Futuristic Cars in Science Fiction 

The lack of flying pedestrians for flying car accidents is unrealistic

The flying cars scene of "Attack of the Clones" is comedy gold. Imagine being in your airspeed on a Coruscant night, minding your own business while driving thousands of miles above the air, and then two Jedi just appear out of nowhere and treat your vehicle like a Mario Bros. platform. Sure those drivers cursed all the ancestors and descendants of Obi-Wan and Anakin at that single moment 😅

The irony of Doc Brown saying "where we're going, we don't need roads". Only to get to the future and have to worry about the skyway being jammed.

7:07 To be fair, once you get a certain number of flying cars you need to have some way to regulate them so they don't crash into each other all the time. I could see them being restricted to certain paths to avoid accidents. Especially when the buildings are too tall to fly over. The reason why we have so few airplanes crashing into each other is because of the relatively small number of them and we can better keep them away from each other.

5:53 Tat reminds me of something. During WW2, many civilian cars were modified to run on wood gas (take wood and heat it in a sealed container. A flamable gas will be released through a process called pyrolysis) as gasoline was in short supply. The usually ended up having something that looks like a cross between a potbelly stove and a still at the back with pipes running to the engine comparment. I guess that's sort of what they were going for in this scene.

You opened this can of worms, now I need a vehicle breakdown of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Your fault for bringing up my favorite childhood movie.

This video really needs a Part 2. There are so many other things that could be discussed about cars in fiction. -The super-car that has an entire arsenal of weaponry and bizarre high tech gadgets: every James Bond car, KITT from Knight Rider, the Viper from its TV series, etc. -Crash protection systems: most fiction avoids them, but there is one such system in Demolition Man, where the car basically engulfs you in a special foam, like a high tech all-around airbag. -Amphibious cars: not very practical (or cheap) with current technology, but they often appear in fiction since it allows more freedom in the story. As an addendum, I should add normal looking cars, but powered by something else that appears plausible, but in hindsight, it's a bad idea. I recall one British TV series, forgot its name, where in one episode someone has the genius idea of developing a self-driving car powered by a small RTG (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator), and the villain of the week wants to turn it into a dirty bomb or something, been a long time and don't recall all the details.

Honestly the flying cars following specified lanes makes sense in my mind because you would need to have designated flight patterns to prevent just random chaos. Not as strictly as we see in Episode 2 perhaps, but having designated fly zones does make sense considering that we do that with planes currently where they are given designated flight corridors to avoid collisions.

6:08 Never thought I would see footage of the anime "Phoenix: Future" in this channel. For those who don't know, it's an amazing underrated OVA that brilliantly adapts one of the arcs of Osamu Tezuka's manga "Hi no Tori", the magnum opus of his career. In this story, the crew of a ship stranded in the middle of space discover to their horror, after waking up from the suspended animation due to a fatal crash the ship suffers, the tied corpse of the only member of the group who stayed awake to supervise them. After escaping to the space pods, the characters spend most of the plot inside these claustophobic capsules in the middle of the space, trying to deduce who (or what) could have killed them. I REALLY reccomend this anime, not only because his story, but also because his amazing animation and ost

Back to the future promised us flying cars by now. *WHERE'S MY FLYING CAR, MCFLY!!*

As a world builder, this is much more useful than most other topics you do as it’s not military related. I’m actually going to do a 3 tier system of a Metro (Based on Washington D.C’s system), a series of self driving cars with non-rubber wheels on a glass like surface that allows for high speed but safe travel and flying cars for the corporate elite. But also self driving to prevent people from slamming them into their bosses house.

Flying cars are like lightsabers, they look cool but if we had them we'd be in the hospital or the morgue in a week.

Great video! You should do ocean going ships in science fiction next!

*Fun fact:* Speaking of Blade Runner's flying car, you can actually see the remains of one of these vehicles in the movie "Soldier", which takes place in the same universe

What about a hybrid between hover cars and regular cars? You would drive them in "ground mode" at slow speeds, and switch to "hover mode" while cruising or to cover difficult terrain. That would also mean that you could equip them with beefier and wider wheels designed more like a landing gear meant only for stopping, maneuvering and parking, rather than do-it-all wheels from regular cars.

Hover cars would only make sense if building roads was not available, and the hover method was more stable than wheels over rough terrain. Luke's land speeder, for example, would be more efficient at crossing desert sands at speed than any car could be. The speeder bikes more efficient at driving through deciduous rainforests. As for flying vehicles following flight lanes, so long as they were _reasonably_ safe from crashing into structures, it would make some sense, as you could have 3 dimentional traffic flows, not only changing lanes horizontally, but also vertically to reduce horizontal traffic. A 20-lane highway could instead be a 4x5 one. The use of discrete lanes keeps things organized, as the same cars just zooming around at random would almost certainly hit each other regularly, while if they only made lane changes with fair warning, it would be relatively safe from a traffic perspective. Plus you could of course _leave_ the fixed flight lanes as needed, with appropriate permissions (which would likely be only for short distances, like the last half-block or to change lanes).

The Starcar from The Last Starfighter was my first love "future car". I mean, it changed into an FTL-capable shuttle!

It's good to remember the saying about reinventing the wheel when designing your futuristic sci-fi wheel. Some artistic liberty is fine but even so it has to make some degree of sense. A good example of a bad design is in the Cyclone vehicle from Star Citizen. The wheels have tires and the rim but no solid attachment to the hub with enough free space for another hub to fit within the rim. The whole thing is held together with gravity and power transmission is through the matching gear teeth on the rim and the hub, which makes absolutely no sense on an off-road vehicle.

I always liked the Rylan space car from The Last Starfighter

About the flying cars sticking to specific lines, it can easily be explained by the city not wanting people taking random directions and colliding into each other, so you have rules about where can you fly, and maybe it uses a kind of 3d GPS to know that you are in the allowed lanes. It would still have the advantage that you could have more lanes than on the ground by staking multiple layers "streets" widout having to build a bunch of bridges on top of one another.

I am surprised there were no references to the "Mad Max" franchise, where repurposed vehicles achieved character status because of their additional functionalities beyond transportation. Also, I've been around long enough to remember the vehicles from Anderson (Gerry & Sylvia) & ITC's (UK) titles like Thunderbirds and UFO.

I always loved the idea of the computerized array of spokes in Snow Crash. Sure, it's way more complicated and has more points of failure, but you can ride over damn near any terrain because the spokes just mold around it.

I've definitely chilled on flying cars. They se em crazy dangerous unless completly automated.

My favourite example of (near-)spherical wheels with in/on wheel motors AND needless hollow interior has to be in Tron Legacy. Yes, it’s mostly bikes - but there’s exactly one car with the same wheels!

Excellent theme. It was my passion for cars, and drawing them as a child and seeing them in sci-fi films that led me to become interested in science fiction and science in general. And of course, also for drawing, art and design.

Wide tracks drastically lower ground pressure, wider tracks would be more common in tanks in real life if it wasnt for the limiting factor of all European and American railways being extremely width-limited due to tunnels and bridges

I think the Starwars style of roads flying cars follow is likely a good idea, something hardwired into the car so it must follow certain paths and not cause issues, but the Jedi can use some kind of universal key due to their DNA code or something high tech to enable it at a fingers touch. If we had everyone flying all over the place in any lane that'd be a nightmare, i almost thought maybe we'd need floating road markers but if programmed into cars it'd be enough.

I'm trying to remember where I've seen a hybrid of hover tech and wheels being used in sci-fi cards where the wheels rotate and become the hover jets. Visually, I wonder how that would work probably. But practically, it could offset some of the issues hover tech cars have. Being able to transition from wheeled to hovering would mean that no power is needed to keep the car in the air, and the wheels can get better grip for something like braking which just pushes a piece of metal against something for wheels vs needing to use more power to push the opposite direction the vehicle is traveling at that moment. And I just realized that the Bat Pod (the motorcycle that ejects from the Tumbler in The Dark Knight) solves the turning problem by making the whole wheel rotate. It certainly allows for crazy maneuvers since it's just 2 wheels instead of 4. Gotta wonder how power is put into the wheels so it can move at all though with that method of drifting with ease

Always liked the style of the cars in the old UFO series. Looked good, but different enough to differentiate the time setting of the show from when it was made.

Just happy to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on here.

No mention of "conveyances"? I saw the clip from "Demolition Man" in the video, but I liked how it was a quaint use of an existing term term, a retrologism (?) when so many others stories use futuristic neologisms.

the demolition man cars actually look good

One thing that I like about cars in sci-fi setting is their power source. Like how in Fallout there's a damn nuclear reactor in it and it creates a mini mushroom cloud when it blows. Idk if that's realistic but it is very cool to see.

Spacedock's humor and down-to-earthiness are a rare quality in youtubers. Keep up the good work!

4:54 You can have an internal combustion engine mounted in the wheel, but it would necessarily need to be a radial or preferably rotary (not Wankel) engine, although both have a lot of problems and are incredibly outdated. Radial engines fell out of favor broadly around 60-70 years ago, and were already exceptionally rare in cars, being primarily used for aircraft. Rotary engines are even more outdated, with the most recent examples I'm aware of being 100 years old. Again, they were rarely if ever used in cars, but they did see some use in hub mounts on early motorcycles. However, both were prone to hydrolocking due to the oil flowing down into the lower cylinders at rest, and rotaries specifically were difficult to throttle, generally using systems like a choke and clutch to reduce power and prevent power delivery to the wheels when stopped, respectively.

8:44 holy shit i never thought you'd put ultraman tiga in these videos.. the moment i saw the guts logo i had to take a double take

maybe a video on sci fi trains next ?

I really love the flying cars (airspeeders in this case) in Star Wars. It's cool as f*ck to have a car that literaly can fly like a plane. That said, these vehicles can be very damaging. For example, if you pilot an airspeeder in Taris in the KOTOR era, the most likely thing is that Zayne Carrick, chasing a gum thief, will crash into your hood and cause a huge traffic disaster with dozens of fatalities 😅

I don’t hate fat treads on tanks, also makes sense for a vehicle that may need to operate in heavy grav environments. Tank gets heavier relative to mass then the treads need more surface area to distribute weight.

Gasp, Not one reference to the Starcar from Last Starfighter! I guess it is so cool it can't get on this list.

7:30 **Realizing that we already have Fly Cars, and have for a long time.* *They're call "Planes" and "Helicopters"** [Mind Blown]

Great compilation of vehicles in the video.

And, depending on the series and/or worldbuilding, vehicles, especially cars, can be a character all in of themselves.

Proud of seeing Michelin in a Spacedock video !

I feel like a lot of Sci-Fi future cars really don't consider how practical said future car is as an actual day-to-day driving vehicle. Technological development for commercial vehicles isn't going to make them faster, more maneuverable, or better in a high-octane chase scene... Developments are likely going to be aimed at making them cheaper, more energy efficient, safer to drive and more able to be automated. Everything beyond that is personal preference of the driver for their specific needs: Cargo space (But mostly car go on land), Aesthetic, Ease of storage, varying degrees of optional offroad potential.

7:15 I think even if we had flying cars, we would still need a traffic system, and you showed clips from Attack of the Clones, where the system is at least in layers, unlike Back to the Future II where traffic is the exact same as ours, on one plane, but in the air.

Bro I literally just finished this movie an hour ago, what a timing

Honestly I find it much easier to treat flying cars like 'bladeless rotor crafts' since their aerial ability is roughly the same. With pilots for both being trained professionals that can taxi their passengers. The best reason I can think of to invest in hover cars is a driving environment that is already incredibly low traction like constant ice and snow.

Honorable mention: cable cars from the revelation space universe. Basically a cabin with robot arms that grips cables hanging around a city. It’s controlled by computer so the ride is smooth as a train or car ride.

I've been waiting over 30 years for airless tires and not expecting them to be in production in my lifetime.

i know it does not fall under this category specifically, but i feel mentioning the fact that these kind of futuristic cars tend to have lot of almost random assortment of gadgets in them, like knight rider's KITT

Tbh I feel flying cars def have a place in scifi. Even irl as you would probably just have to get a special license and training for them just like a regular pilots license.

On the subject of futuristic vehicles, I think it would be interesting to cover futuristic motor sports like the 2008 Speed Racer.

If ever was alive to see flying futuristic cars as the norm for getting around, I would be stressed out trying and studying for the DMV written test.

It should be pointed out that Cyberpunk's usage of the term 'Aerodyne' isn't a marketing / manufacturer's name. It is the actual term for any heavier than air flying vehicle that uses vectored thrust for its flight rather than an aerodynamic surface (stationary or rotary wing)

While wide tires do provide better traction It's actually not because they increase friction. Friction is entirely independent of contact area. Sports cars use wide tires because wide tires can be made of a softer rubber The softer rubber increases friction. Off-road vehicles use wide tires to reduce ground pressure; and in order to better handle driving over loose material.

In my book Blood Hunt, it's set up that most cars hover via a maglev system. I used the concept of solar roadways to gather enough energy to power electromagnets in the roads that repulse the electromagnets in the cars. I also set where the roadways had sensors in them for the function of auto-driving rather than having them be on the vehicles themselves.

Adam Something has a good video on flying cars.

You can use pressurized tires in vacuum, it's just harder to inflate them there. The space shuttle for example. There are also good reasons to have roads for flying cars, especially in a city with extremely high population density, and traffic wanting to go up and down as well as N S E and W. A good example of this is the fifth element.

Well, flying cars following lines for no apparent reason other than avoiding collisions actually makes sense, after all that's precisely how air traffic is organized already, with dedicated lanes depending on destination. In a way aircrafts indeed are limited to roads in the air - and we are very lucky that's the case, otherwise we'd be under constant threat of getting hit by an engine, a tire or human torso literally out of the blue permanently because shit would fall out the sky constantly all around us.. 😅

I'm surprised you didn't include the Rylan star car from "The Last Starfighter" which is capable not only of high speed ground movement, but interstellar travel as well.

"But where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!" Benjamin Sisko.

I love this topic. I'm a car guy and I always get interested in seeing civilian vehicles in media.

1:00 most tactical vehicles have a central tire inflation system. Which means you can deflate them and leave very little air left and let that expand in the vacuum and you’re still left with usable tires since the tires in said tactical vehicles are run flats and are already rigid and only need air to keep its shape

5:50 Side note, this is how you solve 50% of the problems on the West Coast.

I've always liked the idea of vertical takeoff and Landing cars. Cars that can drive on the road with wheels just like any other vehicle but have the option to take off when fuel efficiency isn't an issue and you got to get somewhere quick without obstruction

That Robocop car was intended to look tacky. In the mid-1980's, Detroit made "prestige" cars by tacking on assorted crap to ordinary sedans and basically charging you for plastic and decals. The 6000 SUX was meant to be a continuation of that trend into the future.

“Strange rubber feet, like a wolf!”

Imo, the SUX from RoboCop isn't tacky, and actually looks rad

it would be interesting to see a SF story with 'tumblebugs' ('The Roads Must Roll') -- or our current EUCs -- as a primary transport. I think Syd Mead made an illustration with EUCs being used in an O'Neil colony.

Just something I wanted to point out: The jeeps escorting the limo in The Creator are Mitsubishi Type 73s, jeeps made in the 1990s for the Japan Self Defense Force. I know most people won't recognise them (which is probably why they were picked), but 1990s army jeeps escorting a 2070s limo is like the modern Cadillac One limo being escorted by World War 2 Willys Jeeps and Hudson Hornets.

I've seen once somewhere the idea of a variable-width wheel. I think it had something to do with air pressure and some other hijinks, but it was really cool. The tires would get slimmer in straight lines, therefore reducing drag and wider during turns, increasing stability. Also, something I see very little are walkers with wheels. Imagine a four-legged walker with a wheel at the tip of each limb. When in "road" mode it can keep its limbs close to the body and drive on the wheels, and if hard terrain requires, lock the wheels in place and use the legs.

I always liked the cars and moon mobiles used in the UFO tv series.

Gotta say it is really nice to see you mention cyberpunk so much, was sad to see not a single mention of the basilisk in your tank video

This actually made me think of the cars from Turn A Gundam. Specifically cause it reverses the usual trend with the cars being old and comparably primitive things for such a far future setting. Of course there is a reason for that, but thats a spoiler. Another one that I can think of are the various insane cars from Redline.

"The big downfall of these things is that they're really just worse trains, if you think about it" Can't believe @AdamSomething wasn't summoned by that line

To be fair to flying cars obeying to traffic lines: You know the chaos of regulating a flight zone around an airport? Now imagine that expanded to the average highway in the amount of people who have access to a plane

"They're just worse trains" -- Hoojiwana summoning Adam Something. XD

Smart materials. That's the future of treads, and they may not even be a wheel. A wad of stuff that hardens and softens selectively around a pair of axial bars.

Commercial airlines fly on designated routes set by governments and the airlines, especially when making their approach to airports. Pilots also have to submit flight plans with the route they plan to take before each flight . It would be less realistic for flying cars to not to fly in designated lanes.

You don't actually need airless tires in space. The air pressure difference between space and Earth at sea level is 14.7 PSI. Which means if you have a tire aired up to 40 PSI, on Earth by the time you shoot it into space it will effectively be at 54.7 PSI which really isn't a huge difference, certainly not one that will cause catastrophic failure. The biggest reason for using airless tires in space nobody wants to be changing a in a spacesuit

Thanks for the content.

4:22 year by year we're getting closer to the T180s from speed racer

on setting whit hovercars that runs on "track/roads" is that I presume that it runs on the infrastructure when on it and then you use the internal hover engine (if the car have it) when needed or when your not on the track/road (road whit hover tech support). also I hope shows whit ground hover cars have some kind of landing gear just that we dont see them deployed or they are on (what I will just call magnet parking lots and thoes just hover whit no power).

If you want an example of a simple rotatable wheel, FRC's Swerve Drive is a good example. They can even be externaly powered rather that with an internal motor.

top notch music choice for this video. I know the Red Faction Guerilla soundtrack when I hear it!

"however, the big downfall of these things is that they're really just worse trains" this could be said of all cars

Could you guys do a video on the Terran battlecruiser from StarCraft? Its such an iconic design and the thing has so much presence when ever its seen in cinematics of both StarCraft one and two!

Did not expect an Ultraman Tiga clip, nice.

I don't want flying cars... I grew up in the city so I know what impact traffic can have it's residence (so I don't want lines of flying cars up around the top of biuldings) and I also spend a lot of time in the country with rural surrounding and again, I don't want flying cars overflowing from the urban areas either. I want mass transport to go underground in hyper-efficient, ultra reliable tube shuttles, to leave the surface free of traffic. Then that would leave much more space and opportunity for recreational driving in the open!!

Wide tracks help distribute ground pressure, see early ww2 German pz 3 and 4 tanks for an example, ostkitten or something spelt similar was a modification to widen the tracks to help with snow and mud in east Europe.

First time I ever saw the whole "solar power routed to gas tank" thing was in Dark Angel.

7:05 Right...because _modern airplanes_ don't follow pre-determined, well-known, and regulated flight paths under the direction of Air Traffic Controllers all the time, they're just going wherever they want, so why should flying cars be any different? Okay, being less sarcastic now: I'm pretty sure all those flying cars have on board systems that direct them into those lanes of traffic for purposes of collision avoidance and traffic control the same way we've got standardized aviation routes and flight levels and navigation waypoints and TCAS such on modern aircraft. We've had to do all that since the increase in both aviation traffic and the speeds at which they fly have made VFR (Visual Flight Rules) both largely obsolete and incredibly dangerous to rely on outside of the smallest prop-driven aircraft that simply can't mount all of it...yet. Tech miniaturization will catch up to that eventually. So the question for me isn't so much "why would flying cars be so regulated in their flight paths" and more "why _wouldn't_ they be?" You can't exactly put road signs and lane markers in mid-air, so all those things would have to be displayed inside the vehicle. ...Assuming the show-runners and designers thought about that to begin with.

Damn I guess we really do keep reinventing the wheel.

One of the best examples of a scifi car is in the 2008 speed racer movie.

a video on futuristic walkable cities, cycling infrastructure, 15 minute cities, pedestrian friendly urban design in sci fi

Future's without need of Cars. Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe: 'slidewalks' (think of those things in airports, except everywhere) 'transfer booths' (dial in a teleporter) 'stepping disks' (open air, fixed point-to-point teleporters, jump one city block at a time)

Great video...👍

the asymmetric designs of Cyberpunk2077 to me suggests that car safety laws have since been thrown out the window, since many modern automobiles designs are not only influenced by fashion and taste, also vehicle design regulation, that is what has produced hidden and popup headlight designs during the 60s-80s, because american regulations requiring sealed beam headlights. now without those laws or being made toothless, those manufactures can make clearly unsafe designs just for cost cutting or sheer quirkiness for market appeal. it also reminds me think of those life size clay models used by automaker design teams that make the model asymmetric to test aerodynamics and study style, like the manufacturer just sees the unfinished "sketch" clay model and pushes it into production lol

Did you and Templine Institute coordinate on this? XD You both uploaded videos which cover The Creator on the same day and the same hour