VW STUNS WORLD+DOG WITH REAL HOVER-CAR! It would be nice if it were true, but El Reg has difficulty believing that this video of a VW concept hover-car in China is genuine: The premise of the video is this: VW decided to crowd-source ideas for concept cars in China – a branding exercise it dubbed the Peoples' Car Project (recalling, the genesis of the marque) – …
there are plenty of equally unbelievable products advertised on Chinese TV that are touted as truely legit (mostly 'study pills' and 'cancer cures').
Back to the ad presented. Lots of fun. I especially like how the car's magnetics were repelling the aluminium can on the street. Nice touch! :-)
Careful where you point that science! Aluminium *is* paramagnetic, yes, which means it's weakly *attracted* by a magnetic field. It's *diamagnetic* items that are weakly repelled. What sorts of items are diamagnetic? You know, the usual - water, organic compounds, frogs (the non-robotic kind that is)...see for yourself:
http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
A mag-lev bed would be great, but good luck keeping the sheets tucked in ;)
No you can do it with electromagnets. You induce a current in the aluminium then you can repel the resulting magnetic field. I saw a demo with a floating aluminium puck at the local science centre.
But I don't think you could put a magnet big enough to push an empty pop can away into that thing and power it.
Unless they have mastered cold fusion and high temperature superconducting magnets there is no way it could lift it's own weight.
This is about as real as the flying car in Harry Potter.
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WHAT! do you mean the Flying Ford Anglia wasn't real !!!.........
i thought they prototyped that on some mothers do have them back in the 70's, franks certainly flew, but suffered a controls failure prior to take off....
anyway, saying that is like saying Santa, the easter bunny and the tooth fairy aren't real...
im appalled at your insensitivity to other readers on here...
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They should have claimed it works via some sort of magnetic repulsion from iron, and thus would work only on concrete surfaces (due to the rebar) but not on asphalt or off-road.
I think if you add some appropriate sounding disclaimers to make it sound like a slightly imperfect thing that needs more refinement rather than the revolutionary breakthrough it appears as here and they might have fooled a few more people. Or at least some Insane Clown Posse fans :)
If I were to build a flying car, I'd sure as heck have glowing lights on the bottom. If people expect it, why give anything less.
It'd be more impressive if it wasn't clearly CGI'd. I love those overdone shadows. They should work on that for the next "version".
I'd have it going cross country, and laying down crop circles.
Uhh... Reg? Neither of the linked articles claim it's anything but a concept submitted by a contest winner - err, I mean, crowdsourced from the crowdy crowd thing. Unless the articles have been edited since you posted the links, you're no more credible in your claims of their authors' foolishness, than anyone who suggests that the video is real.
It seems fairly clear that everyone (save perhaps the twitter set you mention, though by now I'm not prepared to take your word on that either) realizes it's a pre-rendered promo video, and that 'crowdsourced' means 'we got a sketch from a dude and thought we should send it to the Maya guys'.
Aside from propping up your own egos, I don't see what's to be gained by putting words in other peoples' mouths (and harming their reputations in the eyes of anyone who trusts your assessment of the linked articles).
Mocking people for being gullible while tricking *yourselves* into believing you're the only journalists smart enough to see the obvious is... disappointing... to put it mildly.
Do you have any evidence, oddie, aside from a deeply ingrained cynicism that leaves your worldview as vulnerable to manipulation as that of a happy-go-lucky, overly-credulous WiReD journalist?
Starting from a position of believing that the authors are full of shit, using that to justify your judgment that they must therefore fall under the category of people who would need to / would post-edit, and therefore concluding that the authors are full of shit... You can do better than that, right?
It's easier and more productive to criticize the true morons in society rather than affecting such ego as to make the entire world and everyone in it (save your precise peers) worthless. God knows there are plenty of real morons to go around - and you're probably letting some of them get away while you're busy attacking others based on prejudice (and based on its being cool to dislike things on the internet; if you never like anything, you'll never get made fun of for accidentally liking the wrong thing).
Effects that CGI artists might not know about:
They get really close to some other cars In the carpark, but none of them move or melt. No-one had coins or keys in their pockets? What about all the erased credit card strips?
CGI artists should know better:
Sometimes they drew a reasonable reflection on the windscreen. When driving along the pavement, they go from shadow into light, but this does not show in the reflection. Nor does the camera man. When the camera is right infront of the car, the reflection should spread out from the midline, not pan sideways across the whole windscreen.
The CGI artists probably did know better, but it's only a concept vid, with limited time and budget! Heck, ILM have made similar school boy errors in StarWars ep 3 (Ewan McGregor et al flying through a flashy laser battle in an open-sided speeder, and the flashes aren't reflected on their faces). Peter Jackson's WETA Studios tend to do a better job.
I agree, though, that lighting does make a big difference to our perception. StarTrek looks too clean and well lit, BSG looks better for looking like a submarine movie, 2001 ASO just looks great because it was made with real models.
My understanding of magnetism is quite limited, but wouldn't two of these cars violently try to attach to one another or send each other flying into the shop windows if they passed in the street? And what about other ferrous objects like lampposts, manhole covers, cutlery from street cafés? The way I see it your car will look like a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean before you even pull out of the garage.
Asian countries actually value good grades instead of rooting for the dumb sports dudes. Check out Jackie Chan's comments on bullying; in a stunning reversal of what happens in the average US school, you only get bullied around if you are a good-for-nothing kid. That is, the average US bully would actually find himself being bullied by *the rest of the school* if he were in a country like China.
I know they suck on other stuff like censorship, but at least their educational values seem to be right on.
Do a little research ... Kerry McLean comes to mind. I happened to be at Bonneville a little over a decade ago when he set a 45MPH record ... on a bar stool ;-)
He's a mad inventor, and a good engineer. Bad web site, but grit your teeth & find the pictures over a pint. Worth it for a grin on the human ability to say "the HELL I can't do that!"
> Do a little research
Do your own research.
Just because someone built a monowheel does not mean that they are useful. They fundamentally cannot brake hard., as just a few minutes' reading or thinking would dsemonstrate.
It's possible to build a 1200cc unicycle. That doesn't make it a practical vehicle.
Vic.
Best car advert ever, 5 minutes later and I can still remember the name of the manufacturer, VW - compared to all those other adverts where car drives along stunning scenery on empty road.
FFS I even watched the entire ad on youtube (had to click to watch), and I hate adverts, and then the great sciencey commentards, thumbs up.
...but not nearly as good as the 'Un-pimp ze auto' ads; I remember those *years* later. And even though I know that it's not like the Wolfsburg execs sat around and thought that up because that's how they roll, they at least approved it - which does say a little bit about the corporate culture. To the extent that a company like VW has one.
A side note: I was at a few auto shows a couple of years back, during setup, and during the last 12 hours before the show opened (or more usually, the noxious 'VIP preview', where wealth creators in tuxedos pretended to be interested in Ford Transit vans while their boozed-up trophy wives ran riot in motion simulators) it was always complete bedlam. 50 lift trucks roaring around beeping, creatives yelling about where vinyl stickers went, people adjusting lights, right up until the minute the doors opened. Panic in the streets, frayed nerves, yelling, banging, every booth a riot of panic and anger.
Except VW.
I remember looking around at the chaos - imagine a long, slow pan right-to-left, with one of those cheesy action movie 'Aiiyaagh!' falling-off-something-and-dying screams a few seconds in - and right in the center of my view was the VW booth, pristine white, complete, sparkling, with one old janitor dude sweeping away a fine coat of MDF dust, kicked up by other booths' circular saws, which had accumulated on vee-dub's shining tile floor.
It was 2008. That year, if I recall correctly, Wolfsburg were the only manufacturer to post a profit and a rise in stock price.
Come on at least the Hitler Diaries where believable for a while longer than this! It's all very nice and clever and I like the touch with the CGI'd tin-can halfway through but seriously? If this were even remotely true it would all over the media like a freaking rash!
Jesus wept, no doubt some of you lot still turn up a Copperfield show and still say, "Wow! How's he do that?!".
> what would happen if VW did throw some of its GDP-of-a-small-country
> R&D budget at creating a hovercar
Someone would crash it.
The trouble with having no direct contact with the ground is that all acceleration needs to be done by way of vectored thrust - directed fans and the like. Unless your name is Apollo and you have a big "USA" decal on the side, that thrust tends to be comparatively low compared to the mass of the vehicle. So you get comparatively small acceleration.
That means you have to look much further ahead, and plan your manoeuvres much more carefully. Which won't happen, and so drivers will go careering into stationary objects. Frequently.
There are a few places around where you can go and drive hovercraft. It's excellent fun - but you'll come away with an unshakeable belief that such vehicles are not fit for the public road...
Vic.
The primary giveaway is braking, although the same applies to forward motion. You can't brake effectively with maglev because forces fall off too rapidly when not normal to the repelled surface. Friction or reaction thrusters have to be used. Gimbaled gyroscopes could be used for rotation. There also appears to be some blurring underneath the vehicle for which there is no plausible explanation.
But using the new near room temperature superconductors based on the senary oxocuprates.
I came up with a way to make this work by using a Manhattan Project method of enriching barium so that the specific isotope responsible for the gravity nullification effect is present in the finished material and also increases the useable fraction.
The way this works is that the virtual electrons present in the spinning superconductor are so energetic that they displace the Higgs bosons and therefore neutralise the mass of the object above the disk with a relatively well defined boundary so that it isn't lifting the entire atmosphere.
Can you say "DIY hoverboard" ?! Seriously has no-one else even thought of enriching isotopes before, it seems novel enough.
Patent pending maybe?
AC/DC 6EQUJ5
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