Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I mean... this thing just ate energy. The prototype car was pulling 6.5kV off the conducting rails to keep the air jets running hard enough for the hovering, and it wasn't even carrying a passenger load. If you add more weight you have to add more air thrust to keep hovering, which means bigger engines and more power, and the production model will need extras for redundancy because if the air cushion weakens while you're doing 200+kph and the car just grazes the track you're in big trouble. I seriously doubt this concept can scale up to a working transit system and be at all safe. The electricity input alone would be a hazard.
I'll bet it sounded like a Harrier from the outside too.
Also what do you think the vortex is like above the air intakes? I'm imagining this thing cruising along sucking in birds and just flushing them straight down onto the track as it travels the countryside.
I was really skeptical about the air hovering, as opposed to magnetic. The video did not go deep enough there imho. They were planning to switch the project to maglev? Or did he just put that in as a historical comparison?
As a layman, it seems to me magnetic levitation would consume significantly less energy, and probably be less error prone.