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Sunday, May 06, 2012
Volkswagen Levitating Car
The "People’s Car" project allowed Internet users in China to post ideas about cars of the future. From the 119,000 ideas received. three vehicle and technology concepts were produced and are now on display at the 2012 Beijing auto show.
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I took a while to bite...
ReplyDeleteThis ad for VW is something that truly annoys me on the internet.... the "concept" design, based on technology we haven't got, based on mystery and woo-woo. And VW did this same crap before, a year or so back, with a beautifully mocked up cg video of an aquatic VW, submarine-capable, driving up out of the waves.
This thing's less real than Marty McFly's hoverboard in Back to the Future.
Mag-Lev? nope. the levitation's too high, and it would fall sideways off the field. Airjet? No, there's no ducted fan... This implies mag-lev with a vast, but invisible power-source beneath the street. Well, that'sl a technology we don't have, and won't have, ever, because even if we could afford to instal the relevant power coils beneath every street, and even if we found a magic power-source that could power it at a cost we could ever pay, the electro magnetic field would be so powerful that it would stop pacemakers and wipe all the electronic gadgets to which we're addicted. There'd be no cellphones or wifi in Beijing...
And that's just the first few moments of rant as to why I'd like to dump a bowl of cold custard over bald chinese smug guy's head.
Show me a working prototype, a flying bedstead, no matter how crude, and explain how it scales into the real-life product.
Don't show me a cgi animation of something you dreamed but have no idea how to make.
Grrr.
It's the OPPOSITE of how real inventors work, the anime-fantasy school of invention. Abracadabra.
I have always wanted to scoot around a la Jetsons. You have dashed my dreams, Soubriquet!
ReplyDeleteIt works in dreams, use it there. In real life, hover transport will probably remain a dead end at least in my lifetime., vast Mountbatten-Class hovercraft plied the ferry routes across from Britain to France, Ranulph Fiennes led a hover expedition to the source of the nile, Saddam bought some for keeping his marsh-arabs under control, Back in the dayI built a couple and piloted more. They're noisy, blow dust water gravel, whatever, everywhere, are fairly thirsty for fuel, difficult to steer, (they tend just to slide sideways), and very hard to stop quickly. Their best application is over water/marsh/tundra, but they're still full of unresolved, and unlikely to be resolved problems.
ReplyDeleteMr Chinese dreamer shows a world with one in. See how it wobbles and sways in the animation? Guess how many collisions that would lead to in dense beijing style traffic?
But anyway, as I said before, the video points toward magnetic repulsion as the hoversource. Multiple vehicles on one powersource? Ha!
We couldn't even make a working toy that did this.
Hovercraft were born in the optimism of the 1960s, for a while they made headlines