500-mph Ford hovercar is the future we were promised

"Within a few decades, the urge to travel at high speed has led man to develop the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane, and the rocket. Today he can travel through the air at speeds in excess of sound, and it is likely that he will soon land on the moon."

Yes, we eventually made it to the moon, 10 years after the Ford Motor Co. issued this bold proclamation. But if all of 1959 Ford's predictions had come true, we'd be floating to work on a comforting cushion of air, in a wondrous machine known simply as the Levacar Mach 1! And deep down inside, there was probably a member of the Ford brain trust who wished for a hovercar powered by the clean, safe, friendly plutonium that powered our Nucleons, harvested from the Soviets after the Marines annexed them as the 52nd state. Hey, McNamara can dream, can't he?

And he must have dreamed about the Levacar -- a wedgy cheese pyramid of a two-seater with Thunderbird-esque scallops, Galaxie "jet" taillights, and the style and panache of an air hockey puck, on a wheelbase that would have made Peter Brock's Cadet look positively Brobdingnagian. Thing was, there was no wheelbase because there were no wheels. Underneath were three "levapads" that spat out air through tiny holes with a force of 15 to 100 psi. They were supposed to adjust to highway contours: "breaks in the surface are no obstacle since levapads will jump a 1-inch space without difficulty." But the prototype unveiled at Ford Headquarters slid on a glassy smooth floor, held on by a tether.

In the future, these would whiz about on ultra-slick highways from anywhere between 200 and 500 mph -- now that there's no rolling friction, the potential for speed is limitless! The Levacar would also reconfigure America's relationship with the highway: instead of rough, ugly concrete, Levacars would whiz by on the smoothest of roads -- and nothing was smoother than a highway of steel. That, the brochure writer freely admits, would basically be a rail. So, the Levacar would be basically a maglev train without those pesky magnets -- handy, since nobody knows how those work anyway.

What's more, the hapless copywriter goes on to claim that at those ferocious speeds, one would have to travel really far to justify going that fast: why bother speeding down to the Safeway, when you could be in Myrtle Beach by lunchtime? "Individual ownership might be a luxury similar to ownership of private airplanes," reads the brochure.

The Levacar was exhibited for at least two years at the end of the '50s: in this rare Ford archive image, it shares a display in Dearborn, Mich., next to the Nucleon and the brilliantly evocative X-2000. Sadly, like its fellow futuristic concepts, the Levacar didn't catch on, either. Curtiss-Wright played around with hovercars, too. Their conventionally looking soapboxes looked like "Star Wars" landspeeders if Luke Skywalker had a thing for Corvairs. That's the fun of romping through history: part naivety, part misguided optimism viewed through the lens of today -- but also the addictive notion of the future we had been promised all along. What if we really will blast across the skies in 500-mph hoverwedges?

By Blake Z. Rong