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Audi Snook One-Wheel Concept Gyrocar Updated
The Audi Snook one-wheeled concept car sounds, to some of my readers, just like the gyrocar from The Ring, the 1969 novel by Piers Anthony and Robert Margroff. Frankly, the novel has more details than the vehicle concept design.
(Audi Snook)
The Audi Snook would travel about on just one single ball wheel, driven by a multi-directional engine. The car would be auto-stabilized. Concept inventor Tilmann Schootz relies on pure fiction to make it work; he says it achieves "“agility through instability, controlled by artificial intelligence."
(Audi Snook one-person and two-person interiors)
I think Anthony and Margroff, writing nearly forty years ago, did a more thorough job of describing how much fun it would be to drive.
Suddenly the pavement stopped.Jeff braked instinctively, but... only the naked supporting girder remained. He was going over the edge!
He accelerated forward, feeling the tread grip agin. The car jumped forward, skewed, straightened...
And he was on the bare girder, its eight-inch width matching the tread of his tire exactly. The gyro held him level as the lights of the city passed dizzily beneath the car...
(Read more about the gyrocar)
Update 18-Apr-2008 I thought I'd also throw in this picture of the (as far as I know) original gyroscopically balanced one-wheeled vehicle - the tumblebug from Robert Heinlein's 1940 story The Roads Must Roll. And, so you can compare styling, here's what the artist thought in 1940.
(Heinlein tumblebug from Astounding SF June 1940)
End update.
Via Audi Snook Futuristic Car Concept. Thanks to the indefatigable Moira for the tip on this story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/17/2008)
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