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On the first view it looks like a rollercoaster
but this vehicle is driven by scientists and it floats.
On the magnetic track, researchers from the Dresdner Leibnitz institute are testing a vehicle,
what they think is the transportation of the future.
Head of the institute Ludwig Schultz even today loves it to ride.
We're now driving 7.5 km/h
and at the moment it's limited to 13km/h
because the people here don't trust me,
I'd drive to fast.
We also want to limit it to 20km/h because of the curve radius.
Our curve radius is 6.5 meter
and we calculated that the vehicle could go with 50km/h through these narrow curves.
In a tank beside the track is the liquid nitrogen.
Employees filling it, for cooling, into 4 boxes
which are something like the tires of the car.
In the boxes are so called superconductor.
This superconductor gets magnetised through the cooling and gets the vehicle to float.
The existing magnetic filed will be frozen
and the superconductor will never be able to leave the position
When we're cooling it down we have distance plates
between the track and the superconductor
and when the right temperature is reached we take them away,
the superconductor and the vehicle tied to it, floats above the track.
The biggest advantage of the Maglev is, that it glides without roll resistance.
The vehicles can save much energy without and can glide further on when the engine fails.
These fails happens more often than the head of the institute likes.
In the curves it's not finely balanced yet, but on the straight we don't feel any of the movement.
It switches to "Break's Active" when I try to accelerate.
If I don't accelerate...does not happen again.
Control problems, of course that's very annoying.
Now break is fixed and it works again
but in the curve I'm not allowed to accelerate.
At the control center the train can be remote controlled.
The vision of the scientists is to create autonomic vehicles
floating through cities to replace todays known local traffic.
Thinking further to the future we can imagine
that we could make track tied individual vehicles for urban traffic
That means I just use the vehicle as long as I want to go anywhere.
E.g. I order one vehicle to my home and drive to work,
and when I'm at my destination the vehicle is free again
and picks up the next one person wants to get somewhere.
Pushing the vehicle to a garage at failures, no problem with the superconductor as long it is cooled well and magnetised.