The Dubai police showed us hoverbike!
The Dubai police force is already famous for its impressive collection of supercars, but where does one go from there? As cool as a Bugatti Veyron with a light bar may seem, the whole supercar thing is so last season. Supercars are out and hoverbikes are in, which is what Dubai showed off earlier this month at the GITEX technology exposition.
How would you like a speeder bike from "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi" but with the arguably higher stakes of four exposed propellers that can puree pedestrians into a soup, like in a late-night blender infomercial?
The speeder bike in question is a Hoversurf Scorpion 3, which is basically a scaled-up drone turned into a police motorcycle with four propellers at the four corners that allow it to hover at a preprogrammed height. Powered by batteries that can be swapped out to cut down on the three-hour recharge time, the bike can travel forward at speeds of up to 45 mph, with a maximum operating time of 25 minutes between recharges. The bike can also operate remotely without a pilot at speeds approaching 60 mph, but where's the fun in that?
As cool as this is, we have a feeling NHTSA certification in the U.S. could be hard to come by for a whole range of reasons, most of them having to do with the prospect of being completely ripped to shreds. But science demands sacrifices from time to time.
Don't book a flight to Dubai with the intention of spotting one of these in action: The bike is still a technology demonstrator, so evidently it's too dangerous even for Middle Eastern police forces. But the Dubai police are more open to using drones for surveillance purposes, so there's still the Orwellian route for these.
As cool (and by cool we mean dangerous) as this may seem, this Hoversurf prototype is not the first attempt at scaling up drone technology to create a speeder bike of sorts. A number of companies are experimenting with technology like this, and most them are trying to make it less dangerous to the rider and pedestrians.
