A 20-year-old mastermind from Romania has built the world’s first full-size Lego car, with a compressed air-powered Lego engine. It has space for two passengers and can hit a top speed of around 30 kph (18.6 mph). At this point, you should probably watch the rather awesome video, embedded below.Dubbed the Super Awesome Micro Project, the Lego car was conceived by Steve Sammartino of Melbourne and constructed in Romania by Raul Oaida. The build, which took 20 months to complete, was crowdfunded by 40 patrons to the tune of $22,000. While the car consists of more than 500,000 Lego pieces, the diminutive plastic brick was eschewed for some of the key, load-bearing components, such as the tires and wheels — and for things like gauges, which are rather hard to build out of Lego. The most exciting part of the Lego hot rod, of course, is the engine — which, rather miraculously, appears to be fashioned entirely out of Lego. There don’t seem to be many technical details, other than it consists of four separate orbital engines, each equipped with 64 cylinders and pistons.
Without seeing inside the engine there’s a bit of a question mark over the “orbital” label — orbital engines, which were invented in 1972, are an odd type of engine that, as far as we know, never really got past the prototype stage. It is more likely that the Super Awesome Micro Project is actually powered by a radial engine (and indeed, it looks like a radial engine). In a radial engine, the pistons all work in concert to drive a central crank shaft. Somewhere out of sight is a canister of compressed air that drives each of the 256 pistons.Sammartino and Oaida say that the hot rod is capable of 20-30 kph, but that they drive it slowly as they’re scared of a ‘giant Lego explosion.’ Presumably there is a hard limit on how much air pressure the Lego cylinders can withstand, and thus how high the engine can rev. Or considering the blocks are almost certainly glued together, maybe the limiting factor is heat dissipation — those pistons, without any kind of real air or liquid cooling, are probably generating a fairly large amount of heat.
The Super Awesome Micro Project was a one-off project that was mainly done for self-serving PR reasons — Sammartino himself is a marketing guy, and he drummed up crowdfunding by telling the patrons that, “Your association [with the project] will be the most interesting thing on your career or entrepreneurial hacker techie CV.” Oaida, however, is just an all-round Lego nerd and cool guy: you might vaguely remember his name from 2012, when he commemorated the end of the Space Shuttle by floating a Lego Space Shuttle to 35,000 meters — the lower edge of the stratosphere (video embedded below).Now read: TCP/IP over Lego model trainWorkers take the wraps off the Batmobile at the Detroit auto show. You don’t need to be fan of superheroes to appreciate what Chevrolet unveiled this week.The automaker, along with students from Detroit’s Cody Rouge Community, built a life-size Batmobile from Lego bricks and took the wraps off it at the North American International Auto Show.
The 17-foot-long “Speedwagon” was part of a promotion for the upcoming “The Lego Batman Movie," which comes out next month.The vehicle used more than 34,000 Lego bricks and, according to Chevy, is “designed to strike fear in the heart of any villain." The Lego Batmobile was created with 34,000 bricks. The company even used the Batmobile in one of its “Real People, Not Actors” commercials that aired this past weekend. “To work on the Lego Batmobile with Warner Bros. is an absolute thrill for us at Chevy,” said Paul Edwards, U.S. vice president of Chevrolet marketing. “Many of the themes in ‘The Lego Batman Movie,’ like imagination, family and community, align perfectly with our Chevy brand values and add to the value of the partnership.”GM even added a webpage to its Chevy site showing the “exciting available options.” Sadly, however, drivers wanting to buy one for their Bat Cave, er, garage, will be heartbroken when they see the small disclaimer at the bottom of the website: "Product not available for purchase.”
Detroit is safer today with the Batmobile in the shadow of GM headquarters. This is my Next Jan 14th 2017 at 9:00AM Josh Scott Photography / Autoblog Few things in this world stand the test of time like Lego. Likewise, few icons of popular culture have been as pervasive and as memorable as the Batmobile. From the campy realism of the 1960s to the modern and militaristic tank of the recent films, Batman's rolling monument to fighting crime has taken on many shapes over the years. In the lead up to the release of The Lego Batman Movie, Chevrolet along with students from Detroit's Cody Rouge community, A World in Motion, and First Lego League have build a lifesize Lego Batmobile. In short, this thing is rad. It's always amazing when a group creates a 1:1 scale version of a car out of Lego, but the Batmobile is definitely one of the best. This iteration of the Batmobile is definitely more fanciful and crazy than the more recent film versions. Giant wings, giant wheels and a giant bat hood ornament adorn this car.
In typical fashion, the car is equipped with all manner of crime-fighting gadgetry. The raw statistics for this full-size Lego kit are amazing. It's 17-feet long, nearly 7-feet tall, and more than 9-feet wide. It's constructed out of 344,187 individual Lego bricks, using 17 different colors. It's surprising that it took so many colors, since the Batmobile isn't exactly known for being anything more than shades of black and grey. It took 222 hours to design and 1,833 hours to piece together. Assembly was handled in Enfield, Connecticut. To go along with the Lego Batmobile's debut, Chevy created a clever spin off its "Real People, Not Actors" ad campaign, featuring, of course, Lego Batman. The Chevrolet connection may seem like a forced marketing push, but there is history between the automaker and the Batmobile. The 1989 Tim Burton-directed Batman used one of the most memorable versions of the Batmobile. That movie car was actually partially constructed from the bones of a Chevrolet Impala and was powered by some variation of a Chevrolet V8.