If you said, "It's a hybrid", to an unsuspecting non-petrolhead who's been living in a cave since the Seventies fuel crisis, he'd remember The Jetsons' flying cars. A hybrid is "anything derived from mixed sources, or elements" which means it's several things rolled into one. But today, a hybrid usually means an ugly car with a top speed of 112kph, although you'd run out of zero-emissions range before you get there anyway. Basically, the word hybrid is pretty much reserved for ‘clean' cars.
What if you took that word and saw something else in it, more than just a few laptop batteries and a 1.4-litre wheezer?
British concept designer Philip Pauley did just that. To him, a hybrid is a car that also happens to be an aeroplane, a helicopter, and a boat. Only, he calls it a power hybrid. That's our kind of environmentalist!
Pauley's Halo Intersceptor (his spelling, not ours) is a multi functional vehicle, based around one car that looks suspiciously like a 987bhp W16 8.0-litre quad-turbo Bugatti Veyron. Which is, we hear, a great place to start when you're doing a power hybrid. The designer then simply created different attachment points on the car, so that the owner then reverses into a desired component to complete the transformation.
Without any clear indication as to how, the road car is somehow good for 500kph. Not only that, the Intersceptor also promises a range of 1,127km and 0-100kph in 2.3 seconds. This claimed acceleration is two-tenths quicker than Bugatti's factory test driver can manage and the mileage is 20 times better, so Pauley either has a magic wand or a wild imagination.
Anyway, the designer doesn't call his road vehicle a four-wheel drive USB stick for nothing. It literally plugs into Halo 120°, which is a private jet with a 14.5m wingspan and a weight of over 21 tonnes. With two Pratt & Whitney turbofans, the Halo 120° produces 112 kilonewtons of thrust with the afterburners, which after consulting with our friend who likes Airfix scale models, we can confirm is a lot. Also, this thing hits Mach 2 and that has to stand for something impressive, so we asked Google and it came back with 2,450kph. Not bad…
Halo 46° takes you to the skies too, seating a crew of two with room for a pair of passengers, but its maximum speed is only 185 knots. Turns out this is actually 343kph, so the chopper isn't hanging about either. For added functionality, it features attachments with regional or urban settings.
The Halo 22° Cigarette boat is our favourite, with a double hull design for ultimate wave bashing while the closed cockpit just like in the F1 boats offers protection and luxury accommodation. At 11.15m in length, the cruiser hits 117kph on water and keeps going for 2,222km, which means you can speed non-stop from Dubai to a port in some faraway country.
To be honest, we're perfectly fine with 10 minutes at full tilt in a stock Bugatti Veyron.
Obviously, Philip Pauley doesn't expect us to believe that this will enter showrooms next year. Instead, he wants to push the boundaries of design and thinks we'll see something like this in production during the next decade, as global roads get more and more clogged and carmakers start competing for air space...
