12 Most Amazing Abandoned Technology And Vehicles

when it comes to the technology behind vehicles one size does not fit all there's more than one way to build a car a train a boat or a plane and it's the diversity of designs that make some vehicles unique not every design is destined to go on to become mass-produced though some of them are too far ahead of their time and are written off as failed experiments some are simply left behind after they've served their purpose here are some amazing examples of sophisticated pioneering vehicle designs that have been abandoned during the Second World War the American car construction industry faced a serious tactical problem the military had priority when it came to steel and so finding and creating enough of it to make cars out of wasn't easy with supplies running low some manufacturers started looking into the possibility of using other materials and so the soybean car was born made in Dearborn Michigan by George Washington Carver and Lowell E overly in 1941 the car was made from a material similar to plastic but largely derived from corn wheat and soybeans Henry Ford had taken a personal interest in developing cars made from plastic and invested millions of dollars of his own money in the project sadly it was largely all for nothing the idea was immediately abandoned after the war ended and the one existing prototype for reasons that nobody has ever been able to explain was destroyed without the prototype nobody will ever know if it was really made of a soybean mixture at all even at the time it was unveiled there were rumors that it was actually made from phenolic plastic extracted from coal tar there were high hopes for the so-called 250 electric train also known as the Falcon 250 when the prototype was unveiled in the year 2000 building the prototype was the culmination of several years of research testing and hard work but just two years later the project was cancelled and the prototype was abandoned more than 60 different enterprises worked on the production of the train from the Alma's shipbuilding company to the T Kron titrant transport engineering plant and the 250 in the trains name came from its anticipated high speed of 250 km/h it's fate was sealed when testing of the prototype revealed no less than 25 serious shortcomings in the design and the fact that it was only truly capable of 236 km/h was only a minor concern the anti-lock system had serious failures causing the brake cylinders to fill with air and jamming the wheels the thermal properties of the windows failed to meet basic insulation standards and the noise levels inside the train at maximum acceleration were far above basic safety standards the whole so-called project was scrapped because of these findings with attention then turning to saps entrains instead Chrysler is a company that has a long history of making unusual concept cars but the 1961 Chrysler turbo flight has to be considered bizarre even by their standards this was one of the final designs overseen by legendary Chrysler chief of styling Virgil Exner who was well known for his eccentric and futuristic ideas this was ex-nurse vision of a turbine powered Road car a vision that would ultimately be discarded in favor of the Chrysler Turbine Ghia the single piece canopy was a bold idea for the era raising the windscreen side glass and roof all at the same time the two tail fins are there to support the air brake which was there instead of any kind of conventional braking system although the car never entered production elements of its design would go on to be used in the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona it's a strange design to look at when we see it now but back at the time it was created many people were convinced that turbines were the way of the future when it came to cars and conventional engines were on their way out when the Soviet Union mastered the art of developing and building nuclear weapons in 1949 it was a little disappointed in itself it had come second to the United States of America in the nuclear arms race and second place wasn't good enough now the country knew more about the potential of nuclear energy they started to look for new innovations that would put them ahead of the Americans and one idea that came from this line of thought was a design for a nuclear car known as the Volga atom engineers from the Gorky automobile plant were charged with designing a chassis that could accommodate a scaled-down nuclear engine modeled on an a21 by April 1965 it was ready for testing and so it took to the roads at a dedicated site near severe ski it ran as expected but its weight made it hard to handle and it was extremely hot inside the vehicle even in Siberia this could probably have been corrected but Khrushchev who had personally championed the project resigned as the Soviet Union's Secretary General his replacement Brezhnev wasn't such a fan of the idea and so he ordered for all working it to cease immediately conventional wisdom will tell you that it makes sense to build ships out of relatively lightweight materials because lightweight materials are more likely to float on water that means ships are usually made out of steel wood or a combination of the two concrete seems like the last thing you'd ever want to make a ship out of but that doesn't mean the idea hasn't been tried repeatedly in the past and with some success concrete river barges first appeared in Europe in the late 19th century and by the 20th century the idea had spread to America when the construction of several large ocean-going concrete ships was ordered by the US military in light of steel shortages making traditional methods of construction difficult since then with steel now as plentiful as it's ever been the idea has slowly been forgotten about the oldest concrete ship still afloat anywhere in the world is the violet built in 1917 and now use as a floating clubhouse on England's Midway River these days the only place you'll see concrete still being used in ship construction is the Netherlands where it's used to make the barges upon which houseboats sit for the second half of the 20th century the USSR in the United States of America were in a race trying to build similar types of technology at the same time and beat each other in the process when the Americans were busy trying to make space shuttles the USSR was trying to make space planes Buran was the closest they got but the Buran was lucky to win government approval in the first place for a long time it looked like the spiral project would win approval which would have been the McCoy augur achieve company trying to get into space they started working on the task as early as 1965 but paused for a while after the American moon landing as the Americans pushed ahead with space shuttles in the 1970s the project was picked up again and so the MIG 105 space plane finally became a reality in 1974 it proved that it was capable of subsonic flight in 1976 and successfully performed a further eight test flights between then in the end of 1978 but funding was suddenly pulled from the project and awarded to Buran instead because of that the MIG 105 is now little more than a curiosity on display at the Manono Air Force Museum [Music] if you want to build anything that's going to go into the sky Boeing is probably the right company to approach they've been making flying machines for decades and have more experience in the field than almost anybody else it was no surprise when the USA approached the company to make a flying laser gun in the early 21st century and despite the idea sounding far-fetched it came very close to becoming a reality the flying device was officially known as the Boeing yal one but in practice it was a heavily modified and refitted Boeing 747 unit carrying a chemical oxygen iodine laser in theory the device should have been able to use its laser to shoot missiles out of the sky it even demonstrated that it could do exactly that just not very reliably and not from a far enough distance to be useful in combat five billion dollars had been spent on the idea by 2007 and tests weren't providing much hope funding was cut in 2010 and then the idea was abandoned completely in 2011 the unwanted yal one spent a few years in storage in Arizona before being broken up in late 2014 five billion dollars is a lot to spend on a flying laser project that went nowhere but the USA spent even more than that on the Boeing Sikorsky rah-66 comanche attack helicopter of which only two were ever built before the development project was cancelled by that point just under seven billion dollars had been spent on it the project was born out of the idea that the helicopters at the military's disposal were showing signs of their age by the early 1980s and bold new ideas were required the Boeing Sikorsky design was deemed the best option in 1991 and a decade of developmental hell followed the list of requirements that the army wanted from the helicopters was extensive from advanced sensors to multiple missiles and rockets and although the designers were able to facilitate all of the requests it pushed the unit cost of the helicopters very high in 2002 the number of helicopters on order was cut to 650 but cutting the numbers increased the unit costs and by 2004 it became clear that the entire project was no longer economically viable the order to call the whole thing off came just before the aircraft was due to enter mass production in the late 1990s a company called freedom ship International announced plans for a seafaring vessel that would be unlike any other any built in human history it was to be called the freedom ship and it would effectively be a whole city floating on the water a kind of watery utopia the appeal of the floating colony would be that it would exist in international waters and therefore wouldn't be subject to any of the laws that constrict or prohibit certain behaviors on land technically speaking instead of being one vessel it would exist as a very long and connected set of barges when complete the freedom ship would be over one mile long and 820 feet wide with enough accommodation to support 50,000 full-time residents also on board would be hospitals schools casinos hotels and offices when the plan was first announced in 1999 it was expected to cost six billion dollars by 2002 this had increased to eleven billion dollars by 2008 the project was on hold due to a lack of financial backing but in 2013 it had been revived with a new expected cost of 10 billion affiliation with India's kana Farah marine was announced in 2016 but there's been no news since then and still no sign of anything being built the quest to identify the optimum design for a vertical takeoff in landing aircraft during the 1950's led to a whole range of weird and wacky designs and the pie Seki vz8 air jeep was just one of them at the time of its creation in 1957 the United States Army was in the market for a flying Jeep and they specifically wanted something that would be smaller and easier to maneuver through the air than a helicopter the pieszecki craft was supposed to fulfill that brief although in truth it never really got the chance to do so two prototypes for the craft were built with the first of them completing test flights in 1959 but the army passed on ordering anymore after the testing period came to an end that's despite extensive modifications being made from one prototype to the next including the addition of two artist engines and a tricycle undercarriage to make it easier to handle on land although the army accepted that it was a perfectly functional flying machine and could successfully avoid radar detection at low altitude they decided that it was unsuitable for the battlefield without ever really explaining why the mcbarns was created for one reason and one reason only the Expo World Fair was coming to Vancouver Canada and McDonald's wanted to show off by proving to the world that they could create a fully functional floating fast-food restaurant they were successful in that endeavor which was considered an impressive feat for 1986 but having proved their point they decided to take the idea no further and left Vancouver to clear up their mess it's been more than 30 years and the mess still hasn't been cleaned up the 180 foot long glass and steel monstrosity is rusting and taking up space on the waterway but it appears to be no closer to finding new ownership now than it was in the months after it was abandoned every year or so there will be a suggestion that it's going to be renovated and turned into anything from a nightclub to another fast-food restaurant but the plans never see the light of day and the condition of the mcmartin tin use to deteriorate by this point it's likely that the next person to step inside it will have come to demolish it you would have thought that designing a jet train would be a lot more difficult than just attaching jets to the roof of a conventional looking train unit but at one point in Russia someone decided to test that theory this blue rusting Hulk was once a promising Soviet jet propulsion project that was expected to become the future of train transport capable of reaching a top speed of 160 miles per hour back in the days of the Cold War that kind of speed was considered sensational despite the simplicity of the design the turbojet train worked exactly as it was supposed to it was fast and it appeared to be reliable unfortunately it was also very expensive the amount of fuel required to power the jet engines was phenomenal and so making a commercial version of the train proved to be an impossible task as soon as the financial issues became apparent the project was abandoned and now the unwanted prototype is peeling and decaying exposed to the elements subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out thank you for watching and see you soon

Channel: Amazing Stock

Views: 442,622

Rating: 4.7916269 out of 5

Keywords: 12 Most Amazing Abandoned Technology And Vehicles, abandoned, abandoned technology, abandoned vehicles, abandoned objects, abandoned train, abandoned vessel, abandoned ship, abandoned car, amazing abandoned, top 12, 12 most, most amazing

Id: 7ldBchXGunU

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020