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I was thinking... what if we had magnetized roads, driveways, parkinglots, etc. And the bottom of your car didn't consist of wheels, but a flat set of magnetic metal plates. I haven't figured out how it would work exactly, since I'm no scientist. But I figured it would be made of several plates that I will describe below... And if you could somehow change the magnetic charge of a plate only *slightly* then you could propel the car in a direction. The basic idea is that the overall charge of the plates is the same as the ground, so that the car never really touches the ground. And then if the back plates' charges increase, it would propel the car forward, same as the front plates. The way it would turn the car is by giving it a charge on the side to propel you in the other direction.


There.
SELECT CASE letter of plate to increase magnetic charge of
CASE A : propel car backwards
CASE B : propel car forewards
CASE C : change direction of car towards right (steering)
CASE D : change direction of car towards left (steering)
END SELECT

i msyelf weould definatekly be interested in makign a miniature model to see if its pssible. too bad i need money to do so.

Using magnetic cars/leviation effect does work, but unfortunately its very costly.. even to do it for simple tracks(relatively speaking) like those on a railway.

seph this idea is very old, it has been implemented as well. But not in the form of cars, because they will get too bulky and will be unstable. The vehicles which use this idea are called as mag-lev(magnetic levitation) trains.

http://www.o-keating.com/hsr/maglev.htm
http://travel.howstuffworks.com/maglev-train.htm
http://www.rtri.or.jp/

Yup. As TBBQ mentioned, some trains use this technology. In fact, the fastest train in the world uses it - I believe it's in France. The reason it can go so fast is that it can propel itself, but it doesn't touch any material except air (it levitates). So that means it has virtually zero friction to bog it down.

Nope, its in Japan



Looks kinda freaky actually

Zack, I think you mean the TGV (Train du Grande Vitesse or something like that), but AFAIK it doesn't use this system

Eh, it's just a foggy memory of mine from some Discovery Channel documentary on levitating trains or something...I certainly could be wrong.

I've always wondered what prevents it from killing your digitalwatch. Anyone know?

rubber coating? magnetic fields can be weakened a lot, to a point of containment D: