Thursday, January 2, 2014

Driveable Lego car built piece by piece — all…

The first driveable Lego car is made of 500,000 pieces and runs on air.

VIDEO: Watch the test drive of the Lego car

The inventors of the Lego car are Australian entrepreneur Steve Sammartino and Romanian Raul Oaida, a self-taught technology guru.

The car — known as the Super Awesome Micro Project — can reach a top speed of 18 miles per hour. It was built in Romania and delivered to a location in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, where the car was test-driven, according to the inventors' website.

"We were scared of a Lego explosion so we drove it slowly," the inventors said on their site.

Even the engine is made of Legos, which has "four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons," according to the site. Only the tires and some load bearing elements are not made of the plastic block toys.

The pair met when Sammartino accepted a Skype request from Oaida, who was interested in meeting an astronaut whom Sammartino knew, the Daily Mail reports.

"I'm teaching him about business and he's teaching me a bit about physics. It's a really nice mash-up," Sammartino told the Daily Mail.

The project was crowdfunded through Twitter, starting with a request from Sammartino in February 2012, asking for contributions of $500 to $1,000 from 20 participants. In the end, about 40 people funded the project.

Anyone interested in investing $500-$1000 in a project which is awesome %26 a world first tweet me. Need about 20 participants... #startup

— Steve Sammartino (@sammartino) February 29, 2012

This isn't the team's first Lego project. In 2011, Sammartino and Oaida launched a Lego shuttle in Germany, reaching a maximum altitude of 35,000 meters.

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