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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Decades of gasoline-burning cars are being karmic-ly erased. The restoration of the balance is in the hands of the CARMA Project, a concept that recycles car scrap into bicycles.

“Can a bicycle make up for everything a car has done?” is the ghostly mission statement and the first thing you see when visiting the CARMA Project’s website. CARMA Project creator Leo Burnett Lisbon’s vision lead Rcicla Bicletas to create some truly beautiful cycles out of a scrapped Mercedes. It’s artistic and environmental possibilities are endless, and as far as the karmic balance is concerned, evening it out is a daunting task, a fascinating and ironically noble cause.

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The world is all about the smaller, more efficient, electric vehicle these days. And that’s a great thing, of course, except for the fact that smaller cars are far less stable than their larger-wheel-based counterparts, particularly at high speeds. Designer Heesang Ahn proposes a pretty radical solution that will let people indulge their need for speed when appropriate…but still drive that sensible city car when needed.

The MONO is only a little larger than a motorcycle when in its smaller city car configuration. It’s agile, swift, and able to fit into those tiny downtown parking spots.

But when what you really want is to drive fast on the open road, the car transforms. The tires, which previously sat directly under the passenger compartment, move out and the body of the car gets lower to the ground. You’ve got a speed machine that is still (mostly) eco-friendly since it runs on electricity.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to enjoy all of the MONO’s transforming glory on your own since there’s only room for one person in there. But as a concept this car makes us think that there is hope for the future of non-boring electric vehicle design.

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Technology has been good to modern humans, and that has never been more obvious than when we look at the wealth of transforming stuff out there. The Transporter Boat from Better Outdoors is another of those amazing shape-shifting objects – and one that we kind of want, like, right now.

The Transporter starts out as a nondescript plastic box. You can throw it in the back of a pickup, strap it to the luggage rack of your car, or even tow it behind an RV on a special trailer (sold separately, of course). But when you get to the water, that’s when the magic happens.

The box unfolds into a boat that can hold either four or seven people, depending on the version you buy. The entire transformation process takes only about ten minutes and requires no tools. Everything that you need to take onto the lake with you can fit into the pontoons, which are conveniently insulated so your sodas and beers stay refreshingly cold.

Although with most small boats sitting on the outer edge will cause the boat to flip over and you to be unceremoniously dumped into the water, the Transporter boats are built to be ultra-stable. The padded outer edges are actually the pontoons, and sitting on them won’t cause any instability.

Optional accessories like motors are available for both sizes of Transporters. Because the boats are modular, you can buy the big one and only choose to use one compartment – or buy the small one now and add on the other compartment later. When the Transporter is folded up into box form, everything you need – motor, life jackets, paddles – all fits into the box itself so you don’t have to worry about carrying multiple armfuls from the truck to the water.

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Clearly taking inspiration from some well-established sources, designer Sungak Kim gives headphones an expanded repertoire by letting them also function as off-the-head speakers. The iHead headphones were an entry in the 2012 iF Design Talents competition.

The headphones work just like any other headphones when they’re firmly hugging your listening holes. But take them off, turn the ear cushions inside out, and flip the hinges so that the cones point straight up – and you’ve got speakers that will produce enough sound for a small room.

The iHead headphones were meant to be an Apple-branded product, so of course they would feature wheel-like touch controls on the round part of the earpiece. The concept has looks and functionality, two of the things Apple products always incorporate, so who knows – maybe the tech giant will pick up this designer’s work in the future.

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