2070 MX-5?

Geez Pat, I hardly know where to start.

One thing I can virtually guarantee will be hands-free auto-hover, giving it a substantial leg up on the more manual competition.

Assuming it's hydrogen powered, it might have that exciting new feature where trace amounts of this fuel are extracted from the atmosphere as you fly along. What could be more satisfying than a free fill-up?

Somewhat less efficient process should you choose to drive. Of course driving entails other challenges as you might expect being on the ground among the land-bound riff raff, and that's only if you've been trained in that arcane practice.

Full environmental controls which sense minute changes in skin temperature and respiratory rate of each occupant directing the perfect conditioned and oxygen enriched air flow right where it's needed.

Not new, but still of great value is the full suite of accident avoidance sensors and devices. Between the direct link to the GPS system and the LASER scanning and ranging monitors tied right into the propulsion and guidance sub-systems making it actually impossible to collide or crash, even if you try!

Something else that's been out for quite a while, but only on the better engineered vehicles is nearly organic homeostasis and self-repair. A matrix of sensors and active probes feeding into the on-board quantum computer detects the smallest degradation and risk of failure, invoking either a corrective nano-bot to restore equilibrium, or to effect repair.

One interesting twist on the above is rumored to be introduced on the 2071 models - perpetual updating. Sure these vehicles will cost substantially more, should they actually reach market, but it's a one-time purchase. The absolutely cutting-edge nanotechnology will be capable of implementing not only adjustments that would otherwise have required a recall, but will actually be able to "re-manufacture" the car on the fly to continuously provide all current features.

For the first time you'll be able to pass your Miata along to offspring or purchasers with their confidence that what they are receiving will be identical to what's in the showroom at the very moment.

All the expected entertainment and creature-comfort features that are options on lesser vehicles are standard on this Mazda, the pride of China:

Interfacing with the Global Entertainment Enterprise - World Integrative Zone, also known as, that's right, GEE-WIZ. All the music and holorama spectacles you could hope to find, including the collaborative and interactive world-wide-jam network. Beauty here is you could be flying along (another reason to not bother with driving) and plug your interface controller into the collaboration console and suddenly find yourself engaged in microtonal explorations with a stranger in the Chinese Hemisphere. How cool is that?

Full food synthesis capability, but not just those lifeless supplement cubes, but actual organic meals including synfruit, synveggies, synmeats, and a rich choice of beverages including the most popular psychotropic and stimulicious proto-fluids to replenish while they refresh, thank PepsiSan.

Even though the worst of the terrorism that plagued the last seven decades has finally been brought under control through the repentant George WHW Bush, president of the Non-Chinese Hemisphere and his War on the War on Terror along with the aggressive genetic re-engineering and extensive lacing of the food and water supply with all manner of controlling and reformative medicaments, this new beauty is fully equipped with the latest in defensive and offensive weaponry. Should something even as crude as a missile be fired in your direction, it would be detected virtually at launch and immediately destroyed by a high-energy particle beam, followed by a close-radius painting of the launch area with energetic neutrons and helium nuclei - no threat from that area again.

Finally, and this rumor is truly treading the edge of fantasy and folly, some believe Mazda has finally perfected the Flux Capacitor after digitally enhancing the entire series of Back To The Future, cloning Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, and pouring billions of credits into the two MIT research centers - Midway Institute of Technology and Manila Institute of Technology. Thankfully, the Mr. Fusion power supply wasn't needed due to the impressive advances in hydrogen and enhanced hydrogen technology.

I mean, how would you like to beam into your beloved Mazda Miata MX-5243, strap on the brain-wave interface headband, think her into a lazy banked turn at 50,000 feet, kick in the Flux Capacitor and find yourself in the year 2007? Imagine, the streets are maintained, many folks - rich and poor alike are still living on the ground, Miatas of that time running on gasoline I believe they called it, before the earth's petroleum reserves were depleted, had to be driven as they so quaintly characterized it, had a TOP speed of 130 miles per hour, or roughly the stall velocity of your MX-5243, those awful collisions and crashes, oh the humanity!. But just picture the look on the faces of these primitives as they caught sight of your mind-boggling mechanical perfection. A caution however, they were quite savage in those days, led by and under the influence of power hungry and ignorant leadership. Should they get their greasy hands on you, even for a moment, you might never get back to the future...

Frank

pws wrote in news:N_hWg.30929$ snipped-for-privacy@tornado.texas.rr.com:

It will run on frijoleum, currently the most powerful fuel known to man. There will be a passage built into the seat that will direct the gas directly to the intake, raising the 1.6 to around 3,500 hp @

2,500rpm. The range of the vehicle will depend entirely on the quantity of refried beans (frijoles) eaten before the trip....

Next question?

Frank, I'm so impressed I may go back and read every post you've ever written! Damn man, seriously, are you a writer or something? You haven't been watching enough TV cause your creativity is extremely active! I suspect intelligence on multiple levels here. Pat is going to be blown away!

Nice work, I'm glad I didn't try my hand at that one before you got a hold of it! I am not worthy..........

Chris

99BBB

Thanks Chris for the kind reaction - that's the ONLY nice thing anyone's said to me today!

No, I'm not a writer, at least only inadvertently, but if you look closely you'll see the semi-plausible speculation of a science teacher. I'm not sure why I was so engaged by PWS's challenge but it is an interesting exercise. The practical benefit is that this is one way to start the process of developing either new technology or new capabilities and uses of existing technology.

To do the job right you'd have to give some serious thought both to what might be developed in that time frame from current research and engineering, and what might come along either out of the blue or as spun off of current trends, and then place that in some prediction of how the world might be at that time.

Actually, I could have gone on and on. I think what I wrote just scratched the surface, though several things were probably too extreme even given the passage of 64 years. A different approach based upon more controlled development of present vehicles might have ultimately been more interesting and certainly more practical.

Looking forward to any other takes on this scenario.

Frank

Ad hoc signature for 10/9: Tomorrow the 60 degree pool gets closed for the season here in WNY - always tough and emblematic of nature's victory over man, and in the VERY near future, after Tuesday's final oil change my beloved 2002 black/tan LS gets tucked into the garage and replaced by a rapidly aging 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee - running close to one-half the mileage and one-hundredth the fun as the roadster - effectively turning a gallon of gas as powers the MX-5 to nearly 30 miles and selling for $2.50 per gallon into the Jeep's 15 miles per gallon at an equivalent cost of $5.00! Oh the pain...

Frank, I have to completely agree with Chris, I am floored and I nominate this "best response ever to a silly question on r.a.m.m.".

A science teacher with excellent writing skills sounds like a sc-fi writer waiting to happen. Since most sci-fi written today is horrible, imo, you would have another edge. One exception is Greg Bear. Most of the really good sci-fi was written in the '50's and '60's, though it can be painful to read about people aboard spacecraft using tape drives and I recently re-read "Stranger in a Strange Land", where only one phone call could be placed from a house at a time.

Robert Heinlein couldn't imagine more than one land line, much less mobile phones that almost everyone carries. They had developed hovercraft and manned missions to Mars, but had not quite figured out how to run two or more landlines into a very wealthy person's house. The statement was, "I can't make the call, boss, you are on the phone". :-)

Seriously, your post had a Douglas Adams quality to it, humorous yet informative. I would definitely give it a try if I had that combination of knowledge and ability.

Pat

Taking specifically from Douglas Adams, we know it will be:

a) Extremely improbable, and

b) black. :)

miker

Grok that...

It will fly and fold up into an attache case meaning that you will never need a parking space again.

Softtop latches that lock. Clutch slave cylinders that last 50,000 miles Air conditioning that doesn't leak. Premium sound systems that are actually premium.

I'm holding out for the 2071 model with the fully integrated interociter.

Even that will pale next to the long-promised Veebleflitzer option.

miker

Passenger seats that dont rattle 'n squeak. Valve lifters that don't clatter.

(I suppose these could be fixed already after the NA, but I wouldn't know).

Candy that melts in your mouth, not in the console bin...

Come on Frank, don't be 'one of the guys', write that sequel to your original post! I'm waiting .........

Chris

99BBB

Candy that melts in your mouth, not in the console bin...

Not tonight my friend. I've been doing database programming for hours and am about to deliver the product by e-mail before spending a little quality time with my guitar and eventually crawling off to bed.

Just went out to the garage to grab some Altoids out of my Miata's console bin, and there she was - gleaming in the soft overhead light as if radiant with sweat, a bit intoxicated from the BMW synthetic 10W50 I plied her with this afternoon, top seductively down almost in mockery of the gathering gloom just outside her sanctuary, seats beckoning "come sit on me, take me for a ride master..."

Hey wait...bad bad combination here of geekly fatique and a dirty mind. Factor in the heartbreak over closing my pool yesterday and the impending seasonal sheltering of my beloved ride, marking the end of a spring and summer of faithful companionship and unencumbered fun, and I just might say something I'll regret.

She was there for me Chris. Always there. Never asking more than to be enjoyed. Respect, pretense or genuine, didn't even matter. All she cared about was how much pleasure she could bring. If she got off in the process, all the better, but her joy was in the giving.

And I flogged her Chris. Flogged her mercilessly. Not even a knock or ping. Even when I filled her up with that lousy house brand. I'm still ashamed when I think about that 87 octane swill. Been trying to make it up to her with the good stuff, 93 freaking octane, last two fills. You know what that stuff costs Chris? Wouldn't be having too much fun with one arm and one leg now would I?

But none of that mattered Chris. She was always there for me. Always there. For me, and me alone. If she had been a dog she'd have wagged her tail pipe whenever I walked into the garage. If she had been a cat she'd have leaked some of her precious fluids on my feet.

No, I never took her for granted. Not once. But I've got to tell you Chris that the times we could have gone somewhere, or gone a little further, or maybe a little faster - well, they'll haunt me all winter long. There'll be those dark and heavy nights when I'll awaken drenched in sweat from a dream of sun and wind and twisting roads and motion, breathtaking motion...and her. And if I drag myself to the back window hoping to catch just a glimpse all I'll see is that damned Jeep and falling snow, and the reality of slow crawls to work and back will jar me back to a reality I'd rather not inhabit.

Frank

There will be a blueish glow from the fusion reactor in the front, evident through the grille.

The fusion engine will be driving the rear wheels through a four speed transmission brought back by popular demand of drivers finding it difficult to shift 51 times going from 0 to 100 in 1.5 seconds.

The wheel-thread surfaces will use nano-activators in them to establish and reversibly peel away mechano-chemical bonds with a dry road surface, but commercially viable systems can achieve no more that 7 to 9 g of mean adhesion on a good surface. Worse, on a wet surface, adhesion will plunge to a precariously low 2 g or less, as the nano-activators are still limited in creating the needed active-control micro-pressures and viscous shear stresses to generate traction on submicron road roughness passing by at 1500-2000 mph. It is expected to take at least 3 to 5 more years before in-thread processors reach the computational speed to pro-actively resolve every submicron roughness feature, rather than sampling them statistically. Until then, the Miata speed limiter will activate at subsonic speeds on wet roads.

Needless to say, the thread is magnetically suspended using superconducting magnets. Classical "tires" are still allowed at nostalgic events, when conducted on bicycle paths, but just image a sidewall rolling over when you are trying to take a sharp curve at, say, Mach 1.5.

A protective shroud will automatically be raised when you reach transonic speeds on the Intersonics, since the greater air penetration into the cabin may yank off your oxygen mask. This is another good reason for Miatas to stay off the Intersonics and leave them to SUV drivers. As is the fact that a SUV which is aerodynamically lifted off the road because of its excessive frontal area may come crashing back down on a Miata.

And you don't need the Intersonics anyway, since Miatas come (optionally) with a teleportation device to transport the Miata instantaneously from the end of a mountain pass to the start of the next mountain pass.

Of course, all Miatas come for safety reasons with a heads-up, through-mountain display. Note however that this is not really X-ray vision through the mountain as many unsophisticated people believe. The info of what is beyond the curve comes from satellite data superimposed by the windscreen on the image of the mountain side. Since the total amount of info that can be pushed out of satellites is severely limited, a well known problem, the info of the other side of the mountain wall will have been buffered and may be microseconds out of date. And it will have been severely compressed, making it hard to distinguish between a deadly 18-wheeler, a nasty motorcycle, or a harmless pedestrian. The driver should probably assume the worst.

There is a cheat mode to warn of gravel or sand in the middle of the curve, but this is not considered fair play by Miata aficionados. Also the satellite data at that level of detail are likely to be hours out of date; the gravel may well be gone by the time you get there.

All Miatas come with an antigrav button for when the driver comes in too hot into that mountain hairpin. But the energy requirements for anti-grav are astronomical, and the Miata driver has only a few milliseconds to decide whether he wants to spend the rest of his life as a miserable pauper or just end it all right now.

Renegade satellites operated by China are programmed to recognized US police cars and give proximity warnings, but possession of receivers for those satellites is illegal in most states. Also, most police cars jam these signals; however, it is legal to detect this *jamming* of signals, and most Miata owners use it to detect the proximity of police patrols.

At constant dollars, the Miata would be much cheaper than 80 years ago, when it was first introduced, except for the magnetic levitation devices required to provide a virtual shelf for holding cups anywhere along the length of the dashboard. Do not drop a screwdriver on the virtual shelf, though, since the magnetic field may pull the shift and manual brake handle sharply forwards and upwards. Accidents caused by this abuse are not covered by warranty.

Miatas will still come in many colors, but there will be a polluter-fee for nonwhite Miatas, as the additional energy required to make them keep up with other traffic adds significant greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Adding a lot of chrome to your white Miata is a further way you can be environmentally friendly.

Leon

Nice post! I guess mine's a cat.

miker

The 2070 MX-5 will get 60 mpg. It will have LED lights. It will unfortunatley weigh 2600 lbs. but horsepower will be just over 200. Otherwise will will be exactly the same. Oh yeah... and it will be offered in Red, White, and some form of Blue.

Jeff

"Jeffster" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com:

.....and the white ones will be faster!