CES 2019: Hyundai Elevate is a rescue concept with leggy, wheely bits
Cars
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In all my years of covering CES, this is the weirdest looking concept car I've ever seen.
Meet Hyundai's Elevate.
It comes out of the Hyundai Creta Robotics and Artificial Intelligence division and its envisioned as a rescue vehicle for really rough terrain.
Now, in the center we have the chassis, which is where passenger compartment is and where the batteries are stored, but at each corner there is a leg with five points of articulation and an electrically driven wheel, At the end, how each of those wheels can be driven or stopped independently and gives me five different methods of motivating.
There is the passive [UNKNOWN] mode which just sort of moves around like a regular car with all wheel drive in electric motors but there is also an active suspension mode where the wheels will lift up over imperfections in the road to give you a little bit more capability.
There are also two walking modes.
There's a reptilian mode that gives you more grip.
And sure-footedness when you're climbing up a really steep slope and a mammalian mode that gives you a little more agility and speed.
There's a fifth mode called omnidirectional, I don't really know what that means, but it basically looks like it's doing whatever it needs to do to get where it needs to go.
Now imagine a vehicle that can rescue people by stepping over a five foot wall to get where it needs to be or expand its wheel base to 15 feet.
This vehicle can do that.
But on a smaller scale, what if your car that slipped off the road in the blizzard could just get up and walk back on the road and get you where you're going?
That's what we're talking about with cars that have legs, like the elevate concept here.
But for now, they're working at one-eighth scale, because well, this is the concept.
But it is pretty cute.
Be sure to check out the rest of our coverage of CES 2019 for even more cool car technologies and wild concepts, like these.
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