Which is a car roof that has solar panels by day, and lights up inside at night… oled screens etc that change according to ambient light conditions.

But who cares about that? This is a totally cool design – and a classic example of what you can do when you get computer-controlled machines to do the fabricating.

The photograph is taken from the point of view of… I don’t know… a cat probably.

There isn’t much on the BASF website… apart from a classic example of what will come to be known as Early 21st Century pre-World War III, Fascist Design. You know the sort of thing.

I don’t know why they’re always doing that. People in suits, tinted blue… but at least you can see them coming. The really insidious stuff has people who are full of… “life”… like the ones in coca cola or beneton adverts.

I always said that these should be open-source, materials locally-sourced, with de-coupled sub-systems…

… but it came to this. They were destroyed by business optimised for scarcity. Deliberately. They got rid of the guy who’s baby it was, then they borrowed money until they ran out, then they destroyed it.

If this was an (open-sourced) software project, it would be given to the community.

When I was in London once I found an entire skip of Thomas Dolby singles… 1000s of boxes – each with a black-and-decker put through them. This is what intellectual property does. It has to destroy abundance to work.

I promise you, it’s not the future.

Fuck everything about this.

And it goes!

It’s actually a company making them… early days yet, but there are a number of very definite advantages over the big petrol driven ones – like redundancy, and electricity and parachutability etc.

It’s a hexakaidecacopter. Or just a hexadecacopter. The gym-ball ladding pad thing is utter genius – all it would need is to have a zorb in the middle of it, filled with helium and nitrous oxide and I’d be the happiest guy in the world.

“Ford’s electric vehicles are now bundled with the option to have SunPower install rooftop solar panels for about $10,000 after a federal tax rebate. The panels, which are estimated to generate 3,000 kilowatt-hours a year, can fuel the electric car for about 12,000 miles. Customers can also monitor the solar panels’ output over the Web application or an iPhone app.” – PSFK

Which is pretty cool, because it’s a driver/gateway for several different that will take people off-grid, and offer enormous benefits in terms of resilience and freedom from corporate-fuckwittery.

The different techs, being solar (obviously) and remote-monitoring… or any kind of electrical monitoring in fact. I think it might also provide a driver for creating vehicles that aren’t based on the principle of using a ton of steel and glass to get a 12 stone human being from A 2 B.

From

There’s hardly anything Australians can’t do. Briliant. It’s like a cross between a bike and a Zorb. And that thing off South Park

Still… beautiful

Particularly gorgeous wooden propeller. They should make the whole thing out of wood – like a Mosquito back in the day. Carbo-fibre is so last-season.

What could possibly go wrong?

The specs are reasonably impressive:

Airspeed Vne – 150 KIAS (untested)
Hover (out of ground effect) – >10,000ft (estimated)
Dry weight – 110kg
Max gross weight – 270kg
Total thrust – 295kg
Engine – 80kw @ 7500rpm

Bit suspish about “dry weight”… when the “wet” part of the wet-weight is largely blood I suspect… contained within a single human, with a motor-bike helmet on its head. Blood and petrol.

I imagine it’s probably the loudest thing in christendom as well – like a jetski that is so loud that it’s actually able to leave the water. That sort of thing. Good for search and rescue.

I don’t think they’ve actually managed to fly it properly yet. Looks like a goer – I’d buy one. Probably. If I had, like $45000 and a HELL of a lot of bubblewrap.

Ideally what I’d want I think is one of these some how merged into a zorb.

Although even a zorb couldn’t survive a fall from 10,000 ft. So I’d have a zorb inside a bigger zorb… and maybe another one beyond that.

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Maglev in a vacuum delivering 97% efficiency… that’s incredibly impressive. They go on about them being safe… and I guess in some ways they are… until one escapes, and lets all the other ones out and then you’ve got about 20 steamrollers going at about a million miles an hour flying off in all directions.

Looks like portable ones are doable as well

Loads of little DIY variants about the place as well

And Porsche are playing with them

Jesus… listen to the voiceover of this

What. A. Crock. Of. Shit.

Fucking embarrassing to listen to, even with no one else around

And anyway – this turned up recently

Which is kindof what I’m about – but with a motor in it.

What these peeps are doing is creating clones of themselves (with a graphical style, unnervingly similar to the beardy “Joy of Sex” from the 70s)… teaching people how to make their own bamboo bikes (rather than shag beardily).

That’s the way it’s got to work I think. If I come by a million dollars, I’ll set up a kind of “Bamboo Aptera Think Tank” or a research institute or something… which collates and progresses the technology and techniques – and supplies vitamin parts – or sets up local “machine shops” to create local vitamin parts. It’s got to be a virus.

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Not sure where Aptera themselves are going mind. I’ve read 1/2 heartedly various forums and whatnot, and they appear to have fallen on the wrong side of the digerati. Partly because they still haven’t actually launched, partly because (as far as I can gather) they got new management in, cutting out the originators… something like that.

Here’s a video of people talking total shit about it, still talking about “America” as though they’re the market. They’re not.

But whatever. The digerati are (by and large) pisswits who don’t know what they’re talking about. I myself don’t know what I’m talking about, but at least I know I don’t know.

Aptera is still streets ahead of the others – check out the video. It looks like it’s in an ugly-bugly soap-box-derby in the carpark of the star-wars bar-scene. Apteras look like they have pedigree – the design looks like the product of a successful evolution, AND a significant departure from the status-quo. Their business approach however is the opposite – the product of a failed evolution which isn’t significantly different from the status quo. I read recently that the bailed out auto-industry spent a load of their bail-out money fighting emission standards.

Which is an electric plane that actually works

Although if I’d made it, I’d have made it with an android/iPad as a dashboard… with inbuilt gyro/location stuff… and I’d have made the entire compartment bit made out of bubblewrap…

It says “Peghiny says the key to flying is watching the voltage. The 72-pound, 70-amp-hour lithium-polymer battery started the flight with 74 volts. Peghiny says I should be ready to land when it hits 65. Once I climbed to around 600 feet, I could pull back the controller to 1,800 rpm to minimize the drain on the battery. Full power is 2,200 rpm.

You should climb out at about 40 miles per hour and cruise at about the same,” Peghiny tells me as I strap into the seat. “On final, fly it at 45 and remember it stalls at just 22.”

So that’s cool. More at Wired

… combine that with this here battery

Which is a battery that took an Audi 375 miles at 55mph on a 6-minute charge…

… and you’ve got two interesting things combined into one REALLY interesting thing.

The trouble with democratised flight (which is basically what the flying car thing is) is that most people are a clueless dipshits who can’t walk around their own house without falling over and breaking things – cars kill more people than Hitler – put that into 3 Dimensions… and you’ve got the solution to the population over-shoot right there.

But these thing go more slowly than your average car… so if we could make them out of zorb-stuff, we might have a winner.

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speaking of winners, one day in an entirely unforeseeable future, I’m going to go over this entire blog from the beginning… and see what has happened to all this stuff, or if it is indeed all vapour-ware… which is what I accuse everyone else of.

That is so cool I can hardly stand it - it’s a 10 ft prototype of a monster that (in 3 years they reckon) will be able to lift 150 tons. I wonder how they’ll power it? We’re due to run out of helium in about 15 years – and hydrogen keeps exploding. Hot air I guess – there’s a lot of that in Aus. You could paint it black and it would probably go by itself. It would be tempting to use something clear though – hydrogen say… then you could turn the whole thing into a giant magnifying glass and use it to incinerate small dogs and people in wheel-chairs etc. Not that they deserve that of course.

Bet it never happens. These things never do – still… at least they actually prototyped it, rather than just drawing some CAD pictures and posting it to ecofriend.com saying “ooh, this is the future”. It says “Skylifter uses a disc-shaped aerostat rather than a cigar shape or sphere so that the airship is unaffected by wind direction but also easier to steer.” – but we know the real reason – and that is that anything that looks like a UFO is instantly awesome. And I hardly ever use that word.