Visionary dreamers
Light Cycle Tron: Legacy
Vehicle type Cyber motorcycle
Special features More than for its plot, the science fiction movie “Tron” from 1982 is remembered for the mopeds it featured, albeit the movie is regarded as a milestone in computer animation. The design of the motorcycles back then was created by Syd Mead (see also “Blade Runner”), that of the sequel by German automobile designer Daniel Simon.
Drive The cycles run on liquid energy and the rider accelerates by pulling the front and rear wheels apart which exposes the engine.
Curious detail For 55,000 dollars, street-legal replicas of the Light Cycle – albeit without the light-band function – went on sale when the movie was released in 2010. A 1,000 cc V2 Suzuki engine was installed to power the bike, and its steel frame was lined with fiber glass bodywork.
Spinner Blade Runner
Vehicle type Automobile
Special feature Vertical take-off capability
Drive IC engines, jet propulsion and a kind of anti-gravitation unit
Use Is mainly driven or flown by police for surveillance, and occasionally a rich citizen buys an illegal license.
Design Syd Mead worked as a design artist on movies like “Aliens” and “Star Trek.” He designed the light cycle from “Tron” and talked about “electronic herds” – something we call car-to-car communication today – as far back as 30 years ago. Asked about mobility of the future, Mead, who is now 83, once said that the question had not been answered so far, and that he didn’t know if the auto industry could find the right answer.
Audi RSQ I, Robot
Vehicle type Automobile
Special features Fiberglass laminate body with “Lunarsilver” coating, gull-wing doors – plus spherical wheels allowing the car to maneuver in all directions. It’s a self-driving vehicle, an idea which, by the way, appears in Erich Kästner’s childrens’ novel “The 35th of May”. Kästner wrote it in 1931 and the fantasy also features moving sidewalks and cell phones.
Design The Audi RSQ specifically designed for the movie is based on a concept of the Audi Le Mans quattro, which subsequently was fed into the body design of the real Audi R8. “Integrating the spheres into the vehicle’s styling posed one of the greatest challenges to us,” recalls Julian Hönig, who was responsible for the exterior design of the Audi RSQ at the time.
DeLorean: Back to the Future
Vehicle type Automobile
Lexus 2054 Minority Report
Vehicle type Automobile
Special features A fuel cell powered mid-mounted electric motor with an output of 670 hp, a DNA recognition system, response to voice and gestures, autopilot, memory metals resistant to deformation, an infrared accident avoidance system.
Curious detail Director Steven Spielberg wanted a Lexus for his film – he drives one himself.
Good to know For the movie, a fully automated factory was designed in which vehicles, among other things, are produced using a predecessor of the 3D printer. A complete action sequence takes place during the production chain and ends in Anderton (Tom Cruise) fleeing in the finished car.
Transporter Star Trek
Type of travel Teleportation/beaming
Who invented it? Neither beaming nor the warp drive was originated by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry. In March 1877 the New York newspaper “The Sun” published a short story by Edward P. Mitchell titled “The Man Without a Body,” in which teleportation, as the title suggests, worked less than perfectly.
How does it work? A standard Starfleet transporter decomposes the object to be beamed into its atoms, sends these through a stream of matter and then rematerializes them at the destination.
Good to know In the Star Trek series, beaming was introduced for cost reasons in order to circumvent complex landing sequences on alien planets. By the way, the world famous phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” was never actually spoken in any episode.
Nautilus: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Vehicle type Submarine
K.I.T.T. Knight Rider
Vehicle type Automobile
Drive Knight Industries turbojet with modified reheat
Special features Pontiac Firebird Trans Am from 1982 with auto cruise and auto collision avoidance, homing device, turbo boost, super pursuit mode and an anharmonic synthesizer which makes it possible to imitate sounds and people, silent mode, microjam used to tamper with other electronic devices, CO2, oxygen and oil nozzles, emergency braking system, built-in automatic teller machine, grapples, molecular sealing, communication via voice recognition in the car and via comlink/wrist watch – plus countless other gadgets.
Good to know The series’ intro blurb “Knight Rider. A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist … a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the powerless, the helpless …”
Exoskeleton Elyseum, Iron Man and Aliens
Function They support the protagonists in tackling tasks such as lifting heavy loads in “Aliens” and in gunfights like those in “Elyseum,” “Iron Man” (Powered Exoskeleton) or “Matrix Reloaded” (Armored Personnel Unit – APU).
Very real Exoskeletons are used by the military. The system by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin is called “HULC Load Carrier” and enables soldiers to carry/wear gear weighing up to 90 kilos. Exoskeletons are used for industrial purposes as well and in medicine where the technology has been successfully supporting therapies or is used as a walking aid. The next step: bionics that fuse humans and technology in the form of smart prostheses networked with the brain.
Tube Transportation System Futurama
Type of system High-speed transportation
How does it work? There’s no explanation provided, but the TTS can be used for free, all it takes is to tell it where you want to go and the system will catapult you to your destination through transparent tubes.
Who invented it? The British engineer George Medhurst came up with the idea of using tubes for transportation. As far back as in 1799, he registered a patent for an “Aeolian engine.”
Good to know In 2013, Elon Musk proposed a system that would propel people in pod-like vehicles through a tube on air bearings at a speed of up to 1.225 km/h (761 mph). The Hyperloop was originally planned to run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, now it’s more likely that it will be built between Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
