The whole flying car dream has been getting closer and closer for years now, and a few companies are getting exceptionally close to making their cars a marketable reality. Designers Greg Brown and Dave Fawcett are working on a design they call the GF7, a jet propelled flying car that can reach speeds of 550 MPH in the air.

The folding-wing flying car will fly at altitudes up to 38,000 feet but boast the interior of a luxury automobile. The four-seater GF7 is designed to be very easy to operate and will be able to reach 100 MPH on the ground via a 50 kWh battery pack that is recharged by the jet engine during flight. The battery is expected to get 80-120 miles per charge.

When in the air, the wheels will retract into the vehicle’s fuselage to streamline the body’s shape. Two vertical tails keep the whole thing stable while it’s flying, as does the 23-foot wingspan. Although it has the look of a winged car, it would be more accurate to call the GF7 a road-travelling aircraft. It would need significant runway clearance to take off and land, and it’s meant to work as a commuter craft within a relatively small geographical region.

As you might expect, the price tag for a craft like the GF7 won’t be within reach of most regular commuters. You’ll have to come up with somewhere between $3 million and $5 million (US) to zoom around in your own personal flying car. The benefit over taking, say, a private jet is that you won’t need a large team to coordinate each journey or figure out a place to store your aircraft. You also won’t need to coordinate transportation to and from the airport,which could be a rather satisfying benefit for those who have things to do, places to be, and no time to waste.

Although the team have been hard at work on their design, they don’t yet have a prototype. They hope to have one ready by late 2014, and after that there will obviously be years more of testing, regulation-passing, and government approvals to get through. Still, the flying vehicle market seems to be a burgeoning one with plenty of start-ups throwing their hats into the ring. Within a decade the fabulously wealthy people could be cruising up to their private airports and flying themselves around wherever they need to go.

[via: Gizmag)

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Seeing a Porsche drive down the street isn’t an uncommon experience, but if you saw this one it would be guaranteed to make your jaw drop. This beauty is the first-ever Porsche, built in 1898 and dubbed by Ferdinand Porsche the P1 (for Porsche 1). The car’s official name, however, is “Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle.”

The P1 is an impressive example of early electric car technology. Porsche invented the “octagon” motor just for this project, so named for its eight-sided housing. The car had 1,103 of battery weight, 287 pounds of motor, and a convertible body that could be a coupe in the winter and an open-top Phaeton-type car in cooler weather.

The Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle was one of the first cars to run on the streets of Austria. In an 1899 international motor vehicle competition in Berlin, the car won the gold medal in a rather difficult race against other electric vehicles. Electric vehicles had a lot to prove at that competition, at which plenty of petrol-powered cars also vied for attention. Ironically, soon after building the P1 Ferdinand Porsche turned his attention to developing petrol-powered cars himself.

Amazingly, this beautiful piece of automotive history was tucked away in a warehouse and forgotten about for more than a century. Upon its rediscovery, it was restored as much as possible – but the years had taken their toll on the car. The body is completely gone, as are almost every other portion of the car other than the wooden dash and the metal chassis.

When the P1 was brought to the Porsche Museum, translucent plastic pieces were installed to recreate what the body looked like in the car’s early days. Only four of the P1 models were built before Porsche decided to work on a new model. Read more about the vehicle’s technical specs on Porsche’s website.

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To most people, building your own car means hours of labor stretching out over weeks, months or even years. Condense this time span down to about an hour and you’d have enough to build the TABBY, an open source electric vehicle.

Italian alternative vehicle company OSVehicle is the creator of the TABBY. The company’s website describes TABBY very simply as “an open source framework for vehicles.” Its short assembly time doesn’t mean you have to completely sacrifice car building’s freedom to customize. The TABBY’s engine is available in traditional combustion, hybrid or fully-integrated electronic form.

Making your TABBY street-legal, however, does require special instructions. That’s where the Urban TABBY comes in. Called “the road legal evolution of TABBY,” it’s a special kit that you would apply to the chassis. OSVehicle’s website includes downloadable building instructions and a forum where you can upload and discuss your personal mods. Fully-built models run anywhere from $5,445 to $8,168, a reasonable price tag when you consider what some people will put into an old junker.

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The Volvo V60 is the world’s first diesel hybrid plug-in car. To celebrate this, the company held an architecture competition called “Switch to Pure Volvo.” The winners have been re-tooling their design and have finally unveiled an interesting, not to mention cool-looking, portable car charging station.

Synthesis Design + Architecture, the winners of the competition, built what they call the ‘Pure Tension’ pavilion. It’s a beautiful awning with a shape like a warped circle and the ability to generate enough solar power to charge the car. The original goal of the minimum amount needed to charge the car was 300 watts; the current model produces 450.

Flexible photovoltaic vinyl tiles, 252 of them to be exact, cover the surface of the mesh for optimal sun exposure. Since the flaw behind solar absorption is that it’s only as powerful as its weakest link, Pure Tension disables the parts of the pavilion that don’t receive enough energy, thus providing maximum efficiency.

Only slightly more impressive than the design is the Pure Tension’s portability. It was built from 24 parts, and along with the CNC bent aluminum frame, the skin folds into ‘B-cases’ that are a tidy 65″ x 15″ x 15″. The membrane, which does the absorbing, comes in two sections that zip together. The pavilion weighs a totals of 150 lbs.

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Now that we are all in agreement that the Segway is just never really going to catch on, it’s time to look at tiny self-driving vehicles like this one to get us around when we don’t feel like using our legs. The Hitachi Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System, or (sigh) Ropits, is a one-person vehicle aimed at increasing mobility for disabled or elderly people.

The itty-bitty car is meant to roam around on sidewalks and pedestrian areas rather than competing with much-larger cars for space on the streets. A gyro sensor keeps the vehicle upright even on uneven ground, which is an important feature when rolling around on the uneven surfaces of sidewalks.

The passenger enters the Ropits via lift-up hatch. After entering a destination on the enclosed tablet computer by touching a destination on a map, the passenger is whisked off. He or she can spend the journey reading, napping or enjoying the scenery. GPS and laser sensors help the car find its way and stay on course.

The Ropits car is meant as part of a public transportation plan in which folks with mobility problems can call a Ropits from a number of special “stops” throughout a city. For passengers who aren’t comfortable with turning over all of the control to the car, a joystick allows for a manual override. In case of an emergency (like a self-driving car uprising, perhaps?) the human inside of the Ropits can take over and drive.

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