“You could argue that, because there’s less friction, the hover car would be more efficient than fuel-powered vehicles with tires, brakes and other mechanism,” says Jos Holgu n-Veras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic University. Of course, for VW’s hover car to work in practice, it would have to cost less to run than an ordinary car, and experts question whether that is possible in the foreseeable future. To add a bit of realism in one scene, a discarded can in the roadway rolls away from the car as it passes by. The narrator points out a number of the imaginary car’s features, including a joystick controller, auto-pilot, and a collision-avoidance sensor. In the video, Jia’s parents take the wheel-shaped hover car out for a spin through Chengdu. Magnets on board and in the track lift the train between eight and 12 millimeters, depending on how much electrical current is used.

(Other maglev trains use electromagnetic forces for propulsion without actually lifting the train off the ground.) The Shanghai Maglev Train has been ferrying passengers since 2004 on a 30-kilometer line between Pudong International Airport and the city’s outskirts at speeds of up to 430 kilometers per hour. The imaginary car stays aloft with the aid of magnetic levitation, much the way some maglev trains travel along special rails using electromagnetic suspension. “It was the ultimate in dreaming because a full-scale version of the car doesn’t exist.” “We put a concept together, including a video depicting how it would function,” he adds. Jia sent sketches of a levitating car that could be maneuvered easily in a downtown setting, says Simon Loasby, head of design at Volkswagen Group China. Wang Jia, a student and resident of Chengdu in the country’s Sichuan province, chose the latter, envisioning a two-person environmentally-friendly hover car. Participants were able to tinker with designs on a Web site that Volkswagen set up for that purpose, or they could upload their own designs.

A year ago, Volkswagen in China launched a marketing campaign called The People’s Car Project (PCP), which invited Chinese customers to submit ideas for cars of the future.

Volkswagen hover car video