Let's find a few of those people and really provide for them and not for the perceived fears of your perceived buyer who most definitely and definitively never brought you a dollar.
On multi-seat vs. single seat flying carsYou need to look around at commuters. Right now we're on the street, and I dare you to find a dozen cars in the next five minutes that have two people in them. And it's a Sunday, so the probability is much higher.
When you're dealing with constants of flight, you include the weight of the pilot, the airframe, and the weight of an engine. And then when you start throwing in variables, like batteries or fuel and then "well, I think I'll have one passenger, maybe two, maybe three … actually six people's really nice. How about 12?" When every person weighs 180 pounds, you push the design into a place it doesn't need to go to allocate space and strength and range for people that are not necessarily in attendance.
You're building machines for people that don't exist, again and again and again, and again, and there's no reason to say it's the right way to get to market, because it has never, ever worked for a hundred years. Nobody has brought one to market, nobody has one, nobody wants one, nobody buys one, nobody uses one because they keep making so many seats that nobody sits in. The constants and the variables don't add up to justify lots of seats for people that don't want them.
When somebody buys a sport bike, what do they want to do? They want to twist the throttle! 160 million registered times! You can't ignore the popularity of one person vehicles and how people will dedicate their time to use them, and derail our chances of flying off the Earth because so many developers insist the market will demand something we have no evidence it will.
That has been done over and over and over and over with every machine that has a tombstone on it. Terrafugia most recently delayed deliveries so it could fight battles for a plastic windscreen and to increase the weight allowance of light sports. Two person, four wheels, overweight. I do not ever expect to see a Transition delivered as they exceeded the light sport weight limits. Now they're circulating videos of the next design, which is a drawing of a machine that does this and does that. And god bless the crew for trying, but if you claim that in six to seven or eight years you might make this thing that supersedes the other thing you didn't deliver, it grows the graveyard.
We need a reality check on the designs. I know what you're saying. The perception that two seats sells things. But as these things grow they become unruly. I learned this years ago, with the guys I worked with from Hiller.
They built the Hiller flying platform, which is a stunning machine. As a one man machine it worked great. I met the test pilot. And then the Navy said, well, the guy that flies it needs to have a gun. And he needs to have a hundred bullets, and he needs to be able to fly ten miles, and then after he shoots the friendly natives he needs to hurry home ten miles, and he needs to carry 100 pounds of bombs, because I have ten fingers and ten toes, so I think 100 is a good number. And they ended up building a machine that was so big and unruly and carried so many things that the machine couldn't be steered anymore. Imagine a surfboard 10 feet wide.
You end up spiraling out of control. The mission objective changed so much that the genius of the machine couldn't adapt – and public opinion has swayed to think the core machine didn't work. It just didn't work as a weapon, and that's all the customer was willing to buy. When people see enough of these things that don't blossom, their belief becomes "that's impossible." And then developers like me have to spend a lot of additional time unwinding that perception, where in actual fact it's happening all around them and they're just biased to ignore the ones that work.
The flying car I'm building now will have one seat, and can carry extra batteries on the ground. So a person can fly somewhere, land, and then throw another 12 batteries on the back, because once you're on the ground the battery weight is comparatively irrelevant.
On why he prefers three wheel designs to fourThere are many different design approaches. One challenge can be legal issues – some people design stuff that works physically but doesn't fit the rules. I always make my stuff legal, because I don't like battles beyond engineering. That puts the outcome is in someone else's hands.
Generally they use internal combustion engines, and one of the big challenges is passing smog checks, so you need to consider that when you select an engine. With the new electric motors we're using, and the street bike motors I run right now, fortunately that isn't an issue.
For flight, the certification of an aircraft is a long winded, multi-million dollar process. Conversely, building a one-off experimental homebuilt aircraft or kit plane is extremely easy, so that's what most people do.
I like to work within the motorcycle category, because if you have one to three wheels, it's much easier to get on the road than if you have four.
There's a very short stack of rules for motorcycles, a very big stack for cars. Also for efficiency, cars are not particularly efficient by design anyway. It's not like I really wish I had a four wheel flying car, I actually don't. I don't want one at all, in fact. There's very few four wheel aircraft out there. Some of them are 20, some are 30, but most have three wheels.
Remember to check out part one of our interview, and stay tuned for another installment next week when Dezso talks us through some of his favorite (and least favorite) flying car designs.
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Moving IoT to the mainstream boils down to one thing: "integrating services with technology," says Prakash Kartha, Market Development for Transportation Solutions Division at Intel.
"That's the secret sauce," he adds.
Well, that and getting consumers to adopt.
The integration of services with technology in the car is one area where Intel thinks that there is a real path to the future – but not in a "George Jetson flying car" kind of way. Embedding services into what Kartha describes as the "cockpit" makes the car just another platform for the delivery of services in context: information, directions and even commerce.
The goal, Kartha says, is to turn the car into a platform that can provide as much – or even more –utility than an app on a phone.
He cites some of what Visa is doing to not just enable users to pay for gas, tolls and parking, but to enable a leasing or purchase transactions.
And that's just the start.
Intel's Car Commerce Push
"Beyond the car, the evolution we are going to see is how a number of different technologies come together to enable automated driving," Kartha told Karen Webster.
But that, he says, is in the off-into-the-distance future. Both Kartha and Webster agree that it's a bit of a stretch to imagine getting into a driverless car and careening down 101S between San Fran and San Jose and feeling completely at ease.
But there are lots of value-added stutter steps in between that rely on sensors within and outside the car, cameras, GPS and other technologies that solve problems for drivers behind the wheel.
"GM's OnStar was probably the first instance that any driver had of having interaction with their car," Kartha said. "Consumers of the [subscription] service had the ability to ask for help and a variety of other services. Satellite radio and in-car navigation is another."
But, as Webster suggests, a lot of these functions have been replaced by the smartphone and apps – music can be streamed, cheap gas can be sourced by a variety of apps, the closest fast food place can be found via Google Maps, as can directions. Waze provides better navigation than any factory-installed version. So how does the auto manufacture compete?
Kartha said, for starters, it begins with making it easier for solutions to universally translate across more automobiles and more devices.
"The interesting thing and the transition we are seeing is that the No. 1 thing we are seeing is that the technology of the car will soon have a lot more seamless integration of services with the car systems itself."
What Kartha means by that, he said, is things like integrating the parking app experience into the driving experience so that consumers get an Uber-like experience when it comes to matching a driver with the need to park with the ability to find an open space and pay for it – no phone needed.
But the problem, at least right now, is a bit of the chicken and the egg, Webster suggests. Great if you are buying a new car, but what about the person who just bought one a few years ago and still wants the cool integrated experience?
"We are seeing a really solid ecosystem around app telematic solutions. The market is growing," Kartha insists.
And the market is ripe for growth, he said, because the adoption lag has more to do with the fact that it's still only a small number of tech companies bringing these connected commerce solutions to market.
What's Needed Next?
For now, it is very much about cracking the chicken and the egg — getting companies with solutions on board, getting car makers on board, but more importantly getting consumers on board.
"It's not a technology problem. The technology exists. You have to create a market for this. You have to create the need for the consumer to want it – and of course they only will if they get a differentiated experience, "Kartha said. "My belief is that mobile-based commerce gets more popular, I think we will get a kind of halo effect around general IoT. It's a short leap to where consumers think that it's just as natural to transact via machines instead of only from their phones."
The Value-Add
After all, beyond convenience, the real value-add comes down to security.
One of the more exciting developments that Kartha described is the ability for services and technology to intersect to create a "halo of protection around the driver," driven by alerting drivers to things that keep them safe — vehicle malfunctions, recalls, inspections, for example — and help them save money — metering that more precisely calculates insurance rates based on driving patterns, for example.
"If you cannot establish trust in a platform, and those services cannot be delivered, the customers will not use them," Kartha says.
Still, when it comes to closing the loop and fully integrating the commerce and payments experience into cars, Kartha tells Webster, there's a long road ahead.
"How [mobile payments] translates into IoT and how that translates into automotive is still in the very early days," Kartha said.
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Is there anything more annoying than those "concept cars" that never seem to show up on the dealer's lot?
For those of us waiting for the automotive revolution touted in weekly headlines, a drive to the dealership can be a bit of a let down. As I recently discovered, buying the car of the future is expensive and for most of us, well, still in the future.
As we wait this week to see if the Canadian car-buying boom continued in April, there is already something we can count on.
Internal combustion still hotFrom personal research, I can reveal now that in April, the vast majority of Canadian new car buyers were shelling out for vehicles powered by the fossil-fuel burning internal combustion engines that were a brilliant modern invention about 160 years ago.
The 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor. Ford's gas-burning F-150 remains a Canadian hot seller. (Reuters)
A trip to my nearest car lot, a Toronto GM dealership, shows that there is really nothing else being sold. Literally.
My motivation was not just journalistic. As some of you may recall, my family was one of those caught up in last year's Volkswagen diesel scandal that came as a such a disappointment to lifelong VW drivers.
Diesel engines are known to last a long time and, with careful maintenance, we had counted on our TDI wagon running for at least ten years.
Still waitingWe had to spend a little more for what we thought was an environmental fuel sipper.
We thought the 10-year lifetime would have taken us well into the brave new world, when VW and its competitors would have turned the corner with practical cars that didn't burn fossil fuels at all.
Volkswagen is showing off its BUDD-e electric vehicle but if you're trying to replace your smoky Jetta — so sorry, not available. (Reuters)
Canadian VW owners still don't know the details of the offer, but suddenly we have to consider that our best option could turn out to be selling our 2009 Jetta wagon back to VW. And that may require buying some other car with the proceeds.
I like to think that VW has learned its lesson. And, if it survives the current debacle, maybe someday it will bring us their flying car — so far, apparently, just available in China. Thank goodness for the comments which reveal this video was actually made with computer animation.
Flying off the lotYou probably aren't surprised you'll have to wait for a flying car, but with all the headlines about self-driving, battery- and hydrogen-powered vehicles out there, you'd think the future was here already. Not for the average Canadian car buyer.
In fact at my local car dealership, despite explaining that I was looking for a really high efficiency car to replace the VW, and that I was not buying till autumn, the very agreeable salesman directed me exclusively to gas-burners.
GM's 2016 Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric — pretty car, rave reviews, but not on the lot. (Reuters)
The GM engineers have really done miracles with their internal combustion, offering a 1.4 litre four-cylinder Buick Encore SUV that gets 8.5 litres per 100 kilometres. But I asked for something with even better fuel economy and hinted I wasn't worried about the price.
Only after I asked directly after the Chevy Volt did he tell me about GM's gas-electric hybrid that offers 75 kilometres of range before the gasoline motor kicks in. But they were hard to get, he said. The 2016s had all been snapped up and there were none on the lot.
Despite rave reviews, and stories about people having to have their old fuel pumped out of the tank because they so seldom drive far enough to switch to gas, my salesman said he had never sold a Volt. Besides, he said, they were very expensive.
There's little wonder that electrics are so far behind in sales if there are none available and salesmen don't mention they exist. And so much for the miracle of the free market when demand exceeds supply.
Launched in CanadaOf course GM is not alone. For all the hype, getting your hands on the hottest electrics and hybrids isn't easy. You don't see them on sale in your auto flyers.
Despite being launched at the Canadian International Auto Show, Tesla's sought-after gull-wing SUV is virtually unavailable in Canada. Ford got its hands on one by paying $55,000 US over the sticker price.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., introduced the Model X car at the company's headquarters, but the sought-after SUV's first appearance at an auto show was in Canada. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)
Of course that's a good sign for electric cars. It means Ford is hot on Tesla's tail, realizing that CEO Elon Musk may be onto something. There were reports last week that Ford is reverse-engineering its own equivalent of Telsa's Model 3.
According to Wired Magazine, the electric car revolution is still coming. It's just been delayed to 2022.
That's when "the biggest obstacle to the sale of EVs — they cost too much — will be obliterated and cars that run on electricity will cost less than those that run on dead dinosaurs," said the enthusiastic if scientifically inexact Alex Davies.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, despite price and other obstacles, Canadian electric car sales continue to increase, even though they are dwarfed by conventional vehicles.
And Canadians have a third alternative. If the right vehicle is too hard to find, maybe it's time for more of us to try to get by with public transit, bicycles, rentals and car-sharing and not buy a car at all.
Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis
More analysis by Don Pittis
TALLADEGA – Pole-sitter Chase Elliott was dodging flying cars left and right on the way to a fifth-place finish in the Geico 500 on Sunday at the Talladega Superspeedway.
"We tried there at the end but just didn't have enough momentum to get to those guys," Elliott said of those who finished ahead of him.
The 20-year-old rookie on the Sprint Cup circuit may not have secured that first victory he's after, but it's easy to see he has the talent to make it happen soon.
Those in our neck of the woods have seen glimpses of such since he was a young teen.
Just more than a year ago – March 15, 2015, to be exact – Elliott was standing on the asphalt of the South Alabama Speedway signing autographs before taking part in the Rattler 250 Super Late Models race.
He patiently posed for photos with fans of all ages – who understood it was likely Elliott's last time to display his talents at the track located on Alabama Highway 52 between Kinston and Opp.
With the rising star moving into Jeff Gordon's coveted Sprint Cup ride for Hendrick Motorsports in 2016, it was almost as if Elliott was putting on a farewell show at one of his favorite short tracks. He had even competed in an Xfinity race the day before in Arizona and then took a flight right after it so he could make the Rattler 250 the following afternoon.
During a phone interview leading up to the race, the Dawsonville, Ga., native explained why it was worth his effort to race again on the rural south Alabama track, where he finished third on that day.
"I think a lot of it is just growing up and doing a lot of asphalt and short track Late Models racing in the past, and I think as much as anything is the people I've been able to do it with," Elliott said. "Just some of the best people you could possibly have to go race with and learn from.
"I'm still pretty close to a lot of those guys, and I like to take every chance I have to go race with them."
Elliott was just 14 when he raced his first Rattler 250. A year later he returned and had the fastest car on the track, leading most of the race before being penalized and sent to the back of the pack with 13 laps left.
It was ruled he caused a wreck involving eventual winner Grant Enfinger and local track favorite Bubba Pollard as they raced three-wide coming around turn 3 at the bottom of the track.
Though he didn't race another Rattler 250 – the biggest race at SAS – until last year, he did come back for several Late Models races in between.
One October night in 2013, NASCAR legend Bill Elliott was a surprise entrant with his son in the Alabama Pro 125. Chase Elliott edged Dothan's Korey Ruble in an exciting win, and his father finished fourth in what was a memorable treat for the fans and the Elliotts.
In his return to Alabama this week, Elliott showed he had a car fast enough to contend by winning the pole at 192.661 mph. Ironically, it came 29 years to the day that his father set the NASCAR pole record of 212.809 at Talladega.
Longtime followers of the sport will remember that in the race to follow on May 3, 1987, Bobby Allison cut a tire and went flying into the catch-fence that separated the fans from the track at Talladega. Some fans were injured as debris from the car went into the stands.
In a safety move to slow the cars, NASCAR required smaller carburetors be put in the cars for the two remaining races at Talladega and Daytona that year. The next year, restrictor plates were mandated for races on the two superspeedways of Daytona and Talladega.
Which brings us back to Sunday's race, where restrictor plates keep the speeds below 200 mph, yet there continues to be chaos on this track.
Elliott was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay away from trouble. He even made a push on the final lap before Brad Keselowski took the checkered flag while another wreck was happening behind.
Elliott went from 22nd to fifth in the last 10 hair-raising laps by avoiding two final crashes – one involving 12 cars, the other collecting seven. He was one of only five drivers not involved in a wreck during the race.
Elliott had also been the pole-sitter in the season-opener at Daytona, but an early wreck ended his day.
So what did he learn during his second restrictor-plate race?
"You can't have a good day unless you finish," Elliott said.
Consider Sunday a good day for Elliott.
Follow Jon Johnson on Twitter @eaglesportsed
We are seldom more creative than when imagining the future. We like to dream, we like to dream big—and sometimes engineering and science makes those dreams come true.
Take Leonardo da Vinci for example. Often the contraptions he drew, such as the famous helicopter-like "aerial screw," were impossible to create, especially considering the materials and technologies available at the time. But almost 400 years later, we have the helicopter—in no small way thanks to the inspirational imagination of the great Leonardo.
More recent generations have also imagined how people would move from place to place in the future—the future we all now inhabit. Some came true to varying degrees, some we still dream of making, others were simply…wide of the mark. Below is a collection of images of curious transportation dreams and predictions from the last 125 years, including a look at whether or not we have turned those dreams into reality.
Means of transportation: Wings (1900 and 1901)Description: In more ways than one, Daedalus probably didn't realize what he was starting when he began building wings for himself and his son. Since then—or more likely from long before the days of ancient Greece—mankind has dreamed of donning wings like the birds.
This includes the French artist Jean-Marc Côté and a group of similar-minded artists, who around the beginning of the 20th century issued a series of postcards imagining life in the year 2000. The series includes a number of flying devices such as the card above showing winged firefighters battling a fire and rescuing a woman and child.
The idea of wings seems to have been in vogue in France at the time, as a second image, which might be a contender for the most French thing ever, illustrates.
In it, wings are put to their most obvious use by a wife's lover to escape out the window when her husband returns unexpectedly. Notice the flashing warning light on the bed frame...not sure how she convinced her husband they needed that extra feature...
Did we make it come true?
Sadly, the answer has to be no. We have strange festivals dedicated to jumping off platforms and seeing how far we can float along on the breeze and a couple of semi-successful attempts at creating human-powered wings. Apart from that, the idea of flying using nothing but wings still remains in the Icharian realm of imagination.
An argument could be made that we've got the birds beat with hang gliders, but we are still talking static gliding (and the same goes for wingsuits).
Ornithopters could be drawn in by the defense. Admittedly, some advances have been made, but to date all flights—whether human-powered or machine-powered—have been over such short distances and time spans that even the Wright brothers wouldn't have been impressed.
The stern judge scans the court, bangs his gavel, and rejects the claim.
Means of transportation: Floating / flying cars (1882)Description: The artist and illustrator Albert Robida's great painting above of crowds getting ready to go to the opera in the year 2000 predicted that our skies would be full of floating/flying torpedo-shaped vehicles.
While health and safety might have a thing or two to say about the design of these cars and buses of the future, scientists and science fiction fans are likely more interested in what means of propulsion they could be using.
The vehicles seem capable of steady hovering/floating. Perhaps the dish-shaped 'fins' are a kind of repulsorlift, a la Star Wars. Another option would be that they are using some sort of magnetic levitation; but if so, then good luck to the soldier (dead center) holding on to his saber when another vehicle gets too close.
A third possibility is the vehicles have hidden propellers, making them a kind of flying car or personal helicopter.
Did we make it come true?
In the case of magnetic levitation, then to a certain degree—although much closer to earth.
The newest generation of Japanese trains powered by magnetic levitation are breaking all kinds of records, recently going past the 600 km/h mark. However, this is along a track, and they are only lifted a very small distance above the ground.
The future of the technology looks promising, with some scientists speculating we could use mag-lev powered ramps to launch satellites and spacecraft into orbit.
Repulsorlifts are, however (sadly), still imaginary.
Sky cars are a pretty well-known concept that has seen some success. The best-known (and notorious) example might be the Moller Skycar, which also illustrates the main issue with flying cars. We might have achieved flight, but personal flying craft are simply too expensive and have too little proof-of-concept to gain any real practicality.
Personal flying craft as a general category, however, could be hovering on the edges of success. Companies, including Pal-V, Zee Aero, and e-Volo are all working on prototypes.
Then there is the Chinese Ehang, which—although looking like the unholy offspring of a drone, a helicopter, the Google car, and a weed whacker—promises to fly you anywhere without you even having to know how to fly. (Just mind the spinning blades.)
Means of transportation: Nuclear Cars, Tanks and Trains (1950s)Description: The future was Jetsons-bright back in the 1950s when nuclear power seemed to be the likely answer to most of our future transportation needs.
One example is the Ford Nucleon above, a concept car from the late 50s. The vehicle would be propelled by a nuclear steam generator placed in the back. Tailgating would have come with certain hazards, but the miles per gallon would have been pretty incredible.
Trains were also looking at using nuclear reactors. A notice from the Association of American Railroads (AAR) released around 1960 discusses the idea and has a great image of what such a train might look like. (You can check it out here.)
The army was also looking into getting some nuclear vehicles in the late 1950s—at least if Chrysler had continued with the TV-8. It is an atomic tank, which, in some illustrations, was equipped with a battering ram, as well as what looks like floating abilities.
Though today it might look like it was invented in a parallel, militarized Haight-Ashbury, the concept was likely quite serious. Both the US and Soviet armies were experimenting with nuclear powered craft at the time, including both tanks and airplanes.
Did we make it come true?
Short answer: No. Micro nuclear reactors seem to be having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, though, so perhaps they could soon be shrunk down to a size where they could be used as propulsion for vehicles.
However, that still leaves a really big question: How would you like to ride around with a small nuclear reactor in your car?
Nuclear planes actually took to the skies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but their potential strategic advantage—primarily being able to stay airborne over enemy territory for long periods of time—was negated by ICBM nuclear missiles, such as the Minutemen.
Means of transportation: Whale bus (1900)Description: [Read in an English accent] "Well, Dave, it's a whale tied to a lunchbox full of people, observed by an angry-looking dolphin, innit."
Did we make it come true?
Not really. We have tried to use marine mammals for various tasks, and the results so far seem mixed. Various stories abound about the US Navy program to train dolphins to locate mines There have been few reports of real success, but if this is due to the dolphins refusing to cooperate, that could be taken as further evidence of their intelligence.
Means of transportation: The flying submarine (1930s)Description: Perhaps the notion of a plane that's also a submarine sounds like something out of Jules Verne. However, it was the real-life passion and lifetime project of Soviet engineer Boris Ushakov.
Ushakov's idea began taking shape while he was an engineering student in the years leading up to the World War II. It caught the attention of the Soviet authorities, who authorized further feasibility studies. From the second half of the war on, Ushakov began building and testing his idea, including how it would do under water. Sadly, it never became a success, and in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev finally scrapped the project.
Did we make it come true?
Yes. In 1961, American Donald Reid began building a plane that would also be capable of movement under water. in 1964, he performed a full use-cycle, diving to 6.5 feet (2 m), before rising to the surface, taking off and flying at up to 33 ft (10 m) altitude.
The concept could getting a serious upgrade quite soon. In 2008, DARPA announced that it was looking at making funds available for flying submarine research.
DARPA being DARPA, they probably won't tell us how it's actually going.
But like our ancestors, we can dream.
Marc ProsserMarc is British, Danish, Geekish, Bookish, Sportish, and loves anything in the world that goes 'booiingg'. He is a freelance journalist and researcher living in Tokyo and writes about all things science and tech. Follow Marc on Twitter (@wokattack1).
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And who could build it? Well, it was either Elon Musk (but then it would have to be electric) or Colin Furze! Guess what. Here it is. Still a prototype, but hey...
I for one can't see a plausible reason why we shouldn't have that!
