It is one of the strangest and most unknown projects of the last millennium but it is also very interesting to conceive: get ready to get to know the Ford that does not fear land, water or any tire puncture …
The history of motoring is also made with failures: for ten good ideas that are applied to production models there are thousands of failures and experimental cars that end up in oblivion. Unfortunately this is the case, if he does not fall to the ground, he never learns to walk and this is well known by the most famous car manufacturers.
The American brand Ford, for example, has a lot of failed prototypes and never produced in its centennial history. We recently saw the Ford Maya but there is something of it even more absurd in the past of the brand, a car that certainly deserves to come out of the oblivion to which the harsh law of history has unjustly condemned it.
The name Levacar may not tell you much. But it should because – at least that we know – it is of the only car capable of levitating ever produced at the prototype stage. This car was born in the sixties in the broader context of the space race against the Soviets which – as we have seen in the past – inspired designers to do increasingly crazy things.
Get up and glide!
The concept behind the Levacar resumes an old Ford patent from the thirties and is intriguing to say the least: the car used three powerful air jets produced by as many nozzles arranged on the frame to levitate from the ground, very similar to modern hovercraft. Testing resumed in the spring of 1959 at the famous Ford Rotunda and had surprisingly good results.
According to numerous witnesses, the Ford Levacar with a person crammed into the single-seater cabin he actually managed to levitate for a few seconds about ten centimeters from the ground. The car was a very ambitious project to the point that the designers had designed it to withstand a maximum speed of over 800 kilometers per hour! Two Veyrons together in practice.
As you can see from the fact that – unfortunately – we do not travel in supersonic flying cars, the project was abandoned until it was forgotten a few years later and the car never fitted the supersonic engine that Ford designed for it. Understandable: it was an innovative but expensive project that would have required a simply unacceptable amount of funds. And so, the curtain falls on the Ford hovercraft.
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