• Question: when would hover cars be around?

    Asked by shepherdl95 to Alexandra, Dean, Jess, Luisa, Sian on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sian Foch-Gatrell

      Sian Foch-Gatrell answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Haha! Absolutely no idea! Might be cool though.

    • Photo: Dean Whittaker

      Dean Whittaker answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The best bet for hovercars is to use superconducting materials. These magnetically levitate but keep things stable, look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWTSzBWEsms to see one. If you try levitating a normal magnet above another magnet then it’ll just kinda fall off because it isn’t stable. Superconductors change their magnetic fields as they move and are kind of like self-adjusting so they remain stable. It’s currently used to levitate very fast trains in japan (but only a little way off the ground). There’s one huge drawback – they need to be very very cold to work at the moment. But we’re working on finding materials that work at room temperature. Then we might be able to levitate things very high in a controlled way… who knows!

      The other option is a jet car: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElS9BKSsezw . But that’s really just a harrier jump jet 🙂 .

    • Photo: Alexandra Kamins

      Alexandra Kamins answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      who knows? The US military has some cool hover-craft like vehicles, and hover-boats are around…wanna invent a hover car?

    • Photo: Luisa Ostertag

      Luisa Ostertag answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I don’t know. Maybe soon. But probably not as long as I am alive, which will hopefully be at least the next 50 years,

    • Photo: Jessica Housden

      Jessica Housden answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I’m not sure – in the 60’s people thought that by now we would have hoverplanes and our own spaceships! Hovercraft are quite difficult to manoeuvre which is potentially a problem. I’m not sure how much power they need either!

Comments