Hasta La Gadget!

The tenth James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me will forever stand out as the movie that had the submarine car in it. Now you can own part of pop culture history: RM Auctions will be putting the bizarre underwater vehicle up for grabs this September. If you’re more of a Transformers fan, think of it as an Autobot that only has alternate modes. Eh? Eh? Sold you with that bit didn’t I?

The submarine was based on the 1976 Lotus Esprit, which was Bond’s signature ride in The Spy Who Loved Me. Apparently the prop makers built different models for the famous transformation scene, which you’ll see in the video below courtesy of YouTuber Maccastreisfan.

RM Auctions will be selling the fully transformed submarine model. According to Lotus Esprit World, the submarine has four fixed fins and four propellers with steering vanes. Apparently it even shoots projectiles. So yeah, it’s a real working sub. The downside? It barely works. It has no brakes and has horrible visibility because its windows are sealed. Obviously it doesn’t transform into a car, much less a Lotus Esprit.

Of course moviegoers didn’t care that the sub was actually a lemon. The movie did very well and Lotus made bank off of the publicity. According to BBC, RM Auctions estimates that the car will fetch around $760,000 (USD). Expensive. Too expensive. Especially when you can get an Esprit that actually drives for about 8% of that.

[via Werd, Lotus Esprit World & BBC]

External batteries are great to keep our mobile devices juiced up, but I’ve never seen one in a car form factor before. Now we have one. Japan Trust Technology (JTT) has introduced the GT5200 Coupe with a built-in lithium-ion battery that will charge your tablets and phones that are equipped with a microUSB port.

The Minicar GT5200 Coupe looks sort of like a BMW from the front, though it’s not any specific model that I can tell. It has a 5200mAh battery inside and is available in 4 colors: white, black, crimson red and deep blue. There is a display mounted on the sunroof, which shows the battery usage and of course, built-in LEDs in the headlights and tail lights that flash during charging. It will charge your device about 300-500 times.

The GT5200 Coupe charger is only 3980 yen (~$40 USD), though there’s no word on availability outside of Japan yet.

[via Damn Geeky]

There have been many attempts to recreate the design of the Hoverboards from Back to the Future II, but none of them have been functional. Now, there’s a project which just kicked off with hopes of creating an actual, working Hoverboard by the Summer of 2015 – the same time period that Marty visits in the movie.

With the goal of creating the world’s first production Hoverboard, Robert Haleluk of Haltek Industries has embarked on an Open Source, crowdfunding project.

Assuming it can actually be produced, the real world Hoverboard won’t look quite like the ones in the movies, in order to accomodate a propulsion system. According to project leader Robert Haleluk, the Hoverboard will be powered by omni-directional tubeaxial blowers – similar to the ones we saw in the Aerofex Hover Bike.

The boards would be constructed from a honeycomb carbon fiber to keep weight to a minimum. In terms of power source, Haleluk is looking at two promising new lightweight battery technologies – a Lithium-Air battery in development by IBM with the goal of powering a car for up to 500 miles on a single charge or a unique energy device being researched by Stanford which can store power in a sheet of paper with special ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. Of course, neither of these technologies is in production yet, so that certainly creates a risk factor for the Hoverboard project. Current off-the-shelf battery technologies would likely be insufficient to lift a passenger for any meaningful period of time.

Should the Hoverboard project come to fruition, the boards would interface with a companion smartphone app, which would provide the ability to lock and unlock the board, turn it on, and run diagnostics among other things.

In order to fund the development of the Hoverboard, Haleluk has set up an Indiegogo campaign with a funding goal of $1 million (USD). These funds will be used for research, development and production of the first Hoverboards. While a bid of $10,000 or more is required if you want to end up with an actual Hoverboard, lower pledges will be used to further research and development efforts.

Naturally, a project like this is fraught with risks for investors, and there’s a good chance that the end result will be less than stellar. But for those of us who have dreamed of seeing the futuristic vision of floating skateboards come to fruition during our lifetimes, it could be pretty exciting if it actually works out – and we’ll never know if they don’t try.

Japanese toilet company Toto has a bike that runs on poop. If you want to save on fuel and produce your own fuel instead, this is the bike for you. The toilet you see there is just decorative, but the engine does run on poop.

It’s called the Neo and it took three years of research, development and design. It is basically a 250cc trike, with a built-in toilet for a seat. However, I was just kidding about you contributing to the fuel supply, which is actually purified and compressed livestock waste. So it still runs on poop – just not yours.

The bio-gas that it uses comes from the Shika-oi, in Hokkaido where waste and household water are converted to methane gas via fermentation. The methane gas is then converted to bio-gas by purifying. The bio-gas is what ends up in the bike, so there’s no actual manure anywhere, but it’s a fun design that gets the word out about alternative energy.

[via Neatorama]

The hard part about driving isn’t exactly the driving part; it’s actually parking. I can drive automatics and stick shifts, but it takes me close to a quarter of an hour to park after I’ve found myself a spot. It’s not only infuriating for other passengers in the car, but it also annoys other cars who get inadvertently stuck while I do my thing.

I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people have this problem. Why else would Volvo come up with a car that can park for you?

Note that this isn’t like Google’s driverless cars. Instead, it’s more like a driverless valet. Once you arrive at your destination, you’re supposed to just pop out of the car and leave it to find a parking spot. It doesn’t use any mapping technology, but relies on sensors that have been embedded in the ground instead.

Volvo calls this “Vehicle 2 Infrastructure.” It’s a pretty neat concept, but I just don’t see establishments spending thousands of dollars to install sensors on their parking spots.

That’s unfortunate, because I think we could all use an autonomous parking feature for our cars.

[Volvo via Dvice]