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An Australian entrepreuner and a tech 'genius' have
constructed a car from Lego - and it can actually be driven on the road.
The bright yellow hot rod, snappily titled the 'Super Awesome Micro
Project', was built using 500,000 pieces of Lego. Even the air-powered
engine is made from standard Lego pieces and utilises four orbital
engines and a total of 256 pistons.
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It can reach a top speed of 12-18mph, although the creators - Melbourne
entrepreneur and marketeer Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida, a
20-year-old self-taught 'technology genius' from Romania - do admit they
were 'scared of a Lego explosion so we drove it slowly'.
Mr Sammartino says the car is a world-first and is 'proof-of-concept of
environmentally-friendly equipment'.
He added: 'What really matters in the world now isn’t so much the new
technology. It’s people having access to the technology. It’s about
people using their imagination to put things together in ways that
people haven’t thought of before. That’s where the real power is.'
It cost £11,200 to build and was crowd-funded by forty Australian
patrons. One of them is blogger Trevor Young, who said: 'I think
ultimately you get involved with something like this because it’s such
an awesome idea and good things might flow from it.'
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The pair met when Mr Sammartino reluctantly accepted a random Skype
request from the Romanian and from there, their working partnership
flourished.
'He wanted me to connect him with this astronaut I know because he’s
interested in rockets,' Mr Sammartino said.
'I’m teaching him about business and he’s teaching me a bit about
physics. It’s a really nice mash-up.'
It's not the pair's first foray into bizarre Lego-related projects.
In late 2011, the pair sent a small space shuttle made out of Lego into
space, where it reached an altitude of about 35,000 metres above the
earth.
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It landed in the snow near a little village in Germany, the country in
which it was launched. Raul retrieved the shuttle using a GPS device.
Their initial attempt failed and the space shuttle blew up into
thousands of Lego pieces as it couldn’t withstand the pressure of going
into space. |
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So for the second successful attempt, Raul simply super glued all the
pieces together so the shuttle wouldn’t fly apart as it was buffeted by
124mph winds.
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