Toyota working on cars that hover above the roadway

Wed, 11 Jun 2014

Toyota is one of the largest automakers in the world, but it's not content simply building and selling conventional cars – it's been at the forefront of numerous advancements in ground transportation. It is widely credited with advancing the cause of hybrid propulsion, and alongside Audi and Google, is among the first automakers seriously testing self-driving cars. We could go on, but the news here is that Toyota is reportedly developing vehicles that hover above the road surface instead of rolling along it.

The news comes from Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, one of Toyota's tech gurus, who revealed at Bloomberg's Next Big Thing summer in San Francisco that the company is working on hovering cars – ones that travel just above the road surface, but don't actually fly in three-dimension space.

According to The Verge, a spin-off of our own sister-site Engadget, Yoshiki refused to elaborate on what the project entails and how far along it is. He was speaking along acting NHTSA chief David Friedman, who lauded such advancements as a "great taste of innovations to come," but stressed the significance of more concrete improvements to conventional automobiles – like inter-car communications to keep vehicles from colliding on the highway – as more relevant to today's industry.

By Noah Joseph