Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads — We Need Exceedingly Calm Water
Someone made a De Lorean hovercraft, and took it for a spin in the San Francisco Bay during a baseball game. It’s… it’s pretty awesome. Even the game’s broadcasters seem reluctant to have to call the game when a faux McFly is tooling around on the water. From the hovercraft’s maker original Kickstarter for the project:
When it is done, the craft will be able to hover on anything flat (asphalt, sand, water, etc), but it will be mostly driven on the San Francisco Bay. The hovercraft is registered with the DMV in California as a boat (it is not street legal). The top speed should be around 45 mph, which is pretty impressive for a vehicle with no breakes (it’s not touching the ground, remember!). If you have never seen a hovercraft, the basic concept is that a fan pushes air underneath the middle of the craft and a “skirt” (basically a flexible inner-tube around the perimeter of the craft) traps that high-pressure air under the craft, which lifts it off the ground.
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.