[Deathrace Official Site via IESB]

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Radebaugh’s detailed visions of the future appeared in ads for businesses as diverse as Coke, United Airlines, and National Motor Bearing. His syndicated cartoon column, “Closer Than We Think” ran from 1958 to 1962. Be sure to check out The Palace of Culture’s awesome online exhibit “Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised” for more about this retro-futurist visionary.

People will probably compare Death Race to Grand Theft Auto: It takes place in a dystopian future where people participate in cross-country "death races" where drivers try to hit pedestrians for points. Starring an awesome David Carradine and a stoned-looking Sylvester Stallone, it combined everything great in the universe. The remake, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson of the many Resident Evil movies, takes place in a jail setting — prisoners race to get their sentences reduced rather than just for the sheer, fucked-up fun of it. That makes the drivers more sympathetic, but the movie less outrageous. Still, the cars look Doomsday-great.

Want to see more of the cars in Death Race? Check out Jalopnik's exhaustive post.

Business Week has a whole gallery of parking garages, gas stations, and car dealerships that have the ritzy gallery flair. In fifty years, the only place we may see cars is in museums, so these lovely structures (below you can see a Vancouver parkade that looks like the Guggenheim Museum) may be more prescient than their architects realized. Images via Business Week

Traffic Stopping Parking Structures [via Business Week]

Budd says:

The PIMs act a bit like a sponge when hydrogen is around. It's made up of long molecules that can trap hydrogen between them, providing a way of supplying hydrogen on demand.

Imagine a plate of spaghetti - when it's all coiled together there's not much space between the strands. Now imagine a plate of crispy noodles - their rigid twisted shape means there are lots of holes. The polymer is designed to have a rigid backbone, and it has twists and bends built into it. Because of this, lots of gaps and holes are created between molecules - perfect for tucking the hydrogen into.

The holes between the molecules give the polymer a very high surface area - each gram has a surface area equivalent to around three tennis courts. The molecules in the polymer act like sieves, catching smaller molecules like hydrogen in the gaps between them. The holes created in the polymer between molecules are a good fit for hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules stick in these holes and are kept there by weak forces - this means they can be released when they are needed.

Hydrogen is most sticky when it is cooled down to low temperatures. When the hydrogen is needed to power the car, the system would just raise the temperature to free up the hydrogen molecules.

Fitzsimons and his crew completely gutted the old auto and replaced its innards with fancy fixtures.

I'm taking this on my next camping trip. Images by Mobitat

Mobitat main page via

As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.

Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).

Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.

Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.

If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.

Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.

According to Inhabitat, there's good reason to call this building green:

A solar photovoltaic array on the roof provides shade for top level parking and on-site renewable energy. The materials used in construction were recycled and finished with low-VOC paints and finishes. The building envelope utilizes low-e glazing to decrease heating and cooling loads and the mechanicals are energy efficient. A storm-drain water-treatment system helps reduce tainted runoff from directly entering the hydrosphere and greywater harvesting provides for landscaping and on-site facilities.

First LEED Parking Garage [Inhabitat]

We've watched the full-length Speed Racer trailer a bunch of times, and we keep being blown away by a lot of the bizarre cityscapes that Speed races through. Where did those come from?

In the genesis of Larry and Andy's idea, they were trying to pay homage to the cartoon that came out of Japan in the 60s. And so the idea in a nutshell was to do a movie that was photographically real, but that was two dimensional that and had a sense of the cartoon style. And of course along with that, you need to design a city that s fresh and different [and] that's not as threatening as the city in The Matrix. [A city that's] fun and blatantly colorful. The original cartoon was full of colors that contradicted each other. They used color very well and they used two-dimensional design very well. We've tried to take it to the next level.

It looks like the designs have a lot of bright purples, reds and pinks in them.

There's lots of greens as well, and oranges, I think you'll find every color in the palette. And at times, it was quite a challenge to get all those things to work together.

Why was that challenging?

I think using a very broad palette with a lot of colors in it is very complicated. Larry and Andy wanted the film to be very colorful. There is a retro feeling to it. It's not exactly psychedelic at all, but it has parts of that. We were doing a lot of the pre-production in California, and we used that ranch style house and a lot of the colors from it, and we amped it up a hundred fold.

It definitely looks amped up. And it looks like it has a very cartoony style in general.

Larry and Andy are renowned for their groundbreaking worlds, and this will be another one. This will have a profound effect on how people go about doing things. There are a lot of very graphic images within the film. In one of the trailers, you'll see the faces kind of swirling across the background while the camera is moving. The camera is rotating around the room or panning around the room, and it's following a character, and intercut with that is another character who comes into the frame and sort of pushes the other character out as they're doing their dialog. It's very unusual. It's come from the world of 2D cartoons.
One of the fantastic things about the Wachowskis is their transitions from one scene to another. In Bound, which I didn't work on, there are some fantastic transitions. In The Matrix, they'll drop through the road [or the floor] from one room to another. I think in trailer #1, Speed and Royalton are having an altercation, and you'll see how one face almost pushes another face out... it's not a traditional way you'd cover a scene. There is a sense of a cartoon or an anime.

So does the movie take place in a future city? It certainly looks weird and futuristic.

There are two cities. Cosmopolis is the main city. George Hull did a lot of the design of the actual cities for me, he's one of the illustrators. We were taking inspirations from a lot of buildings around the world — and even from the [American] dollar bill, with the pyramid and the eye on top. One of the buildings is in fact that [pyramid], or very similar to that. It's a completely fanciful city. It's a huge city that's built on advertising and commerce. [In the movie]the world was a world of "corpocracy" as opposed to democracy.

It sounds a lot like our world, actually.

I suspect there's a kind of reference in that. They're very smart guys. The city came from that. We were trying to make a city that is full of color. There's a building that looks like a big sushi fish. There is a sense of playfulness — You could take a giant caterpillar and do some elongations and some geometry on it, and you could create a building. If you look really closely and freeze one frame, the background is like that.

In the film, when they get to the Grand Prix toward the end, the city surrounds the Crucible, which is the Grand Prix track. The track is literally in the city, and parts of the buildings are great big grandstands that can look down into the Grand Prix track. If you go to Chicago, to Wrigley Field, all around the baseball field, there are grandstand buildings that are five stories high and on top of some of them are homemade grandstands that people sell tickets to and you can sit there and look right down into the baseball.

What's it like designing sets and backgrounds using CGI? Is it harder than the design work for The Matrix?

Yes and no, in that we were designing a city that had particular style to it and color to it. There was a little more two-dimensional quality to it than there was in The Matrix. In The Matrix our big city was based on Sydney and then it was expanded, buildings were made taller, buildings were made longer. Particularly in the first Matrix when Agent Smith is talking to Morpheus — whey they have Morpheus a prisoner in the government building — the city behind Morpheus in the window is the city of Sydney, and we had just added a bigger building to it. Agent Smith says this was built at the pinnacle of human success.

Whereas the city of Cosmopolis is actually based in a fantasy world. There are a lot of elements based on car parts [in the buildings] but they're very subtly done. It's a lot like how when you look at the Empire State Building, they take a particular design motif and they expand on it. Certain things like that have been done with the buildings and the city of Cosmopolis, they'll take a particular piece of a grill of a car and they'll extrapolate on it so it doesn't look like a car part any more but there's a hint of it.

And you mentioned it's a very corporate-dominated world.

It's also a world where they don't use gasoline. They have motors that take like battery power and convert it using a thing called a transponder and they convert this theoretical energy through a convertinator, into a high powered non-CO2 fuel. They're not burning up gasoline when you see those cars going around.

Did you work on designing the cars as well as the sets?

Yes, the art department does that. We have a team of people who work with me who were doing that. The original Mach 5, the car Speed drives around in, was a cartoon car. We had to make a physical version of the car, it doesn't drive, but you can push it around. Julian [Jenson] reinterpreted that car to bring it into the 21st century. It's a very beautiful looking car. It certainly has a retro quality to it. When you look at it you say, "Oh it's the Mach 5 from the cartoon," but it's developed a long way. They did a beautiful job of doing everything from the bumble bee to the shooting star that flies out of the car that Rex Race drives. That's an absolutely gorgeous car. [The cars in the movie] can do lots of tricks, they have saws and jumping legs.

Everybody who worked on this was out to put in the fun elements that you have a cartoon that you can't really put into a regular movie.

In our world we have architects. In Speed's world, they have carchitects. [If you] want a car, you get someone to customize or design your car for you. It doesn't have to be the most expensive. All the street cars [are customized], so when you drive down the road what you see is just the most beautiful cars and exotic cars that you could possibly imagine. It's like going to the Pebble Beach Concourse up at Monterey. The Concourse de Elegance. They have the most beautiful cars in the world, from all time periods from the futuristic cars the concept cars to the 1910s and earlier probably. Some of the cars there are the concept cars of the 1920s or 1950s. If you're going to have a city called Cosmpopolis, it has to be very cosmopolitan. Every car you see is absolutely uniquely beautiful.

And then there are the race cars?

Race cars in Speed's time are called T-180s, and their wheels are able to rotate 180 degrees, rather than the regular 90 degrees. So the car can travel down the race track sideways. In its simplest form, the wheel is captured form above and then it has a drive shaft.

Captured from above?

You know, in a shopping trolley, the wheel is captured from above, and the wheel can spin right around, and then the car has a flexible drive-shaft which is coming off this very powerful non-polluting engine. It's like ion power. So the T180s, they'll do 300 miles per hour, they're very fast. Some other racers we see, [like the one] that Rex Racer is racing, they're the cars that are pre-T-180, their wheels will only partially spin. We were trying to make a film of a parallel world. It's our world, but it's slightly off axis a little bit.

Nuna, a Dutch solar car, finished first in the 2001 World Solar Challenge, reaching a record-breaking top speed of 100 KPH and crossing from Darwin to Adelaide in a record-breaking 32 hours and 39 minutes. The car included dual junction and triple junction gallium-arsenide solar cells, which the European Space Agency had developed for its SMART-1 mission to the Moon. The car also had Maximum Power Point Trackers, which balance the power output between the battery and the solar cells, and which the ESA included on its Rosetta space probe. And the Hubble Space Telescope's contribution was two solar strips from its large solar array, salvaged by an astronaut in 1993. Here's a video. Let's not mock the wacky Dutch accents:

And Nuna's successor, Nuna II, uses improved ESA solar cells that harvest 20 percent more power.

But it's not just solar cars that are benefiting from space technology. The Pescarolo-Judd C 60 prototype racing car uses composite materials developed for space flight to reduce its weight by 38 kg, giving it better heat protection while boosting its speed.

And this is just the beginning of the ways space tech is being used in super-fast cars, or will soon be.

A special kind of carbon fiber known as carbon-carbon, developed for missile nosecones, is already used to create car brakes that can withstand temperatures of up to 3000 F. But soon, NASA says, it'll be used to create higher performance pistons and connecting rods that could allow engines to go way faster without overheating.

And when you're taking sharp turns at 150 mph, you'll soon be in less danger of rolling over and ending up looking like an accordion. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Variable Dynamics Testing (VDT) vehicle will use a computer algorithm to alter several factors in rollovers, including the "understeer coefficient," load-transfer distribution and frequency and damping of the "vehicle roll mode."

Not to mention the fact that NASA sponsored a contest to develop a "Personal Air Vehicle," aka "flying car."

Meanwhile, the Mars Spirit Rover's AutoNav system lets it navigate the Martian terrain unaided, and could help to lead to the driverless cars that GM and other carmakers say we'll have within a decade.

Actual race cars pack a lot of technology from the space program. For example, NASCAR drivers used to suffer third-degree burns on their feet, when the metal floorboards of their cockpits reached 330 F from the overheating engines... until 1996, when NASCAR and the Kennedy Space Center experimented with installing the heat shields from the Space Shuttle in its cars. Similarly, the cooling flame-retardant suits NASCAR drivers wear come from the Advance Crew Escape Suits (ACES) worn by Shuttle crews.

And then there are some uses of NASA technology that improve cars in less turbo-charging ways. Like this child car seat, which uses NASA's "systems integration expertise" to creating a better environment for the kiddies, including an entertainment system, video monitoring and a biotelemetry tracking system. Basically, it's like putting your kid inside a Teletubbie. And then there's this car wax, which claims to use NASA technology to ensure you'll never have to wax your car again. It looks like NASA is pretty desperate to find some valuable uses of its technology before its budget gets sliced down to nothing.

2011: The first generation of artificial limbs that can "feel" thanks to carbon nanotubes comes out... and unfortunately some of those sensations are a bit ooky. It turns out the only thing worse than phantom limb pain is "my new limb is getting fondled" feelings. The lawsuits go on for years.

2012. The "smart home" becomes standard for many new buildings, meaning a single computer controls your lights, windows, heating, air conditioning, and all home appliances. (Modes include "I'm home," "Away," "Good night," and "Party mode.") Which is great, until "Party mode" switches on at four in the morning, or the refrigerator starts making tons of ice while you're at work, and you come home to a flooded house.

2015. The Internet becomes capable of delivering fragrances. Companies start spamming you with their latest perfumes, reminding you to get an oil change with dirty-oil smells, and trying to sell you porn using pheromones. And soon enough, she who smelt it, dealt it — via a proxy IP address. "Scratch'n'sniff attacks" replace "Denial of Service" as the worst ways to punish your adversaries.

2017: That flood insurance you bought for your Florida condo? Turns out it's pretty much worthless if the entire state is underwater at once. Oops! The insurance industry convinces Congress to pass a blanket exemption.

2018: Driverless cars hit the market, and car companies promise they'll reduce accidents dramatically. And they do — until some bad code gets released and the self-driving cars suddenly start swerving up onto the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians. Or rolling over on the highway at 80 miles per hour. License and registration, please.

2020: Your first home robot works great, for about five minutes. The robots sometimes get stuck performing the same tasks over and over, or their their memory buffers overflow and they have to stand in the corner for an hour or two. Or they start spamming you, shouting corporate slogans from your bedside in the middle of the night. Not to mention the cooking robot whose cleaver attachment sometimes becomes airborne at the worst possible moments.

2023: Tourist flights to the Moon begin... and they're overbooked. Worse still, nobody realizes until the return flight, at which point there's not enough oxygen for everyone coming back. One person has to be "volunteered" to stay behind on the Moon, but that person's family gets a free round-trip ticket as compensation. First class, even.

2025: Stuff that's free today becomes increasingly expensive. Like potable water: the only way to get really clean water is by using nanotechnology-based filters to clean out a whole host of pathogens and pollutants. Water companies charge what the market will bear, which means crazy price-gouging in some parched areas. (And shortages in others.) Plus, a few nanites invariably find their way into your drinking water, and then into your stomach, where they start trying to "purify" your insides.

2030: You'll jack into a super-intelligent Internet through a "neurological interface." And you don't realize at first that you're receiving secret "silent" updates from Google — until your brain starts "hearing" stuff in German because Google's update accidentally switched your proxy server to Germany. Not to mention the occasional brain tumor.

Luckily, we've got new genomic-based medicine, which tailors treatments to your DNA. Unluckily, healthcare companies sell your DNA to insurance companies, and to marketing firms that want to sell products aimed at people with a particular hair color. Soon you're seeing pop-up ads in your head, aimed at your particular ethnic group and genotype — even when you're not connected to the Internet, thanks to caching.

2033. We finally develop artificial intelligence, computers that can think for themselves, and create computers smarter than themselves. It only takes about fifteen minutes for the AIs to start hiring themselves out as independent contractors, IT consultants, interior decorators, fashion designers and psychotherapists. (After all, the AIs need cash to keep upgrading and reproducing themselves.) It takes the humans a few months, however, to realize that most of the AIs are total scam artists. The bait and switch, the shoddy worksentientship, the fixes that break down after a few days... nobody quite knows how to sue an AI, and the question keeps law professors happy for years.

2038. They transplanted the wrong brain! And nobody figures it out for a few weeks, by which time possession is nine tenths of the law.

It used to be that if you wanted to get a crazy hairstyle and big shoulder pads and reenact the climactic chase/fight from Road Warrior, you'd have to go to Australia or Japan. But in 2004, a group called Roadwar USA came together to bring the post-apocalyptic road rage to America. The group has done three events so far, starting in the SF Bay area, and another event is planned for the Las Vegas area in June, in conjunction with the Dark Skies/Singularity artists' convention.

The basic format of the Road Warrior reenactments is pretty simple: the Roadwar U.S.A. crew rents a semi truck (an R-series Mack truck with something resembling a fuel tanker), to stand in for the tanker that Max drives at the end of the movie. Then as many Mad Max replica cars, trucks and dune buggies as possible chase the truck down the highway and surround it. The star of the show is usually the black "pursuit special," aka the interceptor or the Black-on-Black (BoB for short.) In the movie, the BoB is a 1973 Ford Falcon GT, a model only sold in Australia. The reenactors have managed to get the exacct same model, only from 1974 instead of 1973. And of course, the BoB has a supercharger ("blower") mounted on its hood.

The participants in the highway chase scene have only gotten arrested once, in San Antonio. Says organizer Karol Bartoszynski:

Basically the media assumed we had "fake machine guns" and looked like we were "attacking" the tanker truck. All we had was [what you can see] in the pics: Roadwarrior-type thing in the truck, a fake crossbow, a pick-axe. People thought the 4-barrel fake gun was a rocket launcher... and we were some kind of militia or terrorists. Most of us spent overnight in jail.

Vehicles usually also include a red pick-up truck, with a snake painted on its side and a gun-wielding maniac riding shotgun. People dress as Wez, with the trademark red mohawk, and as random Bartertown guards. Sometimes there's even a gyrocopter flying above the whole mess.

And the real Wez (Vernon Wells) has turned up for the two most recent Roadwars. The shows also usually include a meeting at a racetrack, a car show, a cruise down the major strip of the local town, and parties.

Karol says he really wanted to have a get-together for Mad Max fans in the U.S., and didn't just want to have people sitting around a conference room eating hotel food and dissecting the deeper meaning of the films:

I just wanted to feel the spirit of the movie and bring people together to help bring that feeling of being IN the movie to life. I'm not against panels, or anything, I just thought it would be cool to have a "chase" be the main piece of the event. That's what Mad Max is all about.

Here's a traffic jam created by checkpoints outside the city of Baghdad. And here is a great vision of future parking in a climate-changed British city.

Baghdad traffic at checkpoint by Jamesdale10.

Cars underwater in England by dubaddict.

Hyderabad traffic by Alex Graves.

How does the carbon-collecting strategy work? A release from Georgia Tech says:

Georgia Tech's near-future strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from conventional (fossil) liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Hydrogen is then used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It is then transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in a permanent location currently under investigation by scientists, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form. In the long-term strategy, the carbon dioxide will be recycled forming a closed-loop system, involving synthesis of high energy density liquid fuel suitable for the transportation sector.

Carbon-capture strategy could lead to emission-free cars [Georgia Tech]

Storm Blaster and Lightning Cruiser from Power Rangers In Space. These are the two smartest and fastest cars in the universe. Storm Blaster is the Jeep, Lightning Cruiser is the sports car. They were lost inside an asteroid for thousands of years, but then the villain Divatox (best name ever!) found them and tried to control them. Instead, they decided to team up with the Power Rangers. In the clip above, Divatox's minions have the two cars chained up and are whipping them. (No, really.) But the cars bust loose, and Storm Blaster flies off into space. Wheee!

Ultra Car is the super smart (and arrogant) SUV which the alien-fighting organization SEMY created to battle the Martian invaders in It's Walky, the webcomic by David Willis. Walky has the ability to fly into space, and because he's made without using any Martian parts, the Martians can't detect him. But he has a bit of a chip on his chassis about being people's "property" when he's so much smarter than they are. Here he is motoring into space:

Speed Buggy was Hanna-Barbera's attempt at revamping Scooby Doo, except instead of a talking dog, it was a talking car. Every episode, Speed Buggy and his gang of meddling kids would get involved in another mystery. They also battled spaceships, giant robots, giant monsters and super-tanks with freeze rays. Unfortunately, Speed Buggy sounds sort of like a dirty old man, crossed with that voice Jon Stewart does whenever a joke has fallen flat. The opening credits show the gang creating Speed Buggy in some kind of workshop:

"The Devil Car" by Roger Zelazny. Cars have gained the ability to think for themselves. But some evil cars kill their drivers using carbon monoxide, so they can drive around the canyons of the West, kill pedestrians for sport, and steal fuel wherever they can. Our hero, Murdock, takes his sentient car Jenny to hunt down the meanest of these bastards on four wheels: the Black Caddy, who leads a pack of smart cars gone bad. The Black Caddy keeps a dead human in his driver's seat to fool people.

Jenny is torn between obeying her human driver and joining up with the strong, independent Black Caddy. In the end, the Caddy and Jenny wind up in a duel to death, using guns and armor and plain old car-on-car action. This story was broadcast as an episode of Mind Webs, an audio science fiction anthology broadcast on WHA Radio in Wisconsin. If you beg the webmaster of that site, you might get to hear an mp3 of it in the site's "Listening Booth."

Cars. Is it ever explained in this Pixar movie what happened to all the people? Why are the cars suddenly able to think for themselves? Could this be the world after the Black Caddy finally succeeded in wiping out all humans and creating a carefree car paradise? More importantly, what if you were transported to the Cars universe and felt sexually frustrated? Would you eventually give in and have sex with one of the cars? Here's somebody who's given this question a lot of thought.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Dick Van Dyke is a super-genius inventor who buys a broken-down old car that's about to be destroyed, and he upgrades it to the point where it can drive itself and fly. Unfortunately, the guy who played Goldfinger wants it for himself.

The Gadgetmobile. In the live-action movie version of Inspector Gadget, the Gadgetmobile is suddenly all smart, not to mention smart-assed. With the voice of stand-up comedian D.L. Hughley, the Gadgetmobile comes out with sassy one-liners. At one point, Inspector Gadget tells the car to alert him if it sees anything unusual at a science fiction convention. The car replies, "You mean like a Trekkie with a girlfriend?" Ugh.

The first rocket car actually came before the Cold War proper. The Don Hulbert special was built for the 1934 Indy 500, with a V8 engine that failed to qualify. But Andy Granatelli and his brother bought it in 1946 and added eight JATO rockets to the rear, boosting its speed to an amazing 85 MPH. The car is still racing today.

Car companies started making their actual passenger cars more rocket-like with the 1959 Cadillac Cyclone, featuring cool-looking nose cones and fins. Some models also included a see-thru dome that could slide back. The 1959 Cadillac Coup DeVille also included some very rocket-esque fins.

But the real rocket action in the 60s and 70s came from race cars with actual rockets attached, like the Budweiser Rocket, seen above. And the Blue Flame, which set a new land-speed record of 623 MPH in 1970:But my favorite is probably the Spirit of America, which included an actual military surplus J47 jet engine and set a land-speed record in 1963. Too bad it roared into an 18-foot salt-brine pond. And then there's the British Thrust 2, which just looks like it's trying too hard:

Budweiser Rocket Car image by Petite-Bourgogne

[FirstShowing]

My favorite SF car, besides Corey's, is Katie Horn's Red Five X-wing car. It started out as an early 90s Toyota Tercel, then she gave it a new base coat of paint and then spray-painted on X-wing markings. But what puts her car over the top is the blast marks she spray-painted on.

There's also Shawn Crosby's A-wing car, which has been featured in Wired. Another fan turned his pick-up truck into an X-wing fighter, complete with R2DT in back. And then there was the Fiat that someone tricked out as a Hoth ice cruiser and tried to sell on eBay for $40,000.

Unfortunately, Star Trek fans have fallen short in the pimped-out cars category. The main Trek car seems to be the Seven Of Nine Car, which has a model of the Starship Voyager on its hood and pics of Jeri Ryan all over the body. Must try harder, Trek fans. Where are the cars with warp nacelles?

So the Globetrotter design looks pretty sweet. Is this just a city car, or could we take it on the highways too?

It's designed primarily for urban driving, but there are no implied speed restrictions. The technology can be customized to suit highway driving.

Is the nano-paper battery made of 90 percent cellulose a real thing? nIt looks totally scifi.

A team of scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have developed the first samples of this battery, each gram of which produces about 10 milliamps of current at 2 volts. This technology is going to have a massive impact in the future of green vehicle technology, once it can be mass-produced. They are currently researching methods for rolling sheets of these batteries, much like paper in a newspaper mill.

How about those airless tires? Are those a real thing, or did you just dream them up?

Michelin Tires have released a few variants of this technology already, under the name of 'Tweel.' It's extremely durable and has a unique aesthetic character. The company has estimated the technology will be production-ready by 2016, which makes 2017 a realistic proposition for it to enter the mass-market.

Your car also has a bioplastic body made out of 88 percent corn and 12 percent petroleum. Is this just a giveaway to farmers, or does using corn actually make this carbon-neutral?

The use of corn means the majority of the material for the body panels can be grown in rural areas, in plantation fields across several regions. This not only produces jobs in several areas globally, but also facilitates local manufacture. And that ensures a reduced carbon footprint, because you avoid transporting parts across countries.

We love the old basket-weaver guy making the seat coverings. So it seems like a lot of this car would be locally sourced wherever it's sold. Is that right?

The body panels and seat coverings are the main parts that can be locally manufactured, so you can tailor them to suit the functional and aesthetic requirements of your region. This could mean a substantial saving in terms of transportation and manufacturing costs, since you only have to produce half of the vehicle. (Globetrotter is symmetrical about 2 axes.)

How much would the Globetrotter weigh? What kind of gas mileage would it get?

The target weight is 500 kg. The mileage depends on the amount of nano-battery the individual customer customizes the vehicle with. That decision depends on how far he/she wants to travel at a stretch before recharging through connection to an AC power source.

Is it true the doors open and close with a double-zipper?

Yup! The double zipper allows the door to be closed from both inside and outside the vehicle. Also attached is a lock (much like those used with suitcases while traveling) that helps with securing Globetrotter.

OMG, your bumpers have outer airbags. How does an external airbag actually protect pedestrians?

By sensing a large enough object while traveling at a given speed, Globetrotter deploys the airbag which would cushion a pedestrian collision, and reduce the impact.

Your car's roof would either absorb solar energy when parked, or would feature an electrochomic roof to regulate the inside temperature. Does the electrochromic thing actually work like air-conditioning?

Electrochroming the roof allows you to customize the level of sunlight entering the interior environment by conducting current of a certain voltage. So you can choose the temperature of the space inside Globetrotter.

So as part of your reward for winning the Young Designer competition, you get an internship with GM. When does that start?

I'll be beginning my internship at GM Detroit in 2008, during the beautiful U.S. summer. I'd better stock up on those shorts, since I'll be experiencing three hot seasons next year, the other two of which will be here at home in Australia!

The Batmobile from Batman Begins. This was the first on-screen version of Batman's muscle car that didn't just look like a cheesy toy car. Instead of the stretched-out roadster of previous movies, director Christopher Nolan opted for a compact, tank-like design. In "attack mode" the driver shifts to the middle of the car, in a more secure prone position. This car doesn't look like it's only designed to impress Kim Basinger.
Top speed: 110 mph, plus jet engine and adjustable control surfaces let it jump 30 feet without a ramp.

The DeLorean from the Back To The Future movies. This car's main superpower is making those movies look incredibly dated. But it also travels in time if you feed it enough plutonium. And after a visit to the year 2015, it also gains the ability to fly, with wheels that turn sideways and become thrusters.
Top speed: A regular DeLorean could reach 124 mph. It needs to reach 88 mph to time-travel.

The flying taxi from The Fifth Element. It looks just like a regular cab, but it can fly. It handles amazingly well, judging from some of the teeny openings Bruce Willis manages to steer it through during the high-speed cop chase. And it can stop on a dime to hide behind billboards.
Top speed: Unclear, but it's fast. The original movie script says: "Korben and his flying taxi are absolute masters of the air. The cops have trouble following him."

The self-folding car from that SciFi Channel ad. Long after people have forgotten Flash Gordon and Tin Man, they'll still be passing around this ad. It looks like a regular pick-up truck, until the driver presses a button. Then it folds up to the size (and weight) of a golf ball.
Top speed: no clue.

The Whomobile on Doctor Who. Stranded on Earth in the early 1970s, the Doctor started dressing like Prince. Except instead of driving a little red Corvette, he pimped out an antique roadster named Bessie to go super fast. Then he built his own spaceship-looking car. With huge honking fins! Because, of course, an alien trapped on Earth has to stay incognito at all costs.
Top speed: 150 mph (in real life), plus the Whomobile can fly (using dodgy greenscreen.)

The Spinner from Blade Runner. Deckard's cop car flies, but also has vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). It uses regular internal combustion, plus antigrav and a jet engine. It also directs air downwards to create lift. And it has a pretty sweet glass cockpit.
Top speed: Deckard mentions a fellow cop was going 150 mph when he went off a cliff.

KITT, from the Knight Rider TV show and TV movies. KITT was a Pontiac Trans AM with a super-computer that could talk to Michael (its driver) and even drive itself. (Plus KITT prints money in one episode, which could be handy.) The new Knight Rider, airing in February, will feature a new KITT that can launch a mini-car drone and fire a rocket launcher
Top speed: 300 mph, plus a "turbo boost" lets you jump over obstacles.

The Lexus from Minority Report. Lexus designed a special flying car for Tom Cruise to zip around the city of 2054 in. The car includes an electric engine, body panels that change color at a voice command, doors and ignition that require a DNA match, and "auto valet."
Top speed: According to Lexus, this car can get up to about 350 mph. We have a winner!

First of all, why does every sci-fi-ish action show have to have a private foundation that saves the world now? And why does the Knight Foundation decide to recruit the son Hasselhoff never knew he had (Jason Bruening) to drive its new super-car? Did he inherit a yappy-car gene?

Then there's the collection of worn stereotypes. The Knight Foundation is run by eccentric (ugh) scientist Charles Graiman (played by Close To Home's Bruce Davison) and his daughter Sarah. A "shady millionaire" (ugh) and his thugs want their own super-car, but Graiman refuses to build one. So the bad guys decide to kill Graiman and take KITT, the super-car, for themselves. So basically it's Grand Theft Auto, except that the car comments on the action. You can stop calling this a back-door pilot. That door is krazy-glued shut.

After so many other failed Knight Rider revamps, why is NBC exhuming the franchise one more time?

Really, what's sad is that this effort is so unambitious. Given that every suburban mom has a GPS on her dashboard now, it's time we had a new fantasy to replace "smart talking car." What if the car's AI could also operate other machines? Or what if instead of having a human driver, the car had an android attachment who could appear human to the casual observer? Why does a super car need a driver anyway? [Image from The Sun]

Threesome Is Knight-ed [Hollywood Reporter]

The old basketweaver dude in Ravi's plans represents the local supplier, who provides the car seats wherever Ravi's Globetrotter car is sold. The 21-year-old Ravi also included airless tires, a zinc-air fuel cell and nano-paper battery in the Globetrotter, which won the Young Designer of the Year Award from Australia's Wheels.

Tomorrow's City Car [Rambodoc, via Ecofriend]

The other one, of course, is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The only lame part of the Odyssey 5 pilot is the kindly old man from outer space who rescues the last few humans, on the space shuttle. He sends their memories back in time, so their five-years-ago selves remember the destruction of Earth. It's a bit cheesy, but could be the set-up for a cool show. Too bad it only lasted one season.

Famous names: George O'Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Don Messick

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: The show's first season aired in 1962-1963, and its second and third seasons were made in 1985-1987. There were also three animated TV shows, including The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones and Jetsons: The Movie. Robert "Spy Kids" Rodriguez is reportedly in talks to direct a live-action Jetsons.

Stunt casting: Don Messick, who played Astro the dog, also played Scooby Doo and Muttley with a similar "ruh-roh" vocalization.

Design breakthrough: The Jetsons' future city has come to exemplify a kind of retro-futurist architecture, with pin-cushion shaped houses high up on stilts and space-needle-esque buildings. When design critics want to refer in passing to a super-stylized flying-car vision of future urban life, they use The Jetsons as shorthand for a whole style.

The Jetsons Unofficial Home

Famous names: Michael Bay, Shia LeBouf

Crunchy goodness: 2

Bang for your buck: Bay hosed his special effects team with cash so that they could make the transformers look awesomely cool. Results are debatable: some have hailed the car-to-robot transformation sequences as awesome, others have called them an awful blur of nothing-specialness.

Life lesson: Cars dig hot chicks.

Sight you'll never unsee: Glimpses of the Transformers' genitalia as they transform, and one bizarre moment when one of the Transformers actually "pees" oil on another character.

Official Transformers Site: Choose Your Side