Toyota Investigating Hovercars

cartechboy writes: Remember back in the day when we all thought we'd be driving flying cars in the future? Well that clearly didn't happen, though it still might in the future. But somewhere inside Toyota there's a team of engineers who think hover cars might be a thing, and apparently there's a project underway at one of Toyota's "most advanced" research and development areas. We aren't talking Jetson's flying car, more like a car that merely hovers "a little bit away" from the road. Probably a few inches, with the aim to reduce road friction. With no wings or ridiculous speed, this is probably no simple process. No one really knows how long Toyota has been working on the idea, or how far along it is. Basically, don't expect flying Priuses any time soon...

Comments

Scrapheap Challenge

[invid]

I was going to build one of those after seeing them made on Scrapheap Challenge (aka Junkyard Wars).

Re:Scrapheap Challenge

[VernonNemitz]

There is a new-ish technology out there for making flying machines, and they can be roughly automobile-sized. Perhaps Toyota should consider teaming up with the inventors....

Re:Scrapheap Challenge

[Thud457]

My bet is they're looking at something related to the wing-in-ground effect like the Russians experimented with. So the "car" would only "hover" while in forward motion.

Re:Scrapheap Challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/cyclogyro/cyclogyro.htm

They've been experimenting with cyclogyros roughly since the invention of heavier-than-air flight. I can't say I'm entirely convinced that this "D-Dalus" thing is going to be the version that finally becomes a success.

aka

[GoddersUK]

small hovercraft.

this is probably no simple process

Surely the underlying technology required is essentially what's already been developed for hovercraft, which already come in car sized variants. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be easy to stick a car body on them, develop intuitive controls and stick them on public roads; I'm just not sure the technology is as novel and underdeveloped as the summary makes out.

Re:aka

[CastrTroy]

I'm not sure why a person would want a hovercraft for general use. It's way more efficient to just have car that rolls on wheels. Lifting the entire car off the ground with a cushion of air is terribly inefficient. Not that there aren't any uses at all, but as a general purpose vehicle on public roadways, it seems like a terrible idea.

Re: aka

[jonnyj]

Presumably the hover car would also have wheels. The benefit would come at motorway speed - an incredibly smooth ride with no road noise and, possibly, improved fuel economy. The off road potential of a hover car is also interesting.

Re:aka

[Tx]

The trouble with those car-sized hovercraft is the turning and braking profile, which is nowhere near good enough for public roads designed for cars. Now a design something like the Aero-X hoverbike might be able to improve on that - by hovering a bit higher and tilting the entire craft, you could effectively vector a large proportion of the lift airflow for turning force, as opposed to redirecting a bit of the horizontal thrust only with a fin as with conventional hovercraft. Aerofex don't seem to make any such claims about their design though, they seem to be targeting off-road use only, and I guess turning that way might present problems for other road users/pedestrians getting hit by the airflow.

Re: aka

[Viol8]

Given 95% of resistance at motorway speeds is air resistance, not rolling resistance I'm not entirely sure how having a massive fan to create the lift and another to propel the car is going to improve fuel efficiency given how inefficient propellers are to start with.

Re:aka

[91degrees]

Be useful in places where there aren't really roads. Bet the things work great in deserts. In my experience though, steering is a problem. You can't really steer a hovercraft easily. The rudder does hardly anything.

Re:aka

[necro81]

The problem I see with hovercraft (on the same roads as automobiles) is acceleration. The wheels do a lot more for the car than simply supporting the weight - contact with the road surface is absolutely essential for accelerating forward, braking, turning, and keeping the front of the car pointed in the direction of travel. In a hovercraft, you need some alternate mechanism for that - usually pushing with or against the air (i.e., propellers and fans). How does the performance of those alternate means for acceleration compare to rubber on the road? Without a prototype to examine or independent road tests, one cannot say for sure.

Re: aka

[zAPPzAPP]

And no grip whatsoever in curves. Weeeeeee~

Re: aka

[rmdingler]

Yes.

Unless and until technology emerges that makes defying gravity much more efficient, there is no advantage (outside of the WOW factor) for using these vehicles on the highway.

Off-road applications are a different matter.

Re: aka

[Anonymous Coward]

So, basically anything made by an American car company?

Because those have always sucked at cornering.

Re: aka

[GTRacer]

Ever heard of Chaparral? Their cars /really/ sucked!

Re:aka

[king neckbeard]

I'm not sure why a person would want a hovercraft for general use.

Really? I can see reasons why it could be horribly impractical, but the reason why people would want it is because it's a hovercraft.

Re:aka

[gstoddart]

The problem I see with hovercraft (on the same roads as automobiles) is acceleration.

And braking. And cornering.

Those are really important, and in my (limited) experience with hovercraft, some of their weak points.

That, and going up a hill or dealing with a side slope.

Unless they're using an entirely different technology, I just don't see a hovercraft being a viable replacement for a car.

Re:aka

[fustakrakich]

Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads...

The bright side to a hovercraft is that you don't need to fix the potholes.

Re:aka

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I see with hovercraft (on the same roads as automobiles) is acceleration.

And braking. And cornering.

Those are acceleration as well, just in directions other than forward.

Those are really important, and in my (limited) experience with hovercraft, some of their weak points.

Couldn't agree more...

Re: aka

[Rei]

That's not true. It varies from vehicle to vehicle and between driving profiles, but it's usually 50-75% of the resistance at highway speed coming from aero drag - not 95%. Rolling drag remains a significant loss factor at all speeds.

That said, this doesn't sound to me like the most logical approach to tackle rolling drag - wheels are more efficient than hover as-is in most general-use cases, and I can easily envision a lot more that could be done. For example, you could use very high pressure (120+ psi) tires with a hard, thin central tread, relying on automatic camber to a thick, sticky side tread during accel, braking, cornering, or when traction control kicks in (the additional vibrational load from cruising on high PSI tires could be canceled with, for example, a cable vibration isolation system or active vibration cancellation). Such a system should be able to approach the rolling coefficients of hard steel wheels (a tenth that of traditional car pneumatic tires - effectively rendering rolling losses irrelevant). Heck, if you're going to that extent, it's not much further to go all the way to completely solid wheels (though you'd want foam-core carbon fiber or similar to keep the weight and in particular unsprung mass down, not solid steel) and not even have to deal with tire inflation or puncture risk. So long as you have a way to automatically shift to a thick, sticky tread as needed based on current traction conditions and have a mechanism to soak up the higher vibrational loads to maintain ride quality, you're fine.

Is that a pretty huge deviation from standard practice? Yeah, by no small amount, it's literally reinventing the wheel. But you know what, it's also a pretty huge deviation to have cars outright hover on the highway. ;)

But yeah, you're right in that rolling losses aren't the *primary* loss mechanism on the highway. A lot more has to be done to tackle aero drag, and that's trickier - not least of which because the optimal shape varies based on speed and things like crosswinds (and the more you optimize your shape, the bigger of an issue this becomes). One of the more clever ideas I've seen - I don't know how it'd play out in the real world, mind you - was Aptera's plan to take a page from Gerald Bull's playbook and fill in the low pressure wake with air ducted in through the cabin. There's also a fair bit of research designed for aircraft (where aero drag is an even bigger issue) that could translate to cars, for example, skin textures or microstructures designed to maintain laminar flow or reduce surface drag. One of the more exotic variants of that which I've seen is a taut film outer-layer over a microscopic layer. The film vibrates in the wind between its ridges, setting up standing waves which separate the laminar flow from the surface, reducing the flow speed in contact with the surface and thus reducing direct surface drag. There've been peer-reviewed papers on it, and one of the researchers founded a company that now makes kits to reskin a variety of small aircraft (not very many thusfar, the skin has to be custom designed for each model). That's of course just one example among many, it's a very active field of research, as even a fraction of a percent reduced aero drag on a commercial airplane results in massive fuel savings.

Honestly, I'll be happy if we can just get people's style preferences to shift away from naturally high-drag forms like those ridiculous oversized front-end things where you can barely see over the hood. I know I'm out of the mainstream, but I love the look of aerodyamics. Real aerodynamics, not counterproductive curvy features that a lot of people think are "aerodynamic" but actually raise your drag. I want my car to look like a wingless plane, a car that cuts through the air like a knife rather than a clobbering oaf shoving it all around as it drives by ("Excuse me air, coming through, excuse me, sorry there!"). I want a rounded front end and a rear end that tapers vertically down with as long of a t

Re:aka

[Rei]

My presumption is that they're still using wheels for acceleration. For example, in a front-wheel drive car, you could hover the back wheels, at least until you need traction from them (for example, turning). With a pulse and glide configuration, you could even hover the drive wheels for a good chunk of the time.

Still, I think there's much better options for reducing rolling drag.

Re: aka

[Anonymous Coward]

Try deflating your tyres by 0.4 bar and see what effect it has on your fuel consumption at 70mph. 95% is optimistic unless you just pumped the tyres and you're driving into a strong headwind.

Re:aka

[Fieryphoenix]

Retrorockets.

Re:aka

[drinkypoo]

Be useful in places where there aren't really roads. Bet the things work great in deserts.

Only on the flat. You can't cross dunes in a hovercraft. Nor, in fact, can you take any significant grade, nor can you cross any obstacles which very closely approach the size of the gap between the ground and the hard bottom of the craft. Not the skirts, but the hull itself.

Hovercraft have basically one job, high-speed landing craft.

Re:aka

[Chrisq]

I'm not sure why a person would want a hovercraft for general use. It's way more efficient to just have car that rolls on wheels. Lifting the entire car off the ground with a cushion of air is terribly inefficient. Not that there aren't any uses at all, but as a general purpose vehicle on public roadways, it seems like a terrible idea.

Only for the niche that small hovercraft already fill - smoothly covering various reasonably flat terrains (marsh, road, water, sand, scrub-land, etc)

Re: aka

[drinkypoo]

Off-road applications are a different matter.

Yes. A different matter entirely, as in, hovercars will never be useful in off-road applications. Unless, perhaps, they are antigravity vehicles and they are utterly unconcerned about slopes and grades. You cannot take a hovercraft up a grade of any note. Antique steam trains can ascend a steeper grade.

Re:aka

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on where you live, they're not even legal on the roadways. I know Ontario, Canada, for example, forbids them on any road.

Toyota would have to work hard to convince the government that it will stop on a dime.

Re: aka

[Viol8]

"That's not true. It varies from vehicle to vehicle and between driving profiles, but it's usually 50-75% of the resistance at highway speed coming from aero drag - not 95%."

It very much depends on the speed of the vehicle and its coefficient of drag. Air resistance increases by velocity squared whereas rolling resistance is pretty much constant regardless of speed.

Re: aka

[MightyYar]

Most of our driving is straight-line interstate. The market here values straight-line performance and a smooth ride. I think that without exception, cars with exceptional handling are niche players in the US market, regardless of national origin. Sometimes the EU market screws up our fun, too. For instance, the original Neon - while crappy in almost every way - did pretty well on the autocross circuit because it was so short and fat. However, in their effort to make it a "world car" suitable for narrow EU streets, they slimmed it down and it was upgraded to crappy in every way.

Re:aka

[Ozymandias_KoK]

Gotta have somewhere to put all your eels, you know.

Re: aka

[Rei]

Sort of.

First off, in general to get up to 95%, you're talking "racing supercars" territory. But honestly, not even that (see below).

Secondly, the aero and rolling drag equations (in particular, rolling) are just approximations, along the lines of "assume a spherical cow". The real-world deviation from the formulas is usually described as changing drag coefficients under different conditions, but in the case of rolling drag, it changes so much at high speeds due to increasing magnitude standing waves on the tires (greater rubber flex) that it's better to add into the modeling a nonlinear component; it's not at all accurate to say that it's "pretty much constant". If you don't at least use a piecewise formula for the rolling coefficient in your vehicle energy consumption calculations, you get results that are way off.

In practice, even at supercar speeds, you'll never get up to that mythical 95% aero drag. Rolling drag is also greatly affected by a number of other properties besides velocity, including road surface, tire pressure, tire temperature (rolling resistance drops as you drive as the internal pressure rises), and road condition (contrary to popular myth, in light rain conditions, the main increase in rolling drag is due to tire cooling, not due to pushing water out of the way).

Oh, and I've neglected to mention thusfar parasitic / operating losses as another vehicle energy loss mechanism, which also play a role (usually small, but sadly growing), which makes it even harder to have aero be such an overwhelming percentage of the picture as was previously claimed. (there's also braking losses, but they're primarily an in-town thing)

Re: aka

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The tire idea is interesting, but I would think it would be easier to auto adjust the pressure so that the tire was either riding on the hard rubber strip in the middle (high pressure), or riding on the softer rubber on the rest of the tire (lower pressure). It seems like a better system than adjusting camber angles.

Re:aka

[ColdWetDog]

Although something that runs along water and would somehow work on highways would be an interesting, albeit small niche market and likely not anything that Toyota would care about. I'd love one. A local cruise operator actually has a commercial hovercraft that they had hoped to used as an inter island ferry, except that it wasn't terribly reliable and was a cast iron bitch to tow back to port.

Re:aka

[91degrees]

There was a hovercraft service running between France and England for a few decades. Rathertoo noisy to be particularly popular but they did manage the journey in considerably less than half the time of the ferry.

Re: aka

[Anonymous Coward]

The absence of road noise would be slim comfort when you're sitting on a giant noisy fan blowing air down to create lift.

Re:aka

[Rei]

Oh, and just an additional comment, from my past experience in the auto industry: this wasn't an "oops, I wasn't supposed to say that!" remark. The Japanese companies are in general very good at controlling information flow; this was clearly planned for him to say that. But the reason he said it was almost certainly not to prepare people for the coming day of flying cars; it's about perception. It's a major brand positive for an auto maker to be perceived as high tech / cutting edge / innovative, and they want to culture that.

Remember Rick Wagoner, the guy whose tenure at GM made a graph of the company's stock look like a double diamond ski slope? Of all of the things that he could have regretted, he's stated that the number one thing he regrets was axing the EV1 (late 90s electric car) program. The EV1 lost tens of thousands of dollars per unit and there weren't many made so there was major overhead on top of it; but by axing the program to save a little money, they willingly gave up the perception of being a tech innovator, right at the time the Japanese companies were introducing hybrids. Even to people who weren't considering buying a Prius or Insight - aka, the vast majority of consumers - the very perception that Toyota and Honda appeared to be high-tech innovators demonstrably influenced consumer buying decisions.

Car makers have slick PR teams who survey and carefully try to manipulate the public perceptions about themselves to influence buyer behavior. Expect that the decision to mention this came straight from one of them.

Re: aka

[Grishnakh]

Honestly, I'll be happy if we can just get people's style preferences to shift away from naturally high-drag forms like those ridiculous oversized front-end things where you can barely see over the hood.

Part of the reason cars still look like this is for crash protection. Even mid-engine cars like Ferraris, as well as Teslas which have the motor in the back and batteries on the bottom, have long hoods, for crash protection. If you stick the passengers at the front of the car, you'll have no crumple zone and therefore no survivability in the event of a frontal crash.

If you want to see a vehicle with REAL aerodynamics, check out SkyTran PRT. Since these vehicles are designed for maximal efficiency, and don't have to worry much about crashes since they're on rails, the people pods are designed for optimal aerodynamics.

Re: aka

[Anonymous Coward]

There are virtually no interstates that are "straight line" (I think Alligator Alley in Florida might be an exception but...), and that's intentional: road designers intentionally place a curve every few thousand feet to prevent driving becoming too monotonous. With long distance driving especially, monotonous can be deadly.

Re: aka

[markhb]

What about off-solid-ground applications, where they are already used? I have an actual use case in mind for a hover vehicle similar to a DUKW, where it could go into hovercraft mode over water that is too shallow to use conventional craft mode, but with a bottom too shallow to use the tires.

However, the on-road applications face another stumbling block: the laws in my US state (and likely most if not all of the others) require all vehicles used on public roads to be exclusively propelled by means of power-driven wheels in physical contact with the pavement. No hovercraft, no strapping a jet turbine to the roof and throwing it in neutral.

Re: aka

[MightyYar]

By "straight line", I mean you don't need any real cornering ability.

Re: aka

[Rei]

It could be (though that would have engineering challenges of its own, and not just noise minimization), but remember that compressing air is a rather lossy process. If you're rapidly dropping the pressure, say from 120psi to 20psi then back, every time you need traction, you're going to lose an awful lot of energy doing so.

Given that increased camber is often a good thing when cornering, and that there's no inherent physical loss mechanism in changing camber, and your required hardware to do so isn't particularly onerous, that's why I mentioned that particular possibility. But overall, that was just an example; the key point is, there's an order of magnitude difference in rolling coefficients between today's car tires and that of rigid wheels**. If you can get rid of all of the compression/flex in your general-use case, and only add it in when you need the additional traction, and make use of a vibration isolation or active cancellation system to maintain ride quality, you could virtually take rolling losses out of the picture.

** - I should clarify that when I say "rigid wheels" perform an order of magnitude better, I don't simply mean "anything non-pneumatic", but rigid to the degree of train wheels or ball bearings. For example, in wheelchairs, pneumatic tires often actually have *lower* rolling losses than "rigid" wheelchair wheels; the latter flex too much and thus lose more energy in the process than their pneumatic equivalents. It's not the use of air that's the problem, it's the repeated bending of material, turning your kinetic energy to heat. To achieve dramatic improvements in rolling coefficients over conventional tires, a rigid wheel needs to offer dramatically less flexure than its equivalent tire as it rotates. But it also has to be lightweight to minimize total mass and in particular unsprung mass. Hence the suggestion of carbon fiber / foam core wheels; I would expect such wheels to be able to meet that kind of spec if built well enough. But who knows without experimentation...

It's also a fair criticism that once you start going for such extreme rolling drag reductions, imperfections in your road surface are going to have an increasingly large impact on your achieved rolling coefficient.

Re:aka

[Anonymous Coward]

small hovercraft.

this is probably no simple process

Surely the underlying technology required is essentially what's already been developed for hovercraft, which already come in car sized variants. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be easy to stick a car body on them, develop intuitive controls and stick them on public roads; I'm just not sure the technology is as novel and underdeveloped as the summary makes out.

Yeah, and Toyota isn't sure, either. That is why they are investigating. They are trying to determine if there is potential for improvement. Nobobdy said they were in production yet.

Re: aka

[Rei]

I'm not talking about a long hood so much as a tall hood relative to the rest of the vehicle - the car starts, then suddenly it's nearly as tall as the roof. Example: here's the concept mode for the Chevy Volt. I took one look at it and smacked my head, anyone who knows aerodynamics can see that that thing is going to have the aerodynamics of a rolling brick (spoiler: that's a whopping 0,43 drag coefficient on a supposedly "efficient" car!). Nobody should have been the least bit surprised when it changed dramatically going from concept to production. Yet that concept look is supposed to mimic the look of a "chopped" car (despite not reducing the frontal profile) and thus be "sexy", "muscular-looking" and desireable. It just ruins it for me. I know that I'm weird in being turned off from a car by seeing its awful aerodynamics.

Basically, there's no reason that your "long hood" has to quickly flare to full width/height in the front, then remain relatively constant height up to the windshield. That's highly suboptimal for aerodynamics and achieves nothing in terms of giving you a long distance to decelerate in. The optimal aerodynamic front end is roughly elongated-egg shaped.

Beyond that, you don't need a long hood at all, either, for crash protection, just a long deceleration distance. Hood length and deceleration distance, though related, are not equivalent. One factor, for example, is where the driver / passenger are located inside the vehicle. If you have a highly raked windshield (optimal aerodynamics) then the driver and passenger have to be located a bit further back from the front of the car for headroom reasons, so there's still plenty of room ahead of them to the foremost point on the vehicle. Also at play is how the vehicle deflects force in an accident - whether it crumples straight back or whether the nose rides up during a collision (the latter gives extra deceleration distance). A greater rake on the windshield also decreases the chance of windshield penetration.

It should also be pointed out that such a design also enhances pedestrian safety in a number of respects. The lack of an abrupt flare means a pedestrian is more likely to be hit at an angle and accelerated over a greater length of time (reduced G-forces). The matching rake between the hood and windshield additionally means they're not going to suddenly decelerate at the windshield. To be fair, of course, some pedestrial-safety features, such as low bumpers, run counter to aerodynamics.

As for that SkyTran PRT: Judging from the image on the cover, it looks like a reasonably good shape up front, but the rear end sucks. Contrary to popular misconception, it is *not* good to have a rounded rear end. Once your angle gets too steep, the flow will detach from your vehicle, leaving a low pressure wake. You want to not exceed the critical angle (aka, use a roughly constant taper angle) and prolong the detachment as long as you can (aka, as gentle of a taper as your design parameters allow), and when you can't delay the detachment any more, you want a relatively abrupt cutoff, potentially with a vortex generator to draw down the stream. The actual details vary depending on the situation, and one always needs to do CFD work, but that's a rough "in general" for aerodynamic optimization

Update: I searched more and found some rather different looking PRT images. These are of an excellent aerodynamic form, with an appropriate taper in back (though I personally prefer a vertical taper to a horizontal taper for cars... theirs makes sense for their particular application, however). I'd be willing to wager that their cover image was an early artistic concept, while the latter was something they actually did CFD work on.

Re:aka

[dj245]

Oh, and just an additional comment, from my past experience in the auto industry: this wasn't an "oops, I wasn't supposed to say that!" remark. The Japanese companies are in general very good at controlling information flow; this was clearly planned for him to say that. But the reason he said it was almost certainly not to prepare people for the coming day of flying cars; it's about perception. It's a major brand positive for an auto maker to be perceived as high tech / cutting edge / innovative, and they want to culture that.

Remember Rick Wagoner, the guy whose tenure at GM made a graph of the company's stock look like a double diamond ski slope? Of all of the things that he could have regretted, he's stated that the number one thing he regrets was axing the EV1 (late 90s electric car) program. The EV1 lost tens of thousands of dollars per unit and there weren't many made so there was major overhead on top of it; but by axing the program to save a little money, they willingly gave up the perception of being a tech innovator, right at the time the Japanese companies were introducing hybrids. Even to people who weren't considering buying a Prius or Insight - aka, the vast majority of consumers - the very perception that Toyota and Honda appeared to be high-tech innovators demonstrably influenced consumer buying decisions.

Car makers have slick PR teams who survey and carefully try to manipulate the public perceptions about themselves to influence buyer behavior. Expect that the decision to mention this came straight from one of them.

Yes, but companies kill various programs all the time. Even Toyota and Honda have introduced various electric cars, fuel-cell cars, natural gas cars, etc for lease and axed them just as quickly. Heck, Honda even repo'd the EV Plus and crushed the cars just like the EV1. Usually this happens without incident. The only thing unique about the EV1 is the almost cult-like following that it appeared to generate. This really appeared only after the program was canceled. It would be unreasonable to say that the manager who killed the program made a mistake. The backlash couldn't have been reasonably foreseeable given all the other programs that car companies cancel without incident all the time. Only in hindsight can we say that the canceling of the EV1 was a bad idea for GM. "Don't kill experimental programs or the public will be angry" is the wrong conclusion to arrive at with this case. The correct conclusion is to do all experimenting with new vehicle types on fleet customers or government customers, and not the general public.

Re: aka

[Grishnakh]

Here's a picture of an actual prototype SkyTran car. You're probably right; those first pictures were just early artistic concepts. Here's another. They're building this system now in Tel Aviv.

As for all your stuff about cars, do you have any examples of cars which are decent aerodynamically, and not just infeasible prototypes and concepts?

Re: aka

[rogoshen1]

In my limited experience, i-80 through wyoming is pretty much dead straight, as is i-84 from about... Condon to Pendleton (oregon)
Slashdot: where pedantry goes to thrive!

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

And the waves in water would sink this type of hovercraft.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

http://i.stack.imgur.com/PKkDf...

I couldn't find the source for that data, but it does look like 50-75% is more accurate than 95%.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

remember that compressing air is a rather lossy process.

In an open system, yes. In a closed system, no.

You are assuming the worst possible implementation for anything that doesn't directly agree with you, and the best possible implementation for things that agree with you. It's a form of confirmation bias, and it makes for an unfair evaluation of the ideas of others.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

There's almost nothing on there about the shape of the pods, and in fact, the renderings look different on different pages.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

. If you have a highly raked windshield (optimal aerodynamics) then the driver and passenger have to be located a bit further back from the front of the car for headroom reasons, so there's still plenty of room ahead of them to the foremost point on the vehicle.

But the long windshield makes for bad UI. How do you clean the small angle where the dash and windscreen meet? What is the effect at night, since you are looking through more glass and at a more distorting angle? Extending the A-pillar along your raked windshield makes it almost worthless for rollover protection.

Aerodynamics maybe your "favorite" design constraint, but it's far from the only one.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

They weren't an American "car" comany, but an American "racing" company. You might as well have said "Carroll Shelby is a good American car company."

Re:aka

[Rei]

The EV1 was indisputably both the most advanced and most popular electric offering at the time, and most critically, they basically gutted all similar research and sold off their patents, not even pursuing hybrids. Their selling off of the patent rights also made it impossible for several other companies to have continued their EVs even if they had wanted to. GM was also the most active and public of companies trying to kill off the ZEV mandate. So all together, it's not surprising that they earned the lion's share of the puiblic scorn on that one. The next most popular of the ZEV-mandate EVs, the RAV4 EV, wasn't taken away from its owners, and for a decade the few that remained were the best EVs available on the market and commanded ridiculous prices relative to their age and hardware specs. The Ford Ranger EV was pretty primitive, and they too were willing to sell to owners.

The EV1 really was an amazingly advance vehicle for its age. It was one of the first aluminum-framed production cars from a major automaker. It had a then-recod low drag coefficient of 0,19 *and* a very low cross-section, something aero-lovers like me adore. It was so streamlined that a prototype that GM re-geared but otherwise used the same chassis and drivetrain hit 183 mph. The drivetrain was miles ahead of its competitors, a highly efficient AC inductive motor that could handle both accel and charging from the same system; the drivetrain of the Tesla Roadster is a direct descendant (Impact -> EV1 -> tzero -> Roadster). The EV1 had all sorts of features that are now common but were rare or unique at the time, including a control computer that could be programmed to do scheduled tasks, for example, to preheat/cool the vehicle at a scheduled interval. Speaking of climate control, the EV1's was more advanced than that of most EVs today, using a bidirectional heat pump for both heating and cooling along with waste heat recovery, with heat augmented by a resistive heater.

While it was out there, GM wanted the public quiet involved with the EV1. They plugged it in ads, using it as a "look at us, we're high tech" vehicle. But they never wanted to have to build it in the first place, and they seriously bungled the PR during the termination. When the guy who ordered its termination called it his biggest mistake, the guy who presided over GM during its march to bankruptcy, that's a major statement.

Re:aka

[AK Marc]

TFA doesn't claim "hovercraft" That's editorial. What would happen if you found a way to duct air under the tires? Have them lifted 1mm off the ground by a thin layer of air. Part of braking or any other maneuver would be to cut the air, and the tire is then in contact again. The tire still bears 100% of the car weight, but has no contact with the road while under certain cruising conditions.

The "announcement" is overblown from a throw away comment with no detail or follow-up. No official press release, just a comment by an engineer about some of the "cool stuff" they are investigating (not making, not prototyping, just thinking about).

Perhaps the engineer was even flat out wrong. I could claim the same thing he claimed if I worked out a lift system that, as the car approached the road, the lift on the car increased. Then lower the suspension to the point the normal force decreased by 90%. You'd lose 90% of your handling, but that wouldn't matter, as long as you were cruising. And it'd be "cruising" on a cushion of air more than the tires.

Given his statement, I can see 100 different solutions that are all better than "hovercar".

Unless they are looking into powered roadways and mag-lev powered hover cars for freeway cruising, but that'd be massive infrastructure build, and the car would be trivial, once the roads are done.

Re:aka

[AK Marc]

Perhaps he was supposed to mention work reducing rolling resistance through lift on the car body, but he wasn't supposed to make it sound like a hovercraft?

Re: aka

[Grishnakh]

Please see my other post in this thread.

Re: aka

[Grishnakh]

Lots of cars these days have highly-raked windshields. Optical distortion and rollover protection don't seem to be a problem for them.

Re: aka

[Rei]

Well, one of the most extreme examples was the "car" I was on the waiting list for, Aptera's 2e, which was about 2 months away (I have their old internal corporate schedules and checklists) from shipping to customers when the board brought in Paul Wilbur to manage the company. Wilbur is a Detroit car exec who had ran one company into the ground after the next; the first thing he did after taking over the company was order a redesign nearly the whole vehicle trying to "mainstream it". The changes ruined the vehicle and he burned through all the company's money in short order (including taking a large salary for himself), bankrupting it. Yes, I'm still bitter over that.

( And yes, I fully realize that I vehicle *that* streamlined isn't for everyone ;) )

For cars that have shipped in some degree of volume, the EV1 really stands out. While both with less interior room and higher drag than the Aptera Mk1, it still sported an impressive 0,19 drag coefficient and 0,36m^2 frontal area. About 1500 were made. Another low volume but from way back was the Tatra 77, with a drag coefficient of 0.212. Not bad for 1935! The Mercedes CLA has a drag coefficient of 0,22; I'm not sure of the volume. The Tesla Model S's drag coefficient is 0,24; it's new but they've already delivered tens of thousands. The first-gen insight (what I drive) was 0,25; there were 17k sold. However, also at 0,25 are the Sonata Hybrid, the Audi A2, the Lexus LS 430, the Pugeot 508, and the Toyota Prius. So all together you've got millions of those.

Now, a lot of those aren't low in frontal area, just drag coefficient. But frontal area is something that also provides benefits (interior room); a high drag coefficient doesn't provide benefits, so reducing that figure matters the most.

Re: aka

[Rei]

Oh, forgot to mention - Aptera 2e's drag coefficient was 0,15. It could cruise at a steady 55mph on 80Wh/mi, a bit more than the power of two blow driers.

Re: aka

[Rei]

No, it simply is lossy, period. Air compressors are geneally at 10-20% efficienct, usually under 15% for small one. To get any sort of significant improvement on that you have to add in one or more bulky waste heat recovery cycles (yes, thermal engines), which are limited by Carnot's law, which dramatically limits your recovery potential.

It's not "confirmation bias", it's a fact; air compression is a highly lossy process. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else who has experience with compressors. Or just google it.

I'm sorry if you don't like the fact that your proposed solution is vastly inefficient. But it IS vastly inefficient.

Re: aka

[Rei]

How do you clean the small angle where the dash and windscreen meet?

You angle the dash up to the windshield. Nobody says the dash has to meet the windshield at the same angle the windshield is raked at.

What is the effect at night, since you are looking through more glass and at a more distorting angle?

My rear window on my Insight is even more raked than the optimal front window on a streamliner, there's no distortion.

Extending the A-pillar along your raked windshield makes it almost worthless for rollover protection.

How on earth are you coming up with that one? The elongated egg-shape of the front end of a streamliner is one of the strongest shapes in nature, and the A-pillars follow the shape. The Aptera 2e had a 4,5x higher roof crush strength than the federal car mandate - a much more impressive figure than their door crush strength, which was only about 2x the federal car mandate.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

You angle the dash up to the windshield.

in practice, that reduces visibility.

The elongated egg-shape of the front end of a streamliner is one of the strongest shapes in nature, and the A-pillars follow the shape.

No, it's not. When they build buildings and want the strongest foundation, they use straight vertical piers. Not elongated curves. Because curves are weak, and vertical strength is higher than lateral.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

It's not "confirmation bias", it's a fact; air compression is a highly lossy process.

So tying two balloons together (so air can pass) and squeezing one to move air into the other is a lossy process?

No, you are so obsessed with being right that you stopped thinking. Take a deep breath and try again.

I'm sorry if you don't like the fact that your proposed solution is vastly inefficient. But it IS vastly inefficient.

What proposed idea? I didn't "propose" anything. I simply pointed out that your incorrect assumptions about compression were incorrect.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

They are. That you didn't work on the design team doesn't mean they didn't have to work on it.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

I did, but only after I posted this on based on the content on the initial link.

Re: aka

[Rei]

So tying two balloons together (so air can pass) and squeezing one to move air into the other is a lossy process?

Are you talking about two pressurized or unpressurized balloons where you're creating a tiny pressure differential between them? Because it's the act of increasing the pressure that's the highly lossy process. And your ballons are never going to flow from low pressure to high.

No, you are so obsessed with being right that you stopped thinking.

How about instead of dancing around the topic, if you think I'm misunderstanding what you're envisioning, you actually describe in detail what you're envisioning? I'm just simply telling you, if you're compressing a gas, it doesn't matter if you're recovering or storing energy during the decompression, the compression itself is highly lossy. You can recover 100% of the stored energy of the compressed air and it still leaves you with major energy losses.

Describe how you're getting the tires back up to 120+ psi.

Re: aka

[Rei]

in practice, that reduces visibility.

In no manner does that reduce visibility. I can't even envision how you're imagining that that reduces visibility. Some car dashes are level, some slope up, some slope down, this isn't at all radical. You have your dash begin below the windshield and intercept it at an upwards angle, just like is done in thousands of cars already.

No, it's not. When they build buildings and want the strongest foundation, they use straight vertical piers

No, in general, the strongest shape for a building for a given amount of material is an arch in the 2 dimensional case, a vault in the 3 dimensional case. For overall loadbearing of an evenly-spread load, the strongest shape (in terms of minimizing bending forces) is a parabolic dome, which reduces bending stresses to zero and maintains a purely compressive load, which is generally much easier to withstand. Modern buildings use straight lines to minimize their footprints, not because they're stronger. Seriously, have you ever looked at the shapes people had to use to build large buildings before the advent of modern materials? Hint: they're not big boxes.

The more your interior structure is solid - aka, if you have an internal skeleton - the less important an arched / vaulted structure is, as you have a more even distribution of lateral forces. On the other hand, if you have a large interior space supported entirely by its exterior, it's very hard *not* to use large arches / vaults, even when dealing with modern building materials (think it's a coincidence that very large enclosed sports stadiums are domed?). And guess what? Cars are a large interior space supported entirely by its exterior, using as little material as you can get away with.

Re:aka

[mjwx]

I'm not sure why a person would want a hovercraft for general use. It's way more efficient to just have car that rolls on wheels. Lifting the entire car off the ground with a cushion of air is terribly inefficient. Not that there aren't any uses at all, but as a general purpose vehicle on public roadways, it seems like a terrible idea.

As Top Gear proved many years ago with their hovervan, they aren't terribly practical, are very difficult to drive and somewhat prone to sinking when driven by Jeremy.

Re: aka

[mjwx]

What about off-solid-ground applications, where they are already used? I have an actual use case in mind for a hover vehicle similar to a DUKW, where it could go into hovercraft mode over water that is too shallow to use conventional craft mode, but with a bottom too shallow to use the tires.

The problem is, hovercraft aren't very practical and are very difficult to control. It's much easier to make a vehicle into a part time boat than it is to make it into a part time hovercraft and much more practical.

Top Gear proved this, their Hovervan had trouble making it up the Themes, their Toyboata on the other hand made it from Dover to Calais in an afternoon.

Re: aka

[mjwx]

Most of our driving is straight-line interstate.

It should be pointed out the US has some fantastic roads for drivers. Around Big Sur on Highway 1 in California, hairpins and corners galore. I hired a Mustang and regretted it, not only is it terrible at cornering, the back end is terrible at not sliding out. I drive a Nissan Silvia S15, a car designed for drifting in the 90's and you can keep the back end in line a lot easier. To go back down Highway 1 I'd pick a car that had some decent cornering abilities because there are some fantastic corners to throw it round... If you dont get stuck behind a mum-tank (SUV).

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

I'm just simply telling you, if you're compressing a gas, it doesn't matter if you're recovering or storing energy during the decompression, the compression itself is highly lossy

And I'm telling you that you are wrong.

You refuse to listen. You can lead a horse to a book, but you can't make him read it.

What's the loss in compressing air in a sealed piston? Take a car engine. Seal every chamber 100% perfect. eliminate friction. Then turn the crank. As you compress it, you "lose" nothing, and as you turn the crank more, you uncompress it, losing nothing. Then it goes around and around. You can compress it an infinite number of times without losing anything.

Air in a sealed system becomes a spring, not a loss. You don't understand "open system" and "closed system".

Describe how you're getting the tires back up to 120+ psi.

You object on a theoretical basis, so the implementation doesn't matter until you learn basic physics. Let me know when that's done, and we can move on to basic engineering. You obviously have no grasp of either.

Re: aka

[MightyYar]

If you dont get stuck behind a mum-tank (SUV).

And that's the trick. Most of the time you are on the road to go somewhere, and those somewheres usually have other people going to them. The rare fun, twisty road is a lot less fun when stuck in traffic.

Re: aka

[Rei]

You refuse to listen

It's hard to listen when, up until your last post, you weren't talking. "No, you're not understanding what I'm picturing" is not a criticism until you actually state what you're picturing.

What's the loss in compressing air in a sealed piston?

It depends on the rate of heat flow. The act of compressing or decompressing 6x or more produces a great amount of heat. This flows into the walls of your container, trying to equalize with the ambient temperature.

Applying this to your tire example, we consider two reservoirs, one the tires and one an extra temporary storage tank. Since volume remains constant (isovolumetric process) and pressure increases 6x, under the ideal gas law temperature of the working gas increases 6x inside the temporary reservoir and decreases 6x inside the tires. Assuming no heat transfer, that's down to a chilly 50K in the tires and a burning 1800K in the cylinder. This, of course, doesn't happen in the real world, because with these temperature differentials with the outside world, you experience rapid heat flow to equalize with the surroundings. And there's no shortage of time for this equalization to occur (while you can insulate your gas reservoir, you can't practically insulate your tires). A typical acceleration or deceleration profile will be on the order of 10-20 seconds. How well do you think the gas inside the tires would remain at 50K over a 20 second interval versus rubber that's even hotter than ambient air? In practice, the heat from the air in the tires will almost completely equalize with its surroundings. As the temperatures equalize, the pressure rises in the tires and falls in the reservoir, depleting the pressure differential that the system is counting on to put the air back into the tires.

Now, I would be curious as to your counter to this, except...

You object on a theoretical basis, so the implementation doesn't matter until you learn basic physics. Let me know when that's done

Let me know when you decide to stop being an asshole when discussing things on the net.

Re: aka

[AK Marc]

It depends on the rate of heat flow.

Yes, and for practical exercises, it rounds to zero. (and I knew that one, and was going to put in something like "perfect insulator" or such, but wanted to give you something mostly irrelevant to fixate on, and yes, you passed the asshole test)

Air is a lossless spring (at least in theory). Even throwing in "worst case" heat loss and such, still much much better than your 10% figure.

Let me know when you decide to stop being an asshole when discussing things on the net.

As soon as the people who are wrong stop being jackasses about it. How about you? When are you planning on stopping your assholeness?

Re: aka

[AmiMoJo]

Actually the highway is the best place for a hovercar, assuming the hovering is some form of magnetic levitation. Imagine being able to roll your car onto a maglev track and zoom down it at 500kph+, like a maglev train can.

This strikes me as one of those lame lost-in-translation stories. If it's anything I'd bet it's a maglev lane for motorways. Not a 500kph lane, but a highly efficient electrically powered lane.

Re: aka

[GTRacer]

lol - 10 points to Pedant House ^^

Still, have you seen a 2J? Crazy ground-effect sucker car. More downforce than weight. Fairly unreliable. Amazingly inventive tho'!

Re: aka

[dave420]

Your balloon analogy is wrong. It shows what he's saying is true.

Awesome military applications

[Anonymous Coward]

e.g.:

hovercar + unintended acceleration => cruise missile

Priuses?

[sanosuke001]

The plural of Prius should be Priora if you're going latin; Priuses just sounds dumb.

Re:Priuses?

[skovnymfe]

But this isn't Latin. This.. is.. English!

Re:Priuses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb or not, English doesn't consistently adopt the grammar of loanwords. You aren't even a real grammar Nazi.

Re:Priuses?

[sanosuke001]

It still sounds ridiculous.

Re: Priuses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be Grammar Nazi?

Re:Priuses?

[Deadstick]

At least give him some credit for not saying it should be Prii, as if "-i" were a universal Latin plural for "-us".

Buddy of mine went to the U of Miami where the Marine Biology Dept was always irritated by that. They used to rail against "octopi" for "octopus".

Re:Priuses?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Priora" wouldn't even be a consistent adoption of Latin grammar since it's only nominative and accusative.

Re:Priuses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what do you expect from a language where you (unsuccessfully) try to use French pronunciation on a Germanic base?
Trying to make English sound non-ridiculous isn't going to work.

Re:Priuses?

[JazzLad]

So they should be Priopedes?

Re:Priuses?

[fuzznutz]

So they should be Priopedes?

How about Priaprism?

Re:Priuses?

[Grishnakh]

We just need to go back to Anglo-Saxon Old English.

Re:Priuses?

[rogoshen1]

the Prius is more like the antidote to that particular condition.

Re:Priuses?

[mjwx]

The plural of Prius should be Priora if you're going latin; Priuses just sounds dumb.

In English, the plural of Prius should be Prii (pry-eye) as the plural of an English word ending in "ius" is "ii". I agree that Prii sounds equal as stupid as Priuses but stupid describes just about everything about the Prius. So it is at least consistent.

I get enough flying priuses already.

[nimbius]

call me a fogey but we cant handle flying cars and we certainly cant begin to handle hovering ones either.

Here in america you need look no further than your local road to confirm my assertion. just drive to lunch today and count how many people change lanes without a signal, make an illegal left across two lanes of opposing traffic, run red lights, cut eachother off, and tailgate. We're a fucking mess. On the highways every single vehicle routinely travels 15 miles or more above the speed limit, even though we've had reliable cruise control thats far superior to our own clumsy right foot for more than 3 decades. Drivers are glued to their phones or face down in the texting position for the majority of their commute. We're horrible at looking ahead and predicting when traffic will stop, instead choosing to slam on our brakes and let the other guy do his best to stop. Although every drivers manual reads we should slow down if someone wants to merge into our lane, we instinctually speed up or ignore them. Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights. Better yet, try driving in the left lane on a road that isnt limited access, a speed limit something around 35mph, and see how many people completely lose their minds despite the fact that what youre doing is entirely legal. And speed? The only time speed factors into any collision in america is when its fatal, and even then its only if the wreckage is catastrophic or the occupant a celebrity. We wrecklessly whip across 3 lanes of traffic and insist on maintaining our lead regardless of how congested the roads are. We categorically ignore speed limits in a construction zone despite a quad-damage boost to any citation received. We race along at all hours of day and in all seasons as if a collision would have no consequences to us, because we're all we think of.

The best innovation in automobiles has been to autonomize them, but compared to things like rail even an autonomous car is laughably inefficient and merely perpetuates a host of systemic and unsustainable problems related to automobiles nonetheleast of which is climate change.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[timrod]

Actually, hovering cars as the article describes (hovering a few inches above the ground) would probably reduce accidents by a great deal. Almost every day, I see bits of tire - some from the big sixteen-wheelers but plenty from what are likely regular commuter cars as well - strewn along the side of the highway. Many of them are accompanied by cars parked in the breakdown lane, or crashed into the barriers on the side of the road. Not every blown tire at highway speeds necessarily leads to a crash, but plenty of them do. I'm not saying hovering cars would be perfect, as I'm sure there would be incidents where whatever is making them hover fails, but removing tires would definitely lower accidents.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider testosterone replacement therapy. Might make you enjoy driving.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would welcome not having to dodge the holes on our nearly, completely unmaintained, American roads though.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Viol8]

"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"

Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear. If you want to play traffic cop go sign up and do the 2 years training, otherwise get out the fecking way.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[JimFive]

Better yet, try driving in the left lane on a road that isnt limited access, a speed limit something around 35mph, and see how many people completely lose their minds despite the fact that what youre doing is entirely legal.

No, it isn't legal. Look up Impeding Traffic. You aren't allowed to impede the normal flow of traffic, even if that traffic is violating the law.
--
JimFive

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

big sixteen-wheelers

Pretty sure you meant 18 wheeler...although maybe it was intended (i.e started with 18 and lost a couple along the road).

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[drinkypoo]

call me a fogey but we cant handle flying cars and we certainly cant begin to handle hovering ones either.

You might be a fogey, but you're completely correct. I was just driving up the 101 and watching people lane drift and thinking this very thing — people can't handle the cars we have now, they certainly won't be able to handle a vehicle with reduced friction.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[timrod]

I did mean eighteen-wheeler, was my first post this morning pre-coffee.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[fuzznutz]

Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights.

How about you keep your butt over in the right lane if you are not passing anybody like the law says? I see that you are one of those douchebags who thinks it's his personal responsibility to make sure nobody is speeding. You seem all to eager to bitch about how bad others drive but maybe you should look a little closer in the mirror. You're kind is a reason New Jersey decided to up the cost of the fines for such douchebaggery.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.s... Lane hogs who clog the left or center lanes instead of using them to pass another vehicle will see fines increase from between $50 and $200 now, to between $100 and $300. The measure calls for $50 from each violation going toward signs reminding motorists who enter New Jersey about the state’s keep-right law.

Better yet, try driving in the left lane on a road that isnt limited access, a speed limit something around 35mph, and see how many people completely lose their minds despite the fact that what youre doing is entirely legal.

And no doubt the speed limit will actually be 45. I get stuck behind douchebags like you every morning on my commute to work. They will drive 35 MPH in the left lane in a 45 zone all the way. Invariably. Every... single... day... They will continue this UNTIL the speed limit changes to 35 and then they suddenly will speed up to 45 because there are no more traffic lights. Lucky for me that the road has traffic light coordination so I get to stop at most of the traffic lights, unless I pass them early on.

And WTF is up with idiots that slow down 10 - 20 MPH at every green light?

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Splab]

So you are saying, it's ok to break the law, as long as everyone are doing it?

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously,

Show me the lines of the traffic code that require slower people to move to the right side.

It's a "convention" at best.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Totally a lot less accidents to imagine when cars start to have as much grip as the air cushion below them provides, duh.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

. I'm not saying hovering cars would be perfect, as I'm sure there would be incidents where whatever is making them hover fails, but removing tires would definitely lower accidents.

Really? The profound lack of friction provided by the air cushion also provides a profound lack of control. Driving on smooth wet ice with worn summer tires is actually grippy in comparison...

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[pr0fessor]

I doubt that, there would be no friction with the ground meaning it would corner and stop poorly, bridges and other areas with wind gusts would be huge problem. Hover crafts have been around for a while they are notoriously difficult to control.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[91degrees]

I think he's saying the opposite of that.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

It most certainly is not just convention.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact it's a convention that'll get you ticketed for weaving in CA.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me the lines of the traffic code that require slower people to move to the right side.

Here you go

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Weaving" occurs within a single lane, so I really doubt that. Anyway, here's the part of the California traffic code that mandates keeping right. Consider yourself informed.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone is breaking it, then its not a valid law.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[chihowa]

Seriously,

Show me the lines of the traffic code that require slower people to move to the right side.

Ask, and you shall receive.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

No he's saying it's ok to get the fuck out of the fast lane if you're holding up traffic behind you, even if you're at the speed limit.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Princeofcups]

So you are saying, it's ok to break the law, as long as everyone are doing it?

When speed limits are designed to be 10MPH lower than what people are expected to drive, then yes. The law makers assume that people will cheat by that much, and set the limits artificially low.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really do need to read the rules of the road. But as you wish:

http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_statutes_90h08_e.htm#BK223

147. (1) Any vehicle travelling upon a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic at that time and place shall, where practicable, be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic or as close as practicable to the right hand curb or edge of the roadway. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 147 (1).

If they meant speed limit, you can be assured that's what the law would say. "Normal speed" is whatever the average speed for that road is. If you're in the middle lane and going an average speed, congrats, no honking.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[wjcofkc]

"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"

Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear. If you want to play traffic cop go sign up and do the 2 years training, otherwise get out the fecking way.

Yet those same furious drivers will inevitably pass on the right into dense, slower moving traffic, ride someones tail until that driver gets nervous and speeds up enough to let them pass that center lane car only to further pass into the the left lane which was open in the first place. The moral of the story is, once you hit the highway, someone is always an idiot to someone else whether you are actually driving like an idiot or following the letter of the law.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

while i can't disagree with a number of your points, i will only say that scrupulously obeying speed limits is NOT a panacea for avoiding accidents... AND, i will further say that lane-squatting at the speed limit while 90% of the rest of us get pissed at you holding up traffic, is INCREASING the chances of accidents happening, NOT 'calming traffic'... further, i personally think that if people would pay just a LITTLE more attention to reasonable following distances would be FAR MORE effective in reducing accidents than merely 'driving the speed limit'...

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[pr0fessor]

And WTF is up with idiots that slow down 10 - 20 MPH at every green light?

That's my wife, she has been hit by people running red lights while texting twice. I saw it happen to someone else Monday.

The city could make a boat load of money if they had cameras at the traffic lights catching the people running the red lights.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fuck, American road laws are hilarious, and dangerous.
I know which country I am never visiting in my lifetime.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[BarefootClown]

Seriously,

Show me the lines of the traffic code that require slower people to move to the right side.

It's a "convention" at best.

43 O.S. 11-309, notably (5):

5. Upon a roadway which is divided into four or more lanes, a vehicle shall not impede the normal flow of traffic by driving in the left lane; provided, however, this paragraph shall not prohibit driving in a lane other than the right-hand lane when traffic conditions or flow, or both, or road configuration, such as the potential of merging traffic, require the use of lanes other than the right-hand lane to maintain safe traffic conditions. [Emphasis added]

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[greenbird]

Now I agree whole heartily with everything you said except:

Although every drivers manual reads we should slow down if someone wants to merge into our lane

This is wrong and it drives me nuts. People don't know how to merge. You're are supposed to drive at a consistent speed if someone is trying to merge into your lane. The merger is supposed to adjust their speed. Their supposed to decide whether to slow down or speed up to merge in front or in back of you. If both start slowing down and speeding up it becomes a confusing guessing game. Now if you mean by slowing down providing enough of an opening for the merger to fit that's another issue. Unless you're driving at a very slow speed if you're following so close that a car can't fit in front of you you're following too close. Tailgating is probably the second most leading cause of serious collisions (whether directly or as a result of reducing wiggle room).

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[nimbius]

Again, the speed limit is critical as that is the maximum speed you are supposed to be traveling on american highways, no faster, and as such im considered at cruising speed. on a 3 lane highway, the left lane is for passing, and center lane(s) cruising. When you choose to drive slowly or enter or turn off the road, use the right lane. You. along with countless other drivers are incredible proof that its possible to pass a drivers test administered in the United States with no more than a passing interest in how highways or speed limits actually function.

there is no such thing as "keeping up with the flow of traffic." when it is in excess of the posted legal speed limit

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're saying is "You have to break the law or you're breaking the law"

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[StormReaver]

No, it isn't legal. Look up Impeding Traffic. You aren't allowed to impede the normal flow of traffic, even if that traffic is violating the law.

Impeding Traffic varies from state to state. In Missouri, for example, drivers in the left lane must move faster than drivers in the right line (assuming both lanes are for the same direction); but only up to and including the speed limit. If the driver in the left lane is at the speed limit, and the driver in the right lane is exceeding the speed limit, the right-lane driver is violating the law while the left-lane driver is obeying the law.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Florida, your behavior is a moving violation equivalent to driving on the wrong side of a double-yellow. You may not like it, but you are breaking the law even if everyone else is speeding. Get to the right lane.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

is the American driving test still the equivalent of waddling your fat arse outof the chairs pointing to a car and saying 'yes it is a car'?

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[chihowa]

The Missouri "Keep right" laws don't support your scenario, though. According to this, all drivers should drive as far to the right as safely possible except if passing or preparing to turn left. If another car is able to pass you on the right, then you are not driving as far right as possible. In your scenario, the person in the left lane is violating the "keep right" law and the person in the right lane is violating the speeding law. Both of your hypothetical drivers are in the wrong.

In fact, the wording in the statute doesn't mention the speed limit at all, but refers to a "regular flow of traffic". If everybody else is speeding and you're driving the speed limit, you are violating the statute by refusing to move into the right lane. Leave speed limit enforcement up to the police... it's not your job.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[alva_edison]

there is no such thing as "keeping up with the flow of traffic." when it is in excess of the posted legal speed limit

Actually that varies by state. The California law explicitly states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits". https://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vc...

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[AthanasiusKircher]

In Florida, your behavior is a moving violation equivalent to driving on the wrong side of a double-yellow. You may not like it, but you are breaking the law even if everyone else is speeding. Get to the right lane.

No it's not. Just last year, Florida passed a law which fines people $60 for driving MORE THAN 10 MPH BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT LANE on a highway.

Given that they had to institute a specific law for people driving FAR BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT lane, I sincerely doubt they are going to pull someone over for driving AT the speed limit in the CENTER lane.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[AthanasiusKircher]

The California law explicitly states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits".

That is true. It is also your duty to allow merging traffic to join the highway where possible. In busy urban areas with lots of on and off ramps, a dense line of cars in the right lane will also impede traffic and threaten safety.

Also, California (and Texas, IIRC) are examples of rare states without "absolute" speed limits, which means if you can justify that your speed was reasonable and safe, even if above the "prima facie" limit, you may be able to get out of a citation. (I don't know if this is still the case, but I know California also used to have signs saying "maximum speed" explicitly when there was a hard limit. You basically can't be ticketed for driving at the speed limit on a road with that sign.)

So the situation is much different in CA from most states, where you can often only get pulled over for slow driving if there's a posted minimum or some other law. In general, unless you're in the leftmost lane and "impeding traffic" by driving AT the speed limit, a citation is really unlikely.

Is it possible a cop might pull you over in CA and give you a warning in this scenario if everyone else on the highway is going faster? Yeah, I've heard of that. But that's mostly because of CA's quirky "no absolute limit" laws. In general, though, to receive an actual citation, your speed would have to be "unreasonable" or "unsafe" given the circumstances. It would be a pretty rare cop who would think a charge of driving AT the speed limit would stick given that ambiguity built into CA's law for someone who wasn't even in the left lane, unless there was some other serious violation at the same time.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[itsdapead]

"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"

Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear.

Red herring. Where did the GP say that the nearside lane was clear? I've often been overtaking a string of slow-moving traffic, only to have some wanker in a big German saloon (the sort with the aggressive-looking LED running lights designed to intimidate peons without flashing and honking) drop out of hyperdrive 6" behind my tailpipe. If the nearside lane did have room to swing a cat, they would use it to pass you.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[chihowa]

316.081 Driving on right side of roadway; exceptions.—

(2) Upon all roadways, any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic or as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway except when overtaking and passing another vehicle proceeding in the same direction or when preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.

(4) A violation of this section is a noncriminal traffic infraction, punishable as a moving violation as provided in chapter 318.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Splab]

Yeah, just like robbing a bank is ok, as long as you only take the small bills, I mean, it's designed for that right?

Or only stabbing people a little, their blood vessels are elastic and can handle a small puncture....

You sir, should not be driving if you believe that.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[steveg]

About 40 years ago (when I was a college student) I was pulled over in Michigan while on a freeway.

The cop had three beefs with me:
1) I was exceeding the speed limit.
2) I was in the left lane traveling slower than the flow of traffic and he wanted me to move right.
3) I had out of state plates.

Number three was the one he was most upset about. He didn't write me up for any of them, but gave me quite a talking to.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[mjwx]

Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear. If you want to play traffic cop go sign up and do the 2 years training, otherwise get out the fecking way.

And this is why Americans are such bad drivers.

First off, it's not the role of ordinary people to play traffic cop as you pointed out, this includes deciding that you should try to intimidate people to "get them of the fecking way".

Secondly, the speed limit is all you can reasonably expect people to go. If you want to go faster, you have to find a way around. If they're going faster, they're doing you a favour, if not, tough titties, act like a mature, responsible adult.

Thirdly, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to be in the centre or centre-inside lane, especial in the US where the inside lane is often turned into an exit lane.

Courtesy dictates that you should treat the centre lanes as inside lanes and only the most outside lane as a dedicated passing lane. Courtesy also dictates that you should stay as inside as possible and finally, courtesy dictates above that you should never be a dick to another road user by flashing and beeping at them like an arsehole.

If there were a 10 commandments of the road, "thoult shalt not be a cock" would be number 1, 2 and 3. The cardinal sin of the road is thinking you own it and have the right to boss others about.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[mjwx]

And WTF is up with idiots that slow down 10 - 20 MPH at every green light?

That's my wife, she has been hit by people running red lights while texting twice. I saw it happen to someone else Monday.

The city could make a boat load of money if they had cameras at the traffic lights catching the people running the red lights.

They do in Australia.

The net effect is that very few drivers take the risk of running red lights. Ultimately this is what you want as it reduces right angle accidents (which tend to produce more fatalities than rear end or head on accidents and block intersections for a while, which is painful for everyone at peak hour).

However fines are not effective deterrents. You need to risk someone losing their license or possibly even facing jail time before it sinks in to a lot of people. Fail to stop for 2 red lights during a double demerit weekend and you'll wipe out your license in my state.

BTW, your wife is fortunate not to have been seriously injured. My Honda Integra was turned into a Honda Sandwich a few months back between an ANCAP 5 star Holden Calais and an ANCAP 5 star Mazda 3... the only one not to have any injuries was me in the car with a 2 star safety rating. The reason for this is because I sit upright (not leaning back) which reduces the chance of neck injures as I'm not craning my neck to see out the windscreen.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I live, that doesn't count as impeding traffic. If you're driving at the speed limit, the traffic behind you is therefore free to drive (up to the speed limit) and therefore not impeded. And in case I need to remind you, tailgating is illegal in many jurisdictions (approximately 400 Euro fine where I live) and is in the process of being criminalised in yet more jurisdictions. If tailgating is still legal where you live, chances are soon it will be illegal.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Viol8]

"If they're going faster, they're doing you a favour, if not, tough titties, act like a mature, responsible adult."

Oh I do - I just pass tossers like you on the inside. Usually resulting in THEM suddenly flashing their lights at someone having the temerity to not treat them like police. Fuck them and fuck you. I'll drive at the speed *I* want, NOT the speed YOU think is appropriate. If I decide to driver over the speed limit its got nothing to do with you and you have no business trying to prevent it.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, idiots are the folks going 2 mph slower than you are. Anyone going 2 mph faster is classified as a maniac.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[pr0fessor]

They were both at the same intersection where the speed limit is 20 mph of course they were speeding. The first accident totaled the car and left her bruised and sore for a few weeks. The second accident she was able to drive away from with only a ding on the fender but she was driving my buick century from the early 80s. I recently bought her buick because she was so impressed by how the old one handled that accident.

Re:I get enough flying priuses already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't that vary by state? It's that way in my state, but I thought that was a variable law depending on where you are. (Freely admit I could be wrong.)

A photo of the prototype

[cccc828]

(...) During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to Toyotas ultimate car, the Hovercar, a flying Prius with enough power to fly almost 100 miles.

Here is an exclusive photograph of the prototype: http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080316031428/starwars/images/5/54/X34-landspeeder.jpg

*This is not the Toyota you are looking for*

Re:A photo of the prototype

[king neckbeard]

How many Bothans died to bring us this information?

Re:A photo of the prototype

[Anonymous Coward]

Just one, his name was Manny Bothans.

Air cushion under tyres

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way this could work is if the car had conventional wheels and tyres that could be instantly put into use at any moment to steer/break etc. To make it hover would require some sort of air cushion being created between the tyres and the road that could be instantly turned on and off.

Zero-traction cars!

[jeffb (2.718)]

Why not call them what they are? With all the time and money that's been poured into improving tire traction, it seems hilarious to talk about eliminating it entirely.

Maybe they could take a baby step in this direction by introducing a car that automatically hydroplanes whenever it's on a wet highway. That ought to reduce friction losses significantly, too, right?

Re:Zero-traction cars!

[silas_moeckel]

Have you driven anything with those eco tires the prius comes with? They have no traction the hover car might be an improvement.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Habaakurafuto wa, unagi ippai!

Whut?

[wonkey_monkey]

Remember back in the day when we all thought we'd be driving flying cars in the future? Well that clearly didn't happen, though it still might in the future.

Wow. What a long-winded way of saying nothing of any meaning. There will always be a period during which it "clearly didn't happen" and we just happen to still be in that period.

Sailing a Prius

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a website by some early Prius fans on which I had seen an applet where drag was calculated based upon wind direction and speed of the car. If the wind were at an oblique angle to the direction of the car, the drag was higher than if the car was traveling directly into the wind. The website speculated that if the body of the car could be actively adjusted to compensate for the wind direction versus the direction the car is traveling, the effective drag could be reduced.

Maybe the Toyota wording (maybe garbled through translation) is about something like this. Active aero isn't new, but maybe whole-body aero?

But but...

[Agares]

I want my flying Prius :(...

Control and Safety?

[jellomizer]

Reducing Road friction, from someone in the North East means the same as driving on Icy Roads.

Now the people who live in areas where we are use to this sort of driving it may be good. But the South they will just be stuck in traffic for weeks because they just don't know how to drive on reduced friction.

Maglev...

[galgon]

I think you are taking the hovercraft name too literally. All they have said is that the car will hover a few inches above the road. There a few ways to accomplish this none of which are easy which is why we have not seen one in real life yet. One option would be to use a maglev type system. Although that would likely require expensive changes to the roads. Other options are using an air cushion in some way but again that is not an easy solution. All we can really gain from this artificial is that Toyota is attempting to think outside the box when developing cars. But we can say that the vast majority of these ideas will never make it into the hands of the consumer (or at least not anytime soon).

Re:Maglev...

[AK Marc]

My "car" already "hovers" a few inches above the road, riding on "tires" that support the weight and provide propulsion. One engineers throw-away comment being blown out of proportion isn't that big of a deal.

Solution: Get rid of steering-mounted air-bags...

[Black.Shuck]

...and replace them with bayonets poking out of the steering-column and pointed at the drivers face.

The roads would be full of careful drivers, well prepared for the upcoming wave of hover-vehicles.

Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

We wouldn't have to worry about poor road conditions (ice, snow, water, potholes, caverns in the road, destroyed roads).,,

As a start

[RoccamOccam]

As a start, Toyota should first start with developing a technology to allow the tires to rise above the surface of the pavement just a few millimeters when the road is wet. This would give many of the same performance characteristics that you'd get with a hover car, but it'd be much easier to achieve.

Not really sure why you'd want this

[Solandri]

Car tires contacting the ground gives you two huge advantages: The car's motion is (assuming no skidding) restricted to a single axis determined by the direction the front wheels are pointing. And the car's orientation is physically coupled to the road (i.e. it more or less points in the direction it's traveling).

Once you start hovering, you lose these two and direction and orientation are no longer coupled to any part of the car. The car no longer moves forward in the direction the wheels are pointed. It's now free to move sideways, and can spin to point in a direction other than where it's moving. Skids are one of the most dangerous events which can happen in a car, and a good portion of design and maintenance is devoted to preventing them. I don't see why you'd want to design a car so that a "skid" becomes the norm instead of the exception.

The only way I can see it working is if the method of levitation somehow locks the car's orientation.

I had a dream of a hoverbike once

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

In my dream, I had the idea that there was an electromagnetic tape that the bike drove over. The thing worked like a hover bullet train. The tape recycled around the bike like a tank tread. The idea may or may not work because it is very complicated for the maglev trains to work in a static state of the rails. For a bike to cycle tape/film around to produce lift would be yet another feat of engineering. So while it was just a dream, I don't think it is totally theoretically impossible.

Since they used the term "hovercar"

[scotts13]

That locks us into an impossible scenario - anything related to a hovercraft as we know it is completely unsuitable as a consumer highway vehicle. So, the company MUST be talking about something else entirely.

Inductatrack maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

They may be investigating a car adapted for Inductatrack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductrack). Of course it requires a special roadway, but it might not be much more expensive than laying a new roadway. If this is so, it is a very long view approach for a profit oriented corporation.

The future is over?

[asylumx]

Remember back in the day when we all thought we'd be driving flying cars in the future? Well that clearly didn't happen

That's the beautiful thing about the future, it is still (and always will be) ahead of us.

Investiage, test, sure, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Things like this will never come out of the r&d lab until we've made some VERY serious advances in fuels that aren't oil based.

advance rtSC research

[Anonymous Coward]

Once Toyota installs all the superconducting roads we get hovercar-tech for free... F-Zero style. Offroading'll be a bitch though.

An all-new Lexus "Laz'r Personal Transport"(c) anyone??

Tesla Investigating Hovercars (fixed ya)

[akubot]

If that were the title, I'd be more interested in reading about this.

If Toyota's cars are not safe ON the ground, who believes they'll be safe OFF the ground?

No thanks Toyota...

Article/Summary

[Jaime2]

Article: The car won't so much be hovering in free space as "a little bit away" from the road. This is more likely to mean microns than inches...

Summary: We aren't talking Jetson's flying car, more like a car that merely hovers "a little bit away" from the road. Probably a few inches...

To me hovering a few microns sounds like hydroplaning on purpose. Sounds like a great idea if you never want to turn or stop.

Toyota solves US infrastructure problems!

[TheRealSteveDallas]

No need to fix those pesky decaying roads and bridges... just hover smoothly over them!

Full Throttle

[Daniel Hoffmann]

Full Throttle had hovercars and they were definitely uncool compared with the bikes running on wheels.

Excellent...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'll finally be able to go into Toshi Station to pick up those power converters!

sweet mother of AI

[Iamthecheese]

Did anyone notice how dead-on accurate Google's automatic translation is on that site? "D-Dalu is a completely new aircraft with a drive system based on four cyclo Giro rotors. Because of pairs of counter-rotating rotors drive the aircraft is permanently in a state of dynamic equilibrium with balanced centrifugal forces." That's almost indistinguishable from a human translator.

Re:sweet mother of AI

[rogoshen1]

It was actually translated by a 13 year old Ukrainian boy. Your move Turing.

Been there done that

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember watching a Bell hovercraft demo in the early 1960's in North Tonawanda NY. Kicked up a lot of dust on the parking lot as I recall.

Curtiss-Wright Air Car

[Animats]

The 1960 Curtiss Wright Air Car did this. It's a hovercraft, built to look like a car with bumpers, chrome, two-tone color scheme, and convertible top. Top speed around 38 MPH. 2.5MPG.

Race car design goes in the opposite direction, trying to get as little lift as possible. Some Formula One cars were built with big fans sucking out air from below the vehicle to increase tire contact forces. Worked too well; prohibited by a Formula One rule change.

Doesn't quite make sense to me

[KingTank]

Just doing some searching on Google it seems the lift/drag ratio for a wing-in-ground-effect vehicle is about 10:1. A typical load/rolling resistance ratio for a tire appears to be about 100:1. So I don't see how the lift can be generated anywhere near efficiently enough it to improve overall efficiency. Unless my numbers are all wrong or they have something way more efficient than a wing-in-ground-effect.

Re:Solution: Get rid of steering-mounted air-bags.

[steveg]

When I was a poor college student driving a VW bug I had a great manual on everything to do with working on VWs. A hippie classic.

The author thought that everyone should be driving a VW bus, "spread-eagled across the front like an Aztec sacrifice." He figured that would bring the accident rate down sharply.

Wasting energy

[GrahamCox]

Anything that has to lift itself against gravity will need to expend energy to do so. Wheels on the other hand, don't expend energy just keeping the vehicle off the ground (ignoring small effects like rolling resistance). It doesn't make sense to replace a passive lifting device like a wheel with something that will need a ton of extra fuel before it even moves from A to B. It is OK for aircraft since the distances, speed and number of people moved per flight makes it worthwhile, but for a ground-based vehicle it makes no sense whatsoever. We already have roads, and the best lifting device to use with them are wheels. For the same reason Maglev trains are unlikely to succeed - it just doesn't add up to a gain replacing wheels with magnetic levitation.

Re:Wasting energy

[Rei]

Maglev trains are a whole different issue. You really can't go at those sort of speeds using wheels. It's hard enough to manage the sort of speeds that the Shinkansens go with wheels. Maglev is a great solution to the problem, in that it totally works and is quiet efficient. Not so great in that it costs the GDP of a small county for a couple dozen mile track, mind you.

I know I'd get jumped for saying it, but I think Hyperloop fits the typical use case for Maglev far better... ground-effect air cushion in a rarified atmosphere, and your track is just steel tubing on columns with a load-bearing requirement no greater than that of Disney's monorail.

Marine Animals?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, this is a hovercraft. Will it be full of eels?

Apparently...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all a bit up in the air at the moment.

A few months ago, I'd been all over this

[Anonymous Coward]

Was very happy with my first Toyota, a Prius...until it recently had the hybrid battery die 4k miles outside of non-California warranty.

If they can't make the core piece of their "most advanced" research products worth a damn, I'm not going to trust a product that hovers not to grind into the pavement as soon as the warranty's up.

Maybe not a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how bad the roads are, skimming over the pot holes doesn't sound half bad.

Hover cars

[hinckeljn]

Without ground contact how is this vehicle is going go to be steered? Roads do have curves! Lot's a curves!

Interstate highways across the sea :)

[patro.ashish]

Time for interstate highways in Seychelles, Maldives, Indonesia and Philippines :)

As a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the fuel savings in Seattle!

New Mexico, Arizona...not so much.

They can call this new tech HydroJet or Hydroaero or somesuch.

(Hail Hydro)

Sailing a Prius

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybrid Battery would still give out on me as soon as the warranty expired. Again.

If they can't keep the hybrid system working past warranty I don't want to be in a car that grinds to an uncontrollable stop 4k miles after the warranty is up so you have to buy another.