The World's Smallest Train is a Car

By: Ameya Naik | Updated: June 30, 2015 13:36 IST

We've all plied on trains, may it be within the city or outside it and we are all aware how much time it saves, especially considering that city streets are filled to the brim with traffic. Suggestions run amok about how flying cars can ease the burden of traffic in the distant future but current options run from sensible stuff like carpooling to even using public transport. However, no one thought of railroads. Can we not have cars modified to run on rails?

Well, we can. Smart has transformed the latest generation of the Forfour into the world's smallest train. This is no April Fools joke and is in fact a real car with solid steel wheels to get it on the track. The car was designed by a team from the UK-based firm Interfleet, who usually deal with huge 70-ton, 16-litre diesel locomotives. This time however, they were dealing with something smaller, much smaller.

Modifying the tiny Smart forfour into what you see in the picture took the engineers six months and this included a lot of CAD modeling and a massive engineering overhaul. The standard alloy wheels on the forfour had to be done away with and this customized version came with massive 22-inch solid steel wheels, each weigh 80 kg.

The engineers even removed the car's steering system and to make sure the wheels remained locked in position they welded aluminum supports between the axles.

This one-off car was tested on a 16 km stretch of railway on the privately-operated Bluebell Railway which cuts a direct route through Sussex and a handful of commuters got the chance to ride in it too. The smallest train in the world did six runs at low speeds with a licensed train driver in the car and supervised by trained staff from the railway at all time.

For the latest automotive news and reviews, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitterand Instagram

Source: The World's Smallest Train is a Car

The Future of Transportation: Flying Cars, Hyperloop, and Virtual Worlds

Four revolutions in transportation are taking place this decade.

This post is a look at how they will shape your life, your business and our world.

In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters…"

Guess what? The flying car is coming, and so is a heck of a lot more.

In this post, I want to explore the latest developments in:

Autonomous Vehicles

Telepresence Robots and Virtual Worlds

Hyperloop

Point-to-Point Aerial Transport

Each of these will change where we live, work and interact.

Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous cars are coming and coming fast. Every major car company has autonomous cars under development. By 2035, it's expected there will be more than 54 million autonomous cars on the road, and this will change everything.

Saved Lives: There are 1.2 million people killed every year in car accidents. Autonomous cars don't drive drunk, don't text, don't have Alzheimer's, and don't fall asleep at the wheel.

Reclaiming Land: You can fit eight times more autonomous cars on our roads, making their land use more efficient. In Los Angeles, it's estimated that more than half of the land in the city belongs to the cars in the form of garages, driveways, roads, and parking lots.

Saved Energy: Today, we give close to 25 percent of all of our energy to personal transportation, and 25 percent of our greenhouse gases are going to the car.

Saved Money: Get rid of needing to own a car, paying for insurance and parking, trade out 4,000-lb. cars for lighter electric cars that don't crash, and you can expect to save 90% on your local automotive transportation bill.

Best of all, you can call any kind of car you need, when you need it. Need a nap? Order a car with a bed. Want to party? Order one with a fully-stocked bar. Need a business meeting? Up drives a conference room on wheels.

Telepresence Robotics and Virtual Worlds

In the US alone, business travel spending will top $310 billion in 2015 (Global Business Travel Association), or about 490.4 million business trips.

The idea of having to schlep your "meat body" from one location to another for a meeting will soon be old-school.

Instead you'll plug into a virtual world, or use a Beam robot to connect virtually. Already, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sony, HTC, and Suitable Technologies are spending billions of dollars to develop the hardware and perfect the experience.

Beyond the advantage of saving serious cash and time flying from LA to NY, meeting someone "in person" will ultimately be a disadvantage. When I'm speaking to you over a virtual link or telepresence robot, I can watch your pupillary dilation, have my system pull up and recall facts about our last conversation, and enrich my interaction with you in countless ways.

In the next decade, you will attend conferences, meetings, interviews, keynotes and maybe even dates by telepresence and virtual worlds. Just the advantage of avoiding a full cavity search courtesy of airport TSA makes it worth it.

For me, I have 15 Beam robots between my offices at XPRIZE (Los Angeles), Singularity University (Mountain View), Human Longevity Inc. (San Diego), and Planetary Resources (Seattle). In a single day, I'll routinely hop between four cities with a click of a button.

Hyperloop

A few years ago, California proposed (and passed) a $69 billion high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In response, Elon Musk (founder of Tesla, SpaceX) published a paper on a conceptual transportation system called the Hyperloop that was "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table" and that could be built at 10% of the cost of the high-speed rail.

Guess what — Hyperloop is now in design and under construction. When it works, it will be able to transport people and cargo between cities at speeds faster than a commercial airliner (over 700 mph) with record energy efficiencies.

Hyperloop, which Musk dubs "the fifth mode," would be as fast as a plane, cheaper than a train and continuously available in any weather while emitting no carbon from the tailpipe.

If people could get from LA to San Francisco in less than 30 minutes, LA to Las Vegas in 20 minutes, or New York to Philly in 10, cities become metro stops and borders evaporate, along with housing price imbalances and overcrowding.

A brilliant team of engineers is hard at work at Hyperloop Technologies, a company founded by investor Shervin Pishevar and former SpaceX Engineer Brogan Bambrogan.

I'm proud to be a founding board member along with Shervin, Brogan, Joe Lonsdale (Founder, Palantir and Formation 8), Jim Messina (Pres. Obama's reelection campaign manager), and David Sacks (PayPal, Yammer).

Point-to-Point Aerial Transport

As alluded to above, some version of the flying car is coming. This is being enabled by the intersection of three converging technologies: high energy density batteries, autonomous navigation powered by differential GPS, and lightweight, high-strength materials.

The XPRIZE Foundation is working on a multimillion dollar Transporter XPRIZE to inspire progress in this arena.

Various designs are under development by a number of companies focused on the creation of personal transportation machines with vertical takeoff, vertical landing capability — think of human-carrying electric quadcopters. Something you can step into and tell it, "Please take me to downtown LA." It then lifts you up, and flies you at 500 feet to your destination.

One company, Zee Aero, is rumored to be funded by Google. This flying car can take off and land vertically using a plethora of small electric motors turning four-bladed propellers and is narrow enough to fit into a standard shopping center parking space.

Another design, e-volo's Volocopter (pictured above), is an electric two-passenger, 18-rotor vehicle.

I call these "flying cars" or "human carrying multi-copters" for point-to-point transport. They are a mix between a personal jet pack and your own autonomous, electric helicopter-on-demand.

For crowded cities, they are a godsend. But for places like Africa which has no passable roads (especially during rainy season), these future Transporters are the equivalent of Africa skipping the copper-line phone system and going straight to wireless.

The future of transportation is an exciting one — and a faster, cheaper, safer, cleaner, and more fun one.

Image Credit: e-volo

Source: The Future of Transportation: Flying Cars, Hyperloop, and Virtual Worlds

Could Flying Bikes, Cars Be Next? Toyota and U.S. Army Explore

Once Hollywood sci-fi, small hovercraft are gaining ground in the real world. The U.S. Army is looking at the "world's first flying motorcycle," and Toyota's luxury brand Lexus has built its own hoverboard.

Yet these and other levitating wonders won't hit the market anytime soon. They still have to undergo safety testing and regulatory scrutiny. And some are simply meant to amuse. Lexus' new Hoverboard, for example, isn't the forerunner of a flying car that Toyota says it's been studying.

"It's definitely something that works, but it's not something we plan to sell," says Lexus spokesman Moe Durand of the hoverboard, unveiled this week in a company video. It uses magnets and liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors to lift a rider off the ground. So far, it only works when magnets are embedded underneath the road surface.

"It's really just for an ad," Durand says, citing the "Amazing in Motion" ad campaign to showcase Lexus' innovation. Though Lexus didn't build it as part of a push toward a flying car, he says it could eventually lead in that direction: "Is it dipping our toe in the water? Maybe."

An increasing number of companies, though, are vying to commercialize their hovercraft. Their prototypes may not look like Marty McFly's board in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II, but they're aiming to do all sorts of incredible things—transport troops over difficult terrain, move passengers in Elon Musk's vision of sonic tubular travel, or even lift buildings to avoid earthquake damage.

Chris Malloy built a helicopter-like Hoverbike in his garage in suburban Sydney, Australia. His website says he "combined the simplicity of a motorbike with the freedom of a helicopter to create the world's first flying motorcycle." Now he's the managing director of Malloy Aeronautics, a company based in the United Kingdom.

"We're doing a feasibility study for them," Malloy says of the U.S. Army. He says his craft, which uses propellers to hover, can do search and rescue missions, cargo delivery, disaster relief, and surveillance. Designed to come in manned and unmanned versions, he says it can do what helicopters do—at a lower cost, in tighter spaces, and without pilots.

This is the original prototype of the Hoverbike, which has two propellers. The current one is a quad-copter with four propellers.

Photograph courtesy Malloy Aeronautics

He declined to give specifics about the project. At the Paris Air Show earlier this month, Maryland Lt. Governor Boyd Rutherford announced that Malloy's company is working to develop the Hoverbike for the U.S. military as a new class of Tactical Reconnaissance Vehicle.

Malloy says he developed the Hoverbike for commercial, not military, use. "We've had lots of people who want to place orders," he says, noting he's not yet taking them. "We don't want to hurry our product into the market."

Technically, he says the company could begin production now, but he needs to do rigorous testing to prove its safety. He expects that could take at least three to five years, and he doesn't have the market to himself.

"We have competitors," he says, noting companies in New Zealand and elsewhere with similar prototypes.

Simpler hovercraft are emerging, too. In California, Greg Henderson has built the Hendo, a hoverboard that he says uses one fourth as much energy as a helicopter to lift the same weight. (Find out what it's like to ride one.) In October, his company Arx Pax plans to debut a new version that's smaller, lighter, and more powerful.

The story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

On Twitter: Follow Wendy Koch and get more environment and energy coverage at NatGeoEnergy.

Source: Could Flying Bikes, Cars Be Next? Toyota and U.S. Army Explore

People Still Insist This Flying Car Will Arrive By 2017, Despite Crash

Another day, another promise that flying cars are just over the horizon. It's like that movie Groundhog Day except Bill Murray's character wakes up once every six months to a new world where he's completely forgotten the media's promises of flying cars from six months ago.

From WGBH:

You are now living in the future.

No, it's not because you have access to the entire world's knowledge via a phone in your pocket. And it's not because of virtual reality, or the 3D printing craze.

The future is here because, in 2017, you'll be able to buy a flying car. Seriously.

Stop it. Just stop it. Your flying car is not coming by 2017. Even if we generously describe the AeroMobil as a flying car, it still hasn't even gotten approval from the FAA. I don't know how many times I have to write this post.

The funniest part about the WGBH writer's bizarre claim is that he discounts that whole "entire world's knowledge via a phone in your pocket." That's actually the future part, guy!

He's absolutely right that we're living in the future. Well, somebody's future at least. But it's not because so-called flying cars are on the horizon. They're not. They don't make any fucking sense. Stop saying that they're a symbol of the "real" future. I realize that flying cars have been promised to Americans for a century. But we need to stop fetishizing this one symbol as the only true barometer of future-ness.

You want to see what AeroMobil's flying car looked like in May?

Yep. It crashed. Because that's what flying cars do. And that's okay! Experiments crash.

But that's not the lone reason that this flying car isn't coming to showrooms by 2017.

We've actually had flying cars for decades. But nobody wants them. At least not in the form and price that all these companies like AeroMobil are trying out. We know how to make an airplane that also drives. We have for a while now. It isn't a question of technological breakthrough when it comes to the AeroMobil. It's a question of practicality—these vehicles need plenty of space to take-off and land, for example, and cost far more than even a luxury car.

Until we have affordable, driverless vertical take-off and landing vehicles, the flying car will remain a dream for the vast majority of humans on this Earth. And that's okay. I just ask that you stop telling me that these flying cars are two years away. If I'm wrong, I will literally eat the sun.

Source: People Still Insist This Flying Car Will Arrive By 2017, Despite Crash

'Back to the Future' hoverboard comes to life

The future is here already -- or at least the one imagined for Marty McFly -- with a carmaker unveiling a real, working hoverboard, like that used in the "Back To The Future" film franchise.

Toyota's luxury car brand Lexus says it has created a prototype that glides frictionlessly just above the ground with technology similar to that used in so-called maglev trains.

A teaser video posted online appears to show the hoverboard floating, although the sequence ends before a skateboarder actually begins to ride it.

While the hoverboard Michael J. Fox's character rides in "Back To The Future II" floats above anything -- except water -- the Lexus model requires magnets to be embedded in the ground, limiting its range to special tracks.

The project is "the perfect example of the amazing things that can be achieved when you combine technology, design and imagination," said Mark Templin, executive vice president at Lexus International.

Testing will take place in Barcelona, Spain "over the coming weeks until summer 2015," the company said.

A US team last year unveiled what they said was a working hoverboard, funded through the Kickstarter crowdfunding website.

Japan has expertise in magnetic levitation technology, which uses electrically charged magnets to propel vehicles along.

Central Japan Railway is aiming to put a superfast maglev train into operation in 2027.

The state-of-the-art train clocked a new world speed record in April in a test run near Mount Fuji, smashing through the 600 kilometre (373 miles) per hour mark.

The maglev hovers 10 centimetres (four inches) above the tracks.

According to Bloomberg News, Toyota has previously indicated it is working on maglev for cars.

"It's very confidential information but we have been studying the flying car in our most advanced (research and development) area," Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, a managing officer in Toyota's Technical Administration Group, said in June 2014.

"Flying car means the car is just a little bit away from the road, so it doesn't have any friction or resistance from the road," he was quoted as saying.

Lexus says it will reveal more details about its hoverboard on October 21, 2015, the day Doc, Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer plug into their DeLorean time machine and go back to the future.

The video can be seen here: http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7556151-lexus-creates-hoverboard-of-future/

Source: 'Back to the Future' hoverboard comes to life

Lexus Announces Creation of a Working Hoverboard—and Zoe Saldana Is Ready to Ride!

Back to the Future II called, and Lexus answered.

It's not April Fools, so we'll just have to take the Toyota-owned luxury automaker's word for it, that they have created a real, working hoverboard, called "Slide."

A skateboard that flies, people!

"There is no such thing as impossible," Lexus chief engineer Haruhiko Tanahashi is quoted in a pretty damn fly (yes, as in Marty McFLY) promo video touting the new technology. "It's just a matter of figuring out how."

The video then ends with the guy who was riding a regular skateboard a moment ago placing his skater-shoe-clad foot on the levitating board, joined by the hashtag #LexusHover.

Too cool to be true?

PHOTOS: Stars in eco-friendly cars

Well, according to Popular Science and likeminded publications, this could be the real deal.

The technology is out there, and Lexus said on its website that their board, crafted with natural bamboo, hovers thanks to magnets and liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors.

"It's the perfect example of the amazing things that can be achieved when you combine technology, design and imagination," said Mark Templin, executive VP of Lexus International.

"It's very confidential information but we have been studying the flying car in our most advanced R&D area," Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, a managing officer in Toyota's Technical Administration Group, said at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit in Sausalito, Calif., a year ago. "Flying car means the car is just a little bit away from the road, so it doesn't have any friction or resistance from the road."

And you can bet a few celebs are excited.

"If this is real I'm going to need a coach—Jason Scott Lee or Greg Lutzka could one of you guys help?," Zoe Saldana wrote on Facebook, figuring a martial arts specialist and a professional skateboarder can help her get her bearings.

Alas, you can't buy one (or even pre-order) just, yet, but Lexus says that the prototype is going to be tested out in Barcelona in coming weeks and more info will be available later this year.

Maybe the Future really is now.

PHOTOS: Tech-savvy celebs

RELATED VIDEOS:

Source: Lexus Announces Creation of a Working Hoverboard—and Zoe Saldana Is Ready to Ride!

Daring Sci-Fi Drama 'Advantageous' Asks How Much Society Can Demand of Women

Courtesy Good Neighbors Media

Forget the sleek skyscrapers, flying cars, or holo-phone tech. What you really need to know about the near future of Jennifer Phang's daring and accomplished science fiction drama Advantageous comes from what a mother and daughter overhear in their cramped, stubbornly un-futuristic apartment. Somewhere, there's a woman crying, and the daughter places her head to the floor, listening. The mother asks, "Upstairs or downstairs?"

Will she submit to the Center's daring new de-aging procedure?

"Both," the daughter says.

So it goes for the un-wealthy — and aging — women in Phang's future. (The script is by Jacqueline Kim, who plays the lead, and Phang herself.) That mom, Gwen Koh (Kim), is an underpaid public face for the Center for Advanced Health and Living, one of those big companies with an aggressively nonthreatening name that so much S-F plotting depends upon. She's had the gig long enough that the company's noticed that that face of hers isn't exactly as it used to be, so they're looking for a younger model. Meanwhile, Gwen's adolescent daughter, Jules (Samantha Kim), is at the age to be sent to a pricey private school. That money is due soon, and Gwen can't afford this if she loses her job, which would mean Jules faces a life without "advantage." We know that's a terrible thing because of the film's many examples of economic deprivation: those weeping neighbors, a homeless girl sleeping in the shrubbery outside an office, news reports about teen prostitution.

And Gwen herself, of course. The first half of the film is an inventive, intense study of aging and class struggle in a youthocracy only just a bit more pitiless than ours today. Gwen hustles for job interviews, considers selling her eggs, and, checking the balances in her accounts, has to bark at a robo-banking voice that most desperate of instructions: "Cancel automatic payment."

"I can't let her become one of these women so desperate that they would do anything," Gwen says of her daughter. But, this being an S-F story with a Center for Advanced What-Have-You, Gwen has one terrifying option open to her after exhausting all others. Will she submit to the Center's newest, most daring de-aging procedure — allowing her, if all goes well, to once again be the face the Center desires?

Of course she does. The film's third act centers on an upsetting surprise, a trick of casting certain to shake the audience, a twist that demands we consider just how much beauty-minded societies demand of women.

Structurally, this guarantees that the film fails to satisfy according to the terms of conventional movie storytelling. Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next? Before the big switch, Jules, sensing the pressure her mother is under, straight-up asks why she, the daughter, even exists. It's a tremendous relief that Gwen's answer comes so quickly, and is so persuasive. Later, in that slower, more ruminative ending, her words echo — and prove all the more powerful.

Advantageous

Directed by Jennifer Phang

Film Presence

Opens June 26, Cinema Village

Source: Daring Sci-Fi Drama 'Advantageous' Asks How Much Society Can Demand of Women