The original Speed Racer series was made in Japan as Mach GoGoGo, and the English dubbed version was shown in 1967 to 1968, then shown in syndication for several years afterward. It finally disappeared from TV screens for a while in the mid-1970s. "Speed Racer, the superviolent, antieducational cartoon series that lived by the sword, is dead," proclaimed the Chicago Tribune on Jul. 12, 1974.

It took 25 years for a new Speed Racer cartoon to appear on American television:

The New Adventures of Speed Racer (1993). This show only lasted 13 episodes, and was widely regarded as a shallow reinvention of the original series. For one thing, Speed could now travel in time, which seems kind of like a weird tangent. And the paranoid conspiracy subplots of the original cartoon were missing, replaced with scifi-ish plots, such as Speed racing against aliens. As a scifi enthusiast, I aprove — except that the end result doesn't look that great. It was created by Fred Wolf Productions (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and featured more American-style animation.

"Winston Smith" wrote on Usenet:

In my opinion the "new Speedracer" really has nothing to do with the "Speed Racer" of the 1960's. It has the characters and a car, but has very little to do with the original. The "new Speedracer" is spiritually closer to the animation of "James Bond Junior", which is funny since "James Bond Junior" has more of the "Speed Racer" feel to it than the "new Speedracer". I would consider it "James Bond Junior, PART VI" with racing cars. There are none of the emotional social dynamics that make up the original. Either the creators are intimidated by the original, or they have no concept of what the idea of "family" means. It is more like a series of adult divorced people running around and masquerading as a family.

Volkswagen commercials. (1997) VW did a series of 30-second spots that formed sort of a continuing adventures of Speed Racer — and they were a horrendous travesty of everything we hold dear. In a typical ad, Speed is driving along when the Mach-5 is sabotaged... so he's forced to drive a Volkswagen GTI instead. Says producer J.J. Sedelmaier:

They were doing a cool, Baby Boomer-type campaign. I don't know if it's Baby Boomer or Generation X or whatever, but they were obviously hitting people my age (41) and a little younger, trying to sell Volkswagens, specifically the GTI.

Speed Racer X (2002). Another short-lived cartoon, this time on Nickelodeon, which pulled it after only a few episodes. At least this one was made by Japanese animation studio Tatsunoko Productions, back in 1997, before being imported to the U.S. In this version, the Mach 5 can fly. Also, some of the buttons on the steering wheel were different: "A" was "aero jack" instead of "auto jack," "B" was "balloon tires instead of "belt tires," "E" was "emergency wire" (a grappling hook) instead of "evening light" (a floodlamp), and "F" was "fish diver" instead of "frogger mode" (so the car's wheels would turn inwards and it would become a full submarine.) The animation was supposed to have a "darker" and more "grown-up" feel to it.

Speed Racer Lives (2006). A series of webtoons to tie in with a new toy line, it looks as though this series only lasted three brief installments before being killed. It features Speed Jr., the son of the original Speed Racer — who's still hanging around as Speed Sr., complete with Reed Richards-style white streaks over his temples. Speed Jr. is supposed to be hip and trendy, and hangs out with people with names like Nitro, Clutch and Vortex. (NItro is a girl with purple hair, Vortex wears a sort of Tron-looking jumpsuit.)

Speed Racer: The Next Generation (2008). A new animated series airing on NickToons and then coming out almost immediately on DVD, this series looks like it'll consist of three 30-minute episodes squished into 90-minute TV movies. Like Speed Racer Lives, this is all about the son of the original Speed Racer, who goes to a racing school where Speed's younger brother Spridle is the headmaster. And there's a new Racer X as well as an evil racing girl named Annalise. New characters include Speed's friends Conor and Lucy, plus a robot monkey named Chim Chim. The new Speed has to prove his worth, probably by winning a really important race.

According to Bay's website, we can expect to see even more fake news out there before the release of the movie next year:

Sorry everyone, everything you are reading (other than we are shooting in Philly) is false. We are going to give so much disinformation on this film to confuse everyone.

Of course, if he really wanted to piss off fans, he'd just kill Optimus Prime at the start of the next movie and replace him with Hot Rod and Ultra Magnus.

Bay tries to fool 'Transformers' fans [Digital Spy]

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.

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.

In Car Wars, scarce resources lead the U.S. government to nationalize oil production, causing a second American Civil War. Three "Free Oil States" spring up with their own oil production — Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Famine and plagues also hit the world hard, and then the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch World War III. In the wasteland that remains, a bitchin car is a necessity for travel, but people also duel cars for sport. (And the game explains away that you can come back from being destroyed because of advances in cloning and memory "backups.")

The original Car Wars came in a ziploc bag full of rules and information, in 1981. You'd have a certain amount of "money" to spend on your car, and you could allocate it to armor, weapons, engine enhancements, and so on. Here's one fan's explanation of the problems with this points allocation system, which later banned tank guns.

(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)

Eventually Car Wars came out with a version for tanks and boats, and even allowed you to add airplanes to the mix. You roll dice to simulate combat, and each player gets to make ten moves per second, including moving, turning, and firing weapons. The more complicated your set of manoeuvres, the higher a score you'd have to roll on a six-sided die to pull off the whole shebang. You would need a rulebook (and a lot of brainpower) to figure out if someone sideswiped you or T-boned you, according to the game's FAQ. It could take hours to play out a few seconds of car-crashing action.

Depending on the size of the map you were playing on, you could use little game counters, Hot Wheels toys, or 1/25th scale miniatures to represent your super-cars.

The game spawned a lousy imitation, Batlecars, as well as a card game version and a computer game, Autoduel.

In the 2002 reissue of the game (which went nowhere), Steve Jackson reduced the amount of moves per second from ten to three, in an attempt to speed up the gameplay and make it less calculated. (And maybe a tad more realistic. Most people don't sit there and go, "Yeah, this second I'm going to honk my horn, and fire my rocket launcher, and turn 15 degrees to the left, and, uh...") The 2002 revision also tried to become quicker because you can only take four hits before your car is toast. But it was too late to bring people back to a dice-based game with mini-cars bashing the hell out of each other. Sadly.

• Speed Racer was originally a manga series called Mach GoGoGo (which might actually be a catchier title) in the 1960s.
• Creator Tatsuo Yoshida was inspired to make the series after he saw Goldfinger and Viva Las Vegas, so you can thank James Bond and Elvis.
• Speed inherited Elvis' neckerchief and black hairdo from Viva, and all the car gadgetry and espionage from Goldfinger.
• Yoshida also created Kagaku Ninja Tai Gatchaman, or Battle of the Planets in 1972.
• Speed's name is actually Go Mifune, and the giant red M on the hood of the car stands for Mifune Motors, not Mach 5.
• The name Mifune was an homage to Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who appeared in over 170 films, including Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress.
• The name Go in Japanese is also a homophone for the number five, and it's also why Speed has a G embroidered on his shirt.
• 

  Speed first appeared on television in 1967, and was also quickly snapped up by American producers. In fact, producer Peter Fernandez provided the voices for Speed and Racer X.

• 
  
• 
  The buttons on the Mach 5's steering wheel each have a specific function: A fires the autojacks, which can make the car leap over obstacles, B deploys the belt tires for extra traction on slippery terrain, C makes the ginormous saw blades pop out of the side of the car, D extends a deflector over the cockpit, allowing it to go underwater, E activates the "Evening Eyes" which lets Speed see in the dark, F turns the car into "Frogger mode" which allows the vehicle to submerge and has 30 minutes of oxygen, G fires the "gizmo rocket," (at sort of bird-shaped homing robot) and H sends the robot back home.
• 
  
• Trixie's original name was Michi Shimura, which explains the M on her own shirt. In fact, she came from a family of rich auto-racing rivals, and was initially sent to spy on Speed in her chopper. However, she fell in love with him and started flying support over Speed's races and giving him advice on the radio.
• 
  
• In the original series, Speed's brother Ken'ichi Mifune (Rex Racer) crashes the families first car while waving to Pops in the stands. After his father chews his ass out, he runs away from home and later reappears as the Mysterious Racer X.
• 
  
• TV Guide called the episode where Racer X reveals his identity as one of the most memorable moments in television history.
• 
  
• When the animated series aired in Germany in 1971, they had to take it off the air after only three episodes because parents hated it. Newspapers called it "horror comic" and "blood and collision racket." Maybe they didn't want supercars hopping up and down the autobahn.
• 
  
• Speed Racer has been parodied on Dexter's Laboratory, Family Guy, and in the Fairly Oddparents movie, each aping the hyperspeed that Speed and crew talk in.
• 
  
• There have been several attempts to revive Speed Racer, but they've each been yanked off the air fairly quickly. A new series will begin airing on Nicktoons after the live-action film airs later this year. However, it's doubtful anyone can recapture the camp of the original.
• 
  
• 

  Check out the megalame introduction from The New Adventures of Speed Racer. Ouch.

• 
  
• 

  Here's the much better looking introduction from 1997's Mach GoGoGo, which adopted a much more hardcore anime look and feel.

• 
  
• Check out these two Speed Racer parody commercials. In one, Speed is given a Volkswagen GTI after the Mach 5 is mysteriously sabotaged, and uses it to knock other drivers off the course where they careen to their death. In the Geico one, he tells Trixie "Not now, bitch!" when she calls him from her chopper to tell him the bridge is out, then gapes when he realizes how much he's fucked.

  

  

• 
  

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.

Car chases are woven deep into the DNA of movies, says crime writer Elmore Leonard. We invented cars and movies at around the same time, and both experiences are about speed, exhilaration and technophilia. And you can't write a good car chase — you have to film it. With explosions and crazy weird vehicles. So here are our favorites:

Freejack (1992). Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver, who dies in a car crash. But he doesn't really die, he's kidnapped into the future so Anthony Hopkins can steal his body. Or something. It's all just a set-up for a giant car chase. You can tell it's the distant future because everybody has laptops with video-chat clients in their cars. How else could Estevez tell Jagger he couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse? CB radio? I also love Jagger giving him driving tips via vid-chat. I want a video Mick Jagger critiquing my driving to be a standard feature in my next car.

Andy Gill, the stunt driver for Freejack also did all the driving for the original Knight Rider, and here are a couple of his favorite stunts:

Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine is a super-driver created by the world's greatest surgeons to drive the world's fastest car, which just happens to have jaggedy fake teeth. He's up against Sylvester Stallone in the world's most vicious race, where you win or die. Here's the trailer:

Mad Max: Road Warrior (1981). Mel Gibson is escorting a hella giant oil tanker across the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia. But a whole gang of New Wave savages with mohawks and spikes sticking out of their vehicles want to jack him. Crossbows, flaming projectiles, funny helmets and weird-looking machine guns are just some of the weapons they use to try and put Mel off his game, while he gets his swerve on.

Cyber Tracker (1994). Someone in law enforcement took RoboCop a little too seriously, and now all the cops are mean cyborgs. Plus an evil corporation wants to replace political leaders with bots. It's up to Don "The Dragon" Wilson to stop this mess, the only way he knows how... with car chases. Cyborgs are crazy driving fiends in this movie. At one point, a van hits Wilson's car, flips over in mid-air, soars about twenty feet up and then crashes and explodes. Wilson, of course, is unharmed. Cyber-crashes are just better than regular crashes. The shot is so awesome, it appears three different times in the movie's trailer:

Looker (1981). Michael Crichton directed his own weird story about an evil company that scans models and creates perfect computerized facsimiles of them... then disposes of the originals. The company also comes up with a weird hypno raygun that works like roofies... it temporarily blanks out your mind and makes you unable to remember your assailant afterwards. At one point, Albert Finney and a hit-man drive around chasing each other and trying to shoot each other with hypno-rays. D00d, it's drive-by hypno!

Total Recall (1991). This one is more comedy than anything else. Arnie is on the run, with a wet towel around his head to block the tracking device in his skull and a suitcase containing an important secret from Mars. To get way from the spooks chasing him, he steals a JohnnyCab, but first he has to disable the chirpy auto-driver and take control of the joystick steering. Here's the video:

Tomorrow, we'll have the greatest car chases of science fiction from the mid-90s onward. What are your favorites?

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?

Scott Robertson loves to draw hovercraft, or "los aerodeslizadores" as they say in Spanish, which sounds a whole lot cooler. Even though they aren't touching the water, they look like they could cut right through it with the knife-edged fins, and check out the wake they're tossing out behind them. You wouldn't want to get sucked into one of those engines, but you'd probably love sitting behind the wheel of one of these things.

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 owners of Robosaurus have decided to put the dragon-like robot car up for purchase because they're retiring him from car shows, the giant robot's bread and butter. Starting January 19th, Robosaurus and all of his materials will be up for auction. If you've been saving your pennies for a rainy day and you want a transforming robot that you can drive, this is it.

You can find out everything you need to know about Robosaurus at his private robo-website, and study up on what you'll need to know about the steely beast, even the tooth engineering. Plus, if you're thinking that you'd love to buy him, but you don't have any way to get him home... not to worry. He transforms into a fully functional tractor-trailer, Optimus Prime style.

Artist Harald Belker created this red racer as a piece of concept art for a Fahrenheit 451 feature film that was canceled after a few weeks of development. It's a shame too, because we would have bought the toy version of this firetruck for sure. We just hope that all those rounded edges don't mean they'll be cutting corners when it comes to safety.

We thought fires in the future would be fought with foam-dispensing hoverpods and wormhole-powered oxygen suppression systems, but if the engines are going to look this great, then by all means keep all four wheels on the ground.

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!