That's what Takara Tomy's promised us at this year's Tokyo Toy Show in Japan. It had two very different maglev-powered toy sets to show off: an on the rails maglev train shuttle that apparently reaches up to 600km (well, in relative speed to its scale). To our dumb eyes, we'd rate and pretty damn fast. The train contains its own magnetic component, levitating it off the plastic-magnetic track and reducing that buzzkill of toy car physics: friction, ensuring it can skate around the track at a pace: the magnetic field produces both an upward and forward thrust. There was also a free-driving car prototype, but it required a sheet of metal to show of its driving skills and was a bit more... bare-bones.
You can see in the background where Tomy's hoping the design will eventually arrive at. While the train model is set to land in 2015, with a bundled set priced at around 10,000 yen ($98), there's no such price for the car. Where you'd typically find the wheels of a car, there's four electromagnets, that rotate at a high speed and (get your Fleming's right-hand rule ready) offer a sustained magnetic field -- enough to keep the car slightly above its aluminum race track. And if this toy-maker can do a race-car, surely Mattel will finally be able to deliver on that hoverboard we were all (kind of) promised.
Filed under: Transportation
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