[dxbydt]

What happened to those concept cars that were encased in rubber/(or some other bouncy material) so when they bumped against each other, they would harmlessly bounce off ? I distinctly remember reading about them in Wired some years back.

[gambiting]

Any amount of rubber would only work up to a certain speed. And all modern cars are designed to provide 100% safety to passangers up to 30mph - crumple zones, multiple airbags, engine block sliding underneath the body of the vehicle, early collision warning, automatic breaking and so on. Encasing cars in rubber would not improve anything above 30mph, while I am fairly certain would increase the weight of the vehicle - making it consume more fuel and also heavier vehicles take longer to stop,so the benefit might actually be null.

[quahaug]

Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens.

I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly.

A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.