The last beacon of hope on the sandy wastelands of a post-oil crash Australia.
Read on for our take on the impressive, and forgettable, futuristic sci-fi cars we’ve ever seen.ĥ Best Cars in Sci-Fi Pop Culture: Mad Max Interceptor Sometimes you end up with an iconic design that reverberates through the eons and surpasses its role as fictional transportation, but almost as often you get a jumbled mess of incomprehensibly ugly styling cues and eyebrow-raising “functionality” that makes you wonder if the producers had ever even seen a modern automobile.
This, of course, is all in addition to the apparent wheel-as-lift-generator function we see in the DeLorean, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and the Strange Tales "air car" (as per the other answer).The cinematic future might not always be riding on four wheels, but there are a fair number of sci-fi movies that offer their best - or worst - guess at what cars might look like further down the timestream. but the retrofit was efficient and smooth rather than awkward and haphazard." "this thing used to just be a regular car, and it's been retrofitted to become a flying car. So not only do we have visual reinforcement of On the flipside, having the wheels simply fold sideways, rather than fold into a special receptacle, specifically could suggest that the vehicle was retrofitted, which in fact seems to be the case in all the examples brought up here.
Having some kind of outward transformation occur makes the vehicle look like a flying machine. Imagine if the DeLorean's wheels didn't somehow change. It can't "just" take off: it would look ungainly. Third, something visual needs to happen when the car takes off. I think having a flat bottom surface is likewise important for conveying the impression of "hovercraft" or "airplane," both of which have flat or flat-ish bottoms. The DeLorean wheels don't fold away, but they do fold. This is such a standard feature that it is likely to reinforce, consciously or otherwise, the specific visual impression of something that flies. Second, we're used to seeing flying machines that have retracting wheels: commercial airplanes. It's certainly better for flying dynamics to not have wheel wells exposed, and it probably also helps with steering and balance to prevent the wheels from rotating freely. Look at the LEGO set: the wheels don't just flatten, they actually fold under the vehicle. Why go sideways at all? Because it makes it look and feel more like a flying machine than just a car in the air.įirst of all, it's potentially more aerodynamic. This answer is speculative, but I'm posting it as an answer and not a comment in the hopes that it will generate some discussion. The surface of the sea, kicking up a big bow wave like a speed-boat. So Commander Pott trod theĪccelerator into the floorboards, there was a great whirl of sprayįrom the four wheels, and CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG fairly sped across They were almost skimming over the surface. In her and the only way to keep from sinking was to go so fast that Well, that was all very fine, but she was a heavy car with four people Motor-boat, with the four wheels whizzing round and round propelling There was a jerk andĬHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG began to move through the water, just like a This meant and what the result would be, so he pressed slowly on theĪccelerator and, just as the waves came up level with the floorboards,Īll four wheels began to turn like propellers. Out like a hovercraft! Being an inventor, Commander Pott realized what In the 1964 novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, by Ian Fleming (yes, the guy that also brought us James Bond) the car actually does have the wheels turn flat to create a hovercraft effect for traveling over water:Īnd do you know what? I bet you can’t guess! All four wheels, pointingįore and aft as all car wheels do, had turned and had now flattened
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