Awesome But Impractical / Vehicles

Examples

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  • Military has its own folders for vehicles.

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Automotive & Aeronautics

• "Chopper" motorcycles often fall under this heading. The more extreme the styling, the less practical they are to actually ride. Many of the prize-winningest show bikes don't even have real engines in them, and couldn't be ridden if they did.
  • One motorcycle builder known for this is the late Arlen Ness, who is best known for being the staple of Discovery Channel reality shows such as Biker Build-Off. While some of his output is rather sedate if not gaudy, his more elaborate showpieces such as the twin-engined "Two Bad" are—despite being otherwise perfectly functional and could be ridden—designed more for show and display than as a daily driver.
• The automotive equivalent of the chopper is the lowrider, which is built around eye-catching aesthetics. Of course, the fancier your hydraulics and electronics, the more high-maintenance your ride becomes. Daily driving a lowrider is hell on the various components, especially the suspension. Indeed, many lowriders you see at car shows are just that — showpieces.
• The Bosozoku style of vehicle modification gives end results that are flashy, creative and attention-grabbing. Unfortunately, they're horribly troublesome to drive, aerodynamically disastrous, and just too unfeasible to use as anything other than showpieces. Good luck handling speed bumps and on-ramps.
• Whistle tips. These are a metal square with a hold drilled in the center and it’s welded into your exhaust pipe so that as the exhaust is forced out it makes an ear splitting whistle.Aside from letting everyone within a mile know you’re around there’s really no point in adding these to your car, never mind of course cities have passed laws making them effectively illegal for violating noise ordinances.
• Played for Laughs with the Campervan Challenge on Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May build their campervans to their own individual ideals of awesomeness, but they're marred by issues like aerodynamic instability, lack of durability, and poor comfort in general.
• Some car fans - particularly those who own coupes and other economy-level cars - like to add what is known by detractors as rice: flashy-looking extra bits that make the car look like it's seriously fast, but that are usually ill-researched and badly designed, so they only end up messing up the aerodynamics and making the car go slower.
  • Spoilers on a front-wheel-drive car are particularly stupid - getting enough downforce to activate the spoiler would actually reduce performance by pulling the drive axle off the ground.
    • Unnecessary spoilers can even cause problems on rear-wheel vehicles if you don't know how they work (they're essentially upside-down wings). Common mistakes include the wrong shape^note proper wings are not straight-sided or too large of an angle with the ground^note for every airfoil shape, there's a maximum angle of attack called the stall angle. More than that, no matter what your speed, all you do is create drag (or crash if you're in a plane).
  • Another mod that appears occasionally is nitrous oxide kits that are improperly configured for the car's engine. It may be tempting to go all out with boosting the engine, but this is a good way to end up with a hand grenade engine that comes apart in short order.
• The Reliant Robin was an entirely plastic three-wheeled car from the '70s. It was very lightweight, it was legally a motorcycle in its origin nation of the U.K. (meaning a Reliant owner had to pay less on taxes and didn't need a driving license), and was very popular in the Northern parts of Britain. Problem was, the single wheel (used for steering) was in the front, along with the engine, making it both nose-heavy and unstable. It was alarmingly prone to wobbling when going around corners, or making any sudden, sharp turn. However it is not as prone to rollovers as Top Gear would have you believe - the show had to disable several safety features and put excessive weight in the front to make the stunts work.
• In Europe, those sedans with standard trunks that Americans and mainland Asians (especially the Chinese) like so much. Yes, they look awesome and provide large boot space, but the layout isn't as space-efficient as alternatives. Hatchbacks and station wagons provide greater rear cargo space for roughly the same amount of car, or the same amount of cargo room in a smaller package: a huge deal on a continent where space is often at a premium.
• You might assume that Americans could save a ton of space and gas by buying European micro-cars, but what makes sense in Europe doesn't necessarily make sense in the United States. This is mostly because, while American fuel economy standards are fairly lax, American emissions standards are some of the toughest in the world, a fact that many people don't consider. And California, which has the largest economy and population of all the states, has the strictest emissions standards of all: This is the reason why you rarely hear about Los Angeles' once-notorious smog anymore. The fuel-sipping, yet highly polluting diesel engines that power many of these Euro-compacts often have to be nerfed into oblivion in order to pass inspection, as Volkswagen found out the hard way in 2015. Ditto for American crash safety standards; that "wasted" space in the back of a sedan is actually very useful for preventing injury to a car's occupants in the event that a three-ton mall-crawler slams into the back of it, while a hatchback would likely get flattened. (It's often joked that safety-conscious parents in the US will refuse to buy their newly-licensed teenage children anything smaller than a Toyota Camry, precisely for this reason.) Finally, Americans are pretty much the world's largest consumer of automobiles, spending much more time in their cars due to suburban sprawl and an inferior rail system to Europe, meaning that their standards for a good daily driver—especially where comfort is concerned—are much higher than those of most Europeans. When you import European compacts to the United States, they become much more expensive but still use relatively cheap engines and construction.
  
  The end result is a tiny hatchback that may have high gas mileage, but strains to go much faster than highway speed (which it's gonna meet a lot more often in the US than in Europe), puts out stunningly noxious emissions for something so small, lacks many of the creature comforts that American drivers are accustomed to, and is a Death Trap in the event that it gets into a high-speed tangle with the average American truck. This is the reason why, with the exception of Volkswagen, European cars in the United States are almost exclusively either luxury/performance vehicles like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and the VW-owned Bentley, or niche brands like Mini (owned by BMW) and Fiat (which, in America, only sells its quirky 500X compact crossover as opposed to the rest of its European lineup^note Though admittedly, part of this is because other vehicles are sold as Chryslers and Dodges in the US). The Yugo, for all its flaws, was one of the few European microcars that actually met the American emissions and safety standards of its time. The Smart car also took nearly a decade of intensive redesigns and tweaking, on top of some cost-cutting import deals, to even become street-legal in the US, let alone practical in the American market. The only hatchbacks that do well in the US are 'hot hatches' that also have performance to spare, and even then, they're a niche market that's most popular with urban buyers (who live and drive in conditions closer to those of European cities).
• Convertibles are incredibly impractical. In exchange for having an open roof, you get less storage space, less safety, less gas mileage, less speed, and are easier to break into. On top of all this, they're much more expensive than a standard car.
  • They're also structurally weaker than a typical car — a convertible relies on the strength of its lower chassis to hold it all together, while other cars have a stronger unibody frame that is much better at resisting collisions. There have been stories of convertibles based on unibody sedans where the doors were stuck and refused to open when the car stood with one wheel on the curb.
  • There is a term in Finnish, rälläkkä-cabriolet, ("angle grinder convertible") for a conversion of sedan into a convertible by cutting off its roof with angle grinder. Such conversions are not only impractical but also highly dangerous and illegal to drive on public roads as much of the mechanical stress on the chassis is carried by the cabin roof and roof pillars.
• The Hummer H1. It's practically a brick on wheels, which is all it has going for it. It comes with a ton of blind spots, no driver space, flashy and useless aesthetics, and trying to tow it will result in the bumper being ripped off. All this for over $100,000. And even though they were designed and marketed as off-roaders, they're too wide for just about every off-road trail out there.
  • The H2 and H3 that replaced it are more practical, but only marginally so. They're still huge, expensive, and fuel-inefficient.
  • The US military decided that, instead of scrapping old HMMWVs, they would be sold on the commercial market at auction. Small problem: they were for off-road use only. Several states don't allow military vehicles on road or off road without modifications to make them legal.
• Owning surplus military vehicles, sure you have a tank, truck, or jeep. But now you have a vehicle that was designed to be maintained weekly with shelves of spare parts and barrels of oil, lubricants, and fuel. As Regular Car Reviews pointed out in the M35 review - the parts for a military truck can't be bought at the local auto parts store.
  • Averted in Europe where many military vehicles are pretty much off-the-shelf and are sold after being decommissioned. VW T3 microbuses formerly owned by the German Bundeswehr used to be popular bases for dirt-cheap RVs, and T3 spare parts still abound today. They're rather Boring, but Practical.
  • During the War on Terror, the Pentagon gave away surplus MRAP vehicles to police precincts, hoping that they can help law enforcement in combating terrorists and drug cartels. However, the qualities that make MRAPs resistant to IEDs make them impractical for patrolling cities domestically. The top-heavy design that protects them from roadside bombs also makes them difficult to maneuver in urban environments and more prone to rollovers. Furthermore, MRAPs are very expensive and difficult to maintain, making them inefficient for most police work. With Police Brutality and the militarisation of the police both being highly controversial issues, having police departments using military-grade vehicles often adds fuel to the fire.
• The Ikarus 293 double articulated bus. While it had a high passenger count, it was too long, slow, and problems with turning making it unable to take corners in Budapest. Only one prototype was made. Later it was sold to Tehran after replacing the engine with a stronger one. Double articulated buses, in general, have seen some use ^exampleHamburg - which has no light rail - uses double articulated buses as double-decker buses would not fit under all bridges and Hamburg has a lot of bridges., but they are mostly a more expensive and prone to failure way to do what buses towing a trailer, double-decker buses or light rail vehicles can do much more reliably. And with both double-decker buses and light rail there are benefits in terms of tourism (e.g. London double-decker buses) or higher acceptance (many people who'd never take the bus have no problem taking rail-based transit as study after study has shown).
• In general, concept cars are this by definition. Meant to be a demonstration of a proof of concept with no real intent to be put into mass production. A good example is the BMW GINA, the fabric car, which has an outer shell of spandex and is as durable as your shirt.
• Classic cars. While to an aficionado they look impossibly cool, they rarely get the sort of treatment that'd make them reliable and safe - that is, a complete rebuild and modernization. Mostly they get partial rebuilds to keep them on the roads, and modernization is actively discouraged in the vintage market, which prices them higher the more stock they are. Driving a car manufactured with the material science and safety culture of several decades ago on modern, traffic-packed roads is not a good recipe for a stress-free life.
  • A special mention goes to vintage sports cars, which in addition to all this don't benefit from the technological advancements that allow your average cheap hot-hatch to soundly beat them on a race track.
  • Extra mentions go to American muscle cars of the old. While they look huge and pack large engines for large power, they have one crippling flaw in form of compromised handling. Being heavy vehicles, they have the handling of a floating yacht, and with excessive torque on rear wheels they can spin out without care. This originates from the era when oval racing predominates in American motorsport: because the emphasis was originally on showing spectators what they could do in a car that they could buy from any dealership (the old slogan being "win on Sunday, sell on Monday"), tracks that played to those cars' strengths predominated, while more technical circuits fell by the wayside.
  • They even lampshade this in Skyfall: Dame Judi Dench's M comments quite unfavourably about the ride quality of the classic car, the Aston Martin DB5. (Although being fair, the car is almost comparable to a typical mass-market sedan or coupe even today, is far more powerful than most modern economy cars, and — laconic British wit notwithstanding — is still a DB bloody 5.)
• Nuclear-powered vehicles in general are this. On the one hand, they can last very long periods of time without any refueling and would emit no carbon dioxide. On the other hand, their operating and investment costs are very high. Most nuclear-powered vessels are only really found in military service, where the cost is (usually) justifiable.
  • NS Savannah was America's first nuclear-powered surface vessel, and commercial failure despite all construction costs and a good portion of operating costs being covered by the Federal Government. However, using highly experimental technology was actually the least of Savannah's problems. The biggest drawback she had was her status as a cargo liner, a ship type known for not being good at either of its two functions. On top of that, her design prioritized appearance over functionality, most notably making it a long and manually intensive process to load her.
  • The Soviet NS Sevmorput was another unconventional design — she was built as a LASH carrier when this was thought of as the new black, which didn't pay out, so she was converted to a container vessel. Moreover, her nuclear propulsion made sure that a lot of cautious ports blocked her entry (the problem that NS Savannah suffered as well), which ensured that she was mainly used along the Northern Sea Route after which she was named. And then the USSR collapsed, and the massive Arctic supply runs she was designed for largely stopped — most of the population left the Arctic outposts, and those who remained could be supplied by the much smaller ships, so she sat at the pier for 12 years, as she required a costly overhaul and reactor refueling, for which no funds were available. Only the resumption of Russia's Arctic ambitions and the subsequent restart of the NSR runs allowed the funds to be finally found, so the Sevmorput now remains the only nuclear cargo ship in the world.
  • Small nuclear-powered vehicles. Every crash or accident would be a potential radiological emergency. It is safer and cheaper to use a stationary reactor to make synthetic gasoline or hydrogen, then use that to power a car or a plane.
    • Ford Nucleon, a nuclear-powered car. Over 5000 miles between refueling stops, but imagine the mess that would result if you let notorious speeders drive it.
  • The smallest nuclear-powered vehicles ever actually tried were strategic bombers made by the US and USSR in The '60s. While both indeed flew with active reactors, none actually was powered by it (the reactors were idling, and the flights were more to test the shielding). As soon as practical ICBMs arrived, both projects were dropped.
• Concorde and other supersonic transport aeroplanes. Supersonic airliner which was cutting-edge at its time and many considered it to be the future of commercial flight. The problem with Concorde and all SST airliners was that they guzzled huge amounts of fuel and to maintain their aerodynamics, their bodies have to be narrow and slender, reducing the available space for passengers and cargo. The body of Concorde had very limited passenger space, which meant carrying a small number of people at high cost, so no wonder Concordes went out of service in the early 2000s. And there are very few airports that could serve as Concorde terminals; you could only ever see a Concorde, let alone fly in one, if you were making a trans-Atlantic flight. Famously, a NASA engineer once said that "putting a man on the moon was easy compared with getting Concorde to work".
  • Besides, the Concorde has been retired for quite a while now, and supersonic airliners are unlikely to return. Going past the sound barrier is too inefficient for civilian flight, period. Also, these days, if you need a meeting with your partners in NYC, just set up a webcam. It wasn't retired because it was too fast - in the digital age, it was too slow.
  • Part of what helped kill it was that many countries restricted its use due to concern over the noise it generated (particularly the sonic boom). Noise problems aside, most planes capable of supersonic flight tend to lose all semblance of fuel economy at those speeds, making that capability an example in and of itself except for some specific circumstances.
  • The Concorde was conceived in a period when talk of the "space age" was all the buzz and optimism about the future was rampant. It hit the market shortly after the first oil crisis taught everyone that unlimited cheap oil was a fantasy. Only two airlines ever bought it (Air France and British Airways, which were at that time both basically state-run) and the Concorde never saw any widespread use outside its London/Paris-New York route. While Air France and British Airways made a small net profit all things told, the development costs never got even close to being paid back. Arguably this failure of a combined Anglo-French effort helped bring about the consolidation of the airplane market into the two giants Airbus and Boeing with other companies like Embraer or Bombardier relegated to small jets at best.
  • The Soviet Union developed the Tupolev Tu-144 which was remarkably similar to the Concorde^note Both sides accused the other of industrial espionage and the Western press took to calling the Tu-144 "Concordski", but nothing was ever conclusively proven.. Needless to say, it was a spectacular failure that was wracked by many unresolved problems such as inefficiency, poor quality materials and components, excessive noise both inside and outside the cabin, and a high accident rate, including a prototype Tu-144 infamously crashing at the 1973 Paris Air Show. One can't help but wonder if this was an ill omen for the Concorde's future.
  • The United States initially planned to develop the much quicker and larger Boeing 2707, which was to fly at Mach 2.7. To allow for this, it was to have variable-sweep wings and a titanium fuselage so as to ward off heating. Due to its high cost and environmental concerns, the project was shelved in 1971, after Congress refused any funding.
• In the same vein, near-sonic airliners like the Convair 990 Coronado. When approaching the speed of sound,(an area known as "trans sonic" flight) funny things begin to happen, and one of them is an immense increase in energy consumption due to compressibility of air and immense stress on the flight control surfaces. To attain such speeds economically, the airliner must have specially-designed wings to dissipate the compressed air and a narrow fuselage body, (The Coronado had a single-aisle and five seats abreast) which means low carrying capability. While it was the fastest non-SST airliner ever, it was phased out in the 1980s due to uneconomical costs. It also sold so poorly that Convair decided to get out of the airliner business for good.
• Private/business jets are seen as a symbol of ostentatious wealth and allow passengers to bypass the hassle of commercial air travel. However, most feature about as much cabin space as a van or a small bus with surprisingly little legroom if more than half-filled. You can't even stand up straight in smaller models, making it difficult to use the one small bathroom (if the plane is big enough to feature one) that everyone has to share.
• The Beechcraft Bonanza appeared in 1947 but looks like it was designed much later. The "V" tail, retractable landing gear, and its sleek lines could make its pilot the envy of the flight line. The problem was that "V" tail and its unique landing gear. The aircraft was snapped up by lots of new pilots with money, particularly doctors. Accidents involving the Bonanza gave it the nickname "The Fork Tailed Doctor Killer". While the aircraft didn't have a higher accident rate, that "V" tail was a structural weakness compared to regular "inverted T" tail - improper repairs or simple wear and tear could cause aerostatic flutter. There were issues with the retractable landing gear that stained the aircraft's reputation even after Beechcraft fixed the problem. The plane's narrow center of gravity didn't help matters. Today the original V tailed aircraft is popular, but it needs a lot of inspections and experience to keep it airworthy.
  • In 1960, Beechcraft began to manufacture the Bonanza with a conventional "inverted T" tail. This proved Boring, but Practical, and a great success; over 17,000 Bonanzas have been built, and the conventional tail rectified all the V-tail problems, turning Bonanza from a failure into an astonishing success. Bonanza is popular not only as a private plane, but as a trainer (Beech T-34 Mentor). Beechcraft also manufactures a conversion kit to convert the early V tail Bonanzas into the new standard model. Its production run - from 1947 to today (2024) is one of the longest of any aeroplane.
• The mythical Flying Car. A staple of science fiction, sure, but all attempts at combining automobile and aircraft have failed because their functional needs are so different, making something that does both only succeeds in making it handle poorly at both, in addition to being expensive and gas-guzzling. Those that do exist are better described as "roadable aircraft", meaning they're airplanes whose wings can be collapsed or detached so they can be driven on the road (say, from the airstrip to private storage); they're not meant to replace your day-to-day car.
• Self-driving cars, as they currently stand. On paper, an automated personal vehicle means you can relax and not have to worry about controlling the car, leaving your hands—and your whole mind and body, for that matter—to do things like study, conduct work-related activities, eat, and use telecommunication without some sort of hands-free device; to say nothing about the potential usefulness for those who have disabilities that prevent them from driving. But automated cars still have a long way to go before they can be safely used on a mass scale, with Artificial Stupidity being a major concern; navigational errors can result in missed turns at best and fatal accidents at worst.
  • At this point self-driving car technology has evolved to the point where they're extremely good at following traffic laws. In fact, sometimes they're TOO good, causing accidents because other drivers weren't driving properly and the smart car failed to react accordingly. Not to mention the ethical debate of whether or not a self-driving car should be allowed to let its owner/driver crash if doing so would prevent a much larger accident, as well as the legal complications about who's at fault for such an event.
  • One thing pointed out, however, is that self-driving cars don't have to be perfect - they just have to not be any worse than human drivers (realistically, though, they have to be at least somewhat better before people start putting their faith in them on a mass scale).
  • There is another problem in that AI, as it is done now, just doesn't perceive things the way beings in the physical world do. simply putting some rectangles on a stop sign can convince an AI it says 'speed limit 45', and inserting a carefully crafted matrix of pixels into any image can convince an AI it's any other image, and this problem won't be solved until the technology we build AI on is fundamentally different. To cite current examples, Tesla Autopilot, despite the name, is legally a driver-assist software, and turns itself off one second before a crash to absolve all liability, there are many people seeing their so called Full Self-Driving seemingly can't detect things like children on the road, and it can't tell the difference between actual roads and light rail tracks, driving like a skittish teenager that needs constant correction and keeps making mistakes.
• In many parts of the world cars can be that. Sure, they can take you (almost) everywhere at top speed well above 100 km/h, but...
  • Chances are, most of the time they will not move at all, being parked. And when they move, it is most likely for commuting in suburban or city roads where a car cannot let its speed advantage come into play due to congestion.
  • Many cities were not built for cars at all and parts of the inner city may even be off-limits to cars entirely.
  • Add to that the fact that gas, insurance and all the other costs owning a car causes tend to get higher every year and it becomes understandable why Boring, but Practical solutions like bicycles or light rail are gaining ground among young people.
  • Even regions that were designed with driving in mind have had problems with congestion. The Greater Los Angeles area freeways can be such major bottlenecks to and from the metropolitan area that public transit like the MetroLink railway and cross-county express bus routes started gaining traction and even special promotional fares to encourage drivers to ride. Unlike driving, these methods allow you to also safely use your phone, read books, work on documents, and so on, so the travel time can be used to your advantage even.
• And speaking of moving cars, breaking the speed limit. Sure it's satisfying to get in the fast lane and zip past everyone, and it feels like it gets you to your destination a lot sooner, but it offers a terrible cost-to-benefit ratio. On the cost side it is more dangerous to yourself and others, puts more wear and tear on your vehicle, burns more fuel per kilometre, and paints a gigantic target on your vehicle for ticket-happy cops which can cost you even more money and even your license. On the "benefit" side, it requires you to consistently go a solid 20 km/h or so over the speed limit to even see a perceptible benefit, and even then you might shave 10% off your commute time if you're lucky enough to be able to speed the entire trip.
• The style of transmission a car has can be seen as this, depending on your point of view:
  • Manual: They provide a lower upfront cost and maintenance, give you more control, and generally provide better gas millage. However, they require a lot more skill to use effectively, especially if you want to avoid stalling the car or "riding the clutch" (which newbies will do) that could burn the clutch out faster. And when you're in stop-and-go traffic or constantly stopping on hills going in the uphill direction, the fun drops off real fast. Lastly, depending on where you are in the world, it can be harder to sell a manual transmission car.
  • Automatic: The convenience of not having to worry about shifting gears does allow the driver to focus more on the driving part; the higher complexity of automatics means higher initial cost and higher maintenance. In addition, they generally have worse gas millage than manuals, but this can depend on the gearing. For example, the automatic trim of the Mazda3 has higher gas millage than the manual version due to its taller gear ratio in the final drive. Many models support semi-automatic operation by paddle shifters or a sequential-style mode on the gear lever, and many transmissions in the 2020s have six gears or more, but this adds complexity so weighing pros and cons is recommended.
  • CVT: A continuous range of gears ensures that the car is in the most optimal gear ratio for a wide variety of use cases, which gives it the best efficiency, as well as being less complicated than traditional automatics leading to lower initial cost. However, maintenance includes replacement of expensive components (such as the belt between gears) and may require specialized personnel due to their relative age in the market. In addition, people find the smooth feel of a CVT a turn-off, since most people are used to the interruptions of gear changing. (Many CVT-equipped cars do offer a driving mode that imitates gear changes.) Another thing to beware of is if the CVT was designed to handle the engine it has been paired with, as inexperienced companies have fitted CVTs to engines that are too powerful without adding proper compensations like a proper transmission cooler, leading to premature failures.
  • One of the niceties of the CVT is that it can be run reverse just as fast as forward - reversing races are popular in the Netherlands.
• Hood ornaments (or car mascots, as they're known in the UK). Originally introduced to cover radiator caps in early cars, they're nice to look at, often artistically sculpted, and a good way to develop a brand identity (or show off, in the case of custom examples). They're also very easily stolen or broken and can cause impalement injuries in the event of a car-pedestrian accident. Fragility and regulations surrounding their design have prompted most car manufacturers to eliminate them entirely; the lone holdouts are luxury manufacturers, such as Rolls-Royce and Bentley, both of which install them on a spring-loaded mechanism to retract it in the event of collision or when the car is parked.
• The Airbus A380, a massive quad-engine passenger airliner with a full-sized upper deck (as opposed to the Boeing 747's upper deck, which is only a fraction of the length of the lower deck) and the capacity for a variety of luxurious services such as bars and showers, or the option to instead seat over 800 passengers in a single-class configuration. Unfortunately, because it is such a huge aircraft, there are stronger regulations involving its separation from other aircraft in the air (as it generates greater wake turbulence), and airports have to make upgrades just to tailor to this specific model of aircraft, such as using multiple jet bridges in order to seat everyone in a reasonable timeframe.
  • The A380 suffers from a miscalculation on the part of Airbus as to what aviation would develop into. At the time the A380 was developed, most airlines operated under a "hub and spoke" model, flying people into one or a few big airports and from there to their final destinations. While airlines such as Delta (Atlanta), Lufthansa (Frankfurt), and the Gulf carriers (Dubai, Doha, and so on) still do that and indeed the Gulf carriers are among the biggest customers for the plane, most newer entrants on the market and much of the growth is in "point to point" flights with twin-engined planes that seat 200 or fewer flying between secondary airports. Customers get direct flights even if they don't live near a hub, High Speed Rail takes over some feeding flights and the airlines only have to order and maintain one type of aircraft. But the A380 has no place in that picture.
  • The airports installed special gates for the A380, they sometimes even upgraded the runways, but the one thing they didn't upgrade was the terminal buildings. Now when an almost fully-loaded A380 comes in, the terminal is overcrowded with the masses of passengers exiting the plane. This actually contributed to people being driven away from the big hubs.
  • In fact, Airbus decided to stop production of it in February 2019, because as noted on the next entry airlines prefer twinjets as the A330 or A350.
• The Boeing 747, the original jumbo jet, also known as the "Queen of the Skies", has also been heading in this direction for intercontinental passenger flights for many of the same reasons as the A380. Ever since the advent of ETOPS rules in the 1980s, airlines have opted for more efficient and easier to maintain twin-engined aircraft like the Boeing 767, 777, or 787, and the Airbus A330 and A350 for trans-Atlantic and -Pacific jaunts. The greater fuel efficiency of twin-engined planes would eventually doom other tri- and quad-jet planes like the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and MD-11, Airbus A340, and Boeing 727 as well. The last two U.S. passenger airlines to fly 747s, United and Delta, retired their aging 747-400s in 2017. Many other airlines, including British Airways and Cathay Pacific, retired theirs in 2020 due to the economic effects of COVID-19. That said, the "Queen" still flies for a few large Eurasian airlines such as Lufthansa, primarily on high-demand long-haul routes which command enough passengers to make flying her worthwhile. Meanwhile, her cargo variant retains enduring popularity with airlines worldwide, which makes sense as the plane was originally envisioned as a cargo liner. Finally, Boeing announced that it would end production of the 747 altogether in 2022 due to declining sales. The last Boeing 747 - a cargo plane - was rolled out of the assembly line on 8 December 2022.
• The Antonov 225 straddles between this and Cool Plane. It's so huge that it taking off can cause air disturbance that would need to be waited out. Only one was ever made because there's just not much need for something that big. Another airframe was built but never completed, requiring massive investment to complete. The awesome part though is that it is indeed the only plane capable of airlifting oversized cargos such as turbines or even an 'entire locomotive. It's all about need.
  • Make that, it was the only plane capable of airlifting said oversized cargo. The one completed plane was effectively destroyed during Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The uncompleted airframe is apparently still intact, but for now is essentially impossible to complete.
• A good deal of airport expansion or worse replacement programs. On paper, the first and last thing most people see when they enter a city is its airport, and you want visitors to leave with a good impression. So majorly overhauling or building a nice new big airport from scratch will pay dividends right? As it turns out you can get the same result by just sprucing up your terminals. And these expansion projects have an annoying trend of being followed by a decrease in air traffic as they tend to be made in response to one-time spikes in demand (like Olympics). The former CEO of Southwest Airlines had this to say on the subject:
  Herbert Kelleher: I’ve never once thought, “Wow that airport was great! The rest of the city was awful, but the airport was so nice I want to go back!” And unlike most people, my business revolves around airports.
• Discussed in an essay by Douglas Adams, in which he describes growing disillusioned by comedy despite being considered a comedian himself. He describes going to a stand-up routine and listening to the comedian describe how, in a plane crash, the black box would be the only thing to survive intact. The punchline was the comedian smugly asking why they didn't just build the plane out of the same material as the black box, since it would be indestructible. Adams acerbically noted that it's because the black box is made out of titanium which, in addition to being incredibly sturdy, is also incredibly heavy, and a plane made out of the stuff would never be able to get off the ground.
• The General Motors EV1. It was the first modern mass-produced electric car and set the template for subsequent electric cars. However, battery technology in the 1990s wasn't mature enough to handle the demands for an electric car, and the EV1 was expensive to develop and manufacture. Due to GM wanting to save costs, the cars initially used lead-acid batteries, which significantly increased the car's weight and hampered its maximum range (70 to 80 miles [110 to 130 km]); the "Gen-2" models used NiMH batteries, which effectively doubled the car's range. Only 1,117 EV1s were ever produced, and all of them were only available on lease, mostly in California with some of the "Gen-2" models available in Arizona and Georgia. In 2003, the EV1 program was canceled, and every EV1 was recalled with all but 40 examples destroyed. The surviving cars were sent to museums and universities for display and research, with the stipulation that the cars could never be reactivated and driven on public roads. And even those samples had their electric powertrains deactivated—except for the one donated to the Smithsonian Institution, which has a strict policy of accepting only fully intact specimens.
• The 1983 Steinwinter Supercargo experimental semi-truck. Admit it, there's something snazzy about a super-flat semi-tractor that entirely slips under the trailer, that can carry a 20' container on its back, and that almost looks like a sports car with its sloped windshield (the unloaded tractor is actually pretty fast for a truck) and no visible front grille. In fact, it's so cool that it served as an inspiration for Jetto's truck in The Highwayman (the Highwayman himself drives something Colani-inspired). Besides, it made semi-trailers with doors on both ends possible, and it can carry cargo over the vehicle's entire length. Now let's count up the disadvantages.
  • For starters, the Steinwinter tractor doesn't work well with conventional semi-trailers, if at all.
  • In curves, the front of the trailer sways out much, much farther than on a conventional semi-truck. You're bound to knock down signs and traffic lights in tight curves.
  • Worse yet, the front corners of the trailer are at a dead angle from the driver's POV, especially the one on the passenger's side. The roof windows are of no help. This also means that while it's possible to drive a Steinwinter against a loading bay forward, it requires guesstimating where the trailer might be.
  • Oh, and you cannot drive the tractor out from underneath a Steinwinter semi-truck that's standing with its front against a loading bay.
  • No front grille means this thing is seriously difficult to cool. As in prone to overheat as has been proven during press test drives.
  • Due to its shape, engine maintenance is rather difficult, too. When the tractor is coupled to a trailer or loaded, it's nigh-impossible.
  • The long and low front overhang is likely to scrape on the ground when entering an incline. This can be prevented to a certain degree with the adjustable pneumatic suspension, but you as the driver have to remember to do that. Besides, pneumatic suspension is something else that needs to be maintained.
  • Cab equals crumpling zone, driver included. If you bump into another vehicle and be it a VW Polo, you're toast. This thing is the mother of all vehicular death traps. At least you're dismembered because your feet are only a few inches away from the front end, so your legs will be the first things to crumble. This was the reason why Steinwinter actually had difficulties finding test drivers.
  • Those who did dare to drive it noticed a whole lot of understeer. That's bad enough already if you're driving a Tatra luxury sedan with a V8 rear engine, but if you're driving a semi-truck of over 30 tons, that's terrible.
  • This may border on nitpicking, but: The Steinwinter's reclining seats may be cool, but the berth in a backsleep is much more comfortable. Besides, the many windows around the Steinwinter's cab cannot be shut off with curtains.
  • Even before the Steinwinter was presented, aerodynamics started to become important for trucks in order to save increasingly expensive fuel. The aerodynamics of the tractor alone were great. Those of whatever it would carry on top, well, not so much. And you couldn't hide it behind a spoiler. The Highwayman featured a trailer with a half-sloped front, but that would have made a front door impossible and eliminated one of the Steinwinter's few advantages. By the way, notice how the Highwayman trailer doesn't go all the way to the tractor's front for reasons explained above.
  • Last but not least, just because your tractor can reach some 100 mph when not loaded, doesn't mean that's legal for a truck. And it isn't. At least not in Germany.
• Airless tires and run-flat tires can respectively make all or most of the burden of flat tires a thing of the past, so why haven't they replaced pneumatic tires? To support the weight of the vehicle, the run-flat tires need to be much more durable and be able to hold the vehicle's weight without air, which makes the tire more rigid and massive and thus detracts from handling and ride quality. Airless tires — lacking air in the tires — cause more abuse to be transmitted to the vehicle's suspension and can wear it out sooner if the vehicle wasn't designed for airless tires. These specialty tires also tend to cost noticeably more than pneumatic tires. For a lot of people, the risk of having a flat tire is a small price to pay for superior handling and shock absorption. Like a lot of technologies, this can be subject to change.
• Electric vehicle battery swapping has long held a significant allure to many in the market. In theory, it offers an easy solution to what has long been their greatest weakness: long charge times, allowing them to more easily rival traditional gas refueling times. Its big problems are that it requires building a large number of excess EV batteries; an entire mechanism and building to handle, charge and store batteries; and each station can only handle one vehicle at a time. This is all in stark contrast to the comparative ease to set up gas and/or EV charging stations that may handle multiple cars at once. It’s for these reasons that Tesla abandoned the concept after trying it and Israeli startup Better Place went bankrupt attempting the same. The only successes so far are Chinese Company Nio^note  Who comes from mainland China- a nation that has the political will- being an authoritarian centralized system (much like a large corporation) where decisions tend to be top-down- and the resources- their government and/or companies having stakes if not outright owning several large cobalt mines in Africa- to implement and improve swappable batteries and Taiwanese Electric Scooter company Gogoro^note  Whose focus on smaller and manually swappable batteries and stations is far more financially sustainable and capable of handling multiple users quickly. , both of which have yet to test their ability to succeed elsewhere.
• Fuel cell vehicles were thought to be the future of consumer vehicles when battery technology still lagged behind, there were even talks about micro fuel cells for laptops powered by alcohol, relegating batteries for very small devices. The explosive growth of the laptop and smartphone industry instead provides the scalability for affordable & high-density batteries in cars, which require far less infrastructure investment compared to delivering hydrogen. Some companies and countries still invest in the technology, either to avoid dependency on countries controlling the supply of the required mineral for batteries or to serve a niche where fuel cells make more sense.
• From an urban planning perspective, cars are this as a whole. While they may allow unparalleled personal mobility if you can afford them, designing settlements around them causes all kinds of issues:
  • Roads cannot simultaneously be safe for pedestrians and vehicles going 30+ mph. Especially for disabled people, crossing a busy road is one of the most dangerous things you can do, and in many cities, it's a daily necessity.
  • Traffic is an inevitability. Induced demand also requires expanding further and further to alleviate and potentially demolish more buildings. It's better to expand public transit to reduce the need for cars.
  • If you can't afford a car or can't use one due to disability, age, or car troubles, settlements built around cars are pretty much inhospitable to you unless you're lucky enough to live near a transit stop.
  • Some people, despite being in a position to own and drive a vehicle, just hate the idea of driving due to how dangerous and stressful it can be, as opposed to just hopping on public transit and not having to worry about all of that.
  • Designing around cars is a financial drain. When stopping for groceries requires parking, you need to make the process of stopping and starting driving worthwhile, making superstores your only real option for your necessities, leading to homogenization of everything. They've also led to many neighborhoods, especially suburbs, without a center people can just be. It's especially awkward for children who can't drive, since they either must be driven to a place to hang out or be stuck playing in their limited yards or houses.
  • Finally, geometry. Parking requires either expensive parking garages or demolishing more and more buildings for parking lots.
• Importing and driving a gray market vehicle. Sure you will have a unique ride that no one else in your neighborhood will be driving but it comes with its own challenges. Insuring and registering the car will be a hassle since no one knows what the hell it is. Likewise, your local mechanic will have no idea how to fix it when something breaks. Auto shops won't have parts for it so you will likely have to ship them from the car's native country. And if the steering wheel is on the opposite side? Drive-thrus will be the least of your worries. You will have bigger problems seeing oncoming traffic and judging lane positioning. Automotive journalist Doug DeMuro points this out in driving his Nissan Skyline GT-R in the United States.
• The Rumpler Tropfenwagen from 1921 was not only state-of-the-art back then, it was downright futuristic, having been conceived entirely by the aircraft designer Edmund Rumpler. In times when streamlining usually meant pointy cabs and conical smoke box doors on steam locomotives, the Rumpler Tropfenwagen had actually been tested in a wind tunnel. Even though the open-roof variants looked like a Roaring 20s Batmobile, the Tropfenwagen wasn't to be flashy, it was to be fuel-efficient over half a century before that actually became a thing. It managed to reach 70mph or 110 km/h from a mere 36hp while riding smoothly. So far, so cool. Oh, and it wasn't a Super Prototype. It was an actual production car.
  Only that "production" meant not more than round about 100 cars. The Tropfenwagen sold poorly mostly because Rumpler didn't think it through. The rear swing axle, itself an invention of Rumpler's, worked fairly well unlike in certain post-war vehicles, but the steering didn't.
  Worse yet, the air-cooled W6 rear-mid-engine was prone to overheat for a simple reason: Rumpler left the bottom underneath the engine compartment open to let cool air in, but what few louvers especially early specimens had in the surrounding carbody weren't nearly enough to let the heated-up air escape again. While the Tropfenwagen was designed for long-distance travels, this was one factor that made it unfit for this purpose.
  The other factor was that long-distance trips usually require a fair amount of luggage, but Rumpler must have totally forgotten to give the car any dedicated space for that. Even the two spare wheels were stowed away in the enshrouded undercarriage, making retrieving them difficult.
  The Tropfenwagen would end up being used as a taxi in Berlin, partly with roof racks for luggage which undid a great deal of its aerodynamic advantage, or set ablaze in Metropolis. Only two have survived to this day.

Luxury, Racing, and Sports

• The Red Bull X2010 and its successors were developed as theoretical prototypes for Gran Turismo series as speculation about how a racing machine might be if it was built without any regulations. The concept exploits ground effect tremendously to enable ridiculous cornering speeds. The vehicle can be built with the available automotive technology of the time, however, the sheer G-forces from driving the car at its full performance would be too dangerous for the driver.
• This is invoked with Top Fuel dragsters. They can run the 1000-foot (about 0.305 kilometers) in 3.62 seconds, produce around 8500-10000 horsepower, and reach speeds of 335 mph (539 km/h). They also consume around 12 - 22.75 gallons of fuel in a single run, require a specialized drag fuel (nitromethane), produce enough noise to register on a Richter scale, and a single run will typically obligate a complete engine rebuild; in fact, the mechanical stresses are so great that the 1000-foot standard was implemented because of the risk of the cars coming apart running a 1/4 mile (0.402 kilometers). The cars are also under so much stress that there's little to no margin for error in body construction. Additionally, the tires are highly specialized, being so soft to provide the necessary grip that the tires are spent after approximately 8 drag races. The training and conditioning needed to drive a Top Fuel dragster is much higher than a typical street-legal dragster, so you may NOT simply hop into one and give it a try. On the plus side, no gearbox is needed, with the tires' flexibility alone providing the ratios for optimal acceleration, by compressing under acceleration and ballooning at higher speeds. The spectacle can really draw a crowd too.
• Invoked with Formula One too. Unlike regular road-going cars, the machines are purpose-built for incredible performance all across the board with specialized components that are unlike what is found on street vehicles in the interest of cutting-edge performance. Naturally, this makes a complete F1 car incredibly costly and can actually make street-legal supercars look economical in comparison. F1 engines have a much shorter life expectancy than street engines in the interest of Min-Maxing performance. As, like with Top Fuel, drivers must have extensive training and conditioning to drive these machines due to the sheer acceleration and g-forces they inflict on the drivers. Just starting an F1 car can be an endeavor, lasting 1.5 to 2 hours due to the need to pre-heat the fluids and thus the engine to proper temperature. ^note The engine is so precisely built that it is virtually siezed up when cold. However, the spectacle of a Formula 1 championship draws an enthusiastic crowd worldwide and the research that goes into an F1 car can even be used to improve road-going vehicles.
  • The brakes that F1 cars use are notable, as they don't work correctly at road car speeds requiring the intense braking that F1 cars are under to heat up to the proper temperature. Hence, this why road cars stick with tried an true Boring, but Practical brake systems and why we haven't seen F1 braking systems on street cars.
  • Wet weather tires are more of a curiosity than a way for F1 cars to race in heavy rain. While a race through pouring rain has the potential to be interesting as drivers struggle on a drenched track and other racing series like NASCAR do allow road races in this weather, the FIA tends to stop races under heavy rain to avert any safety catastrophes. This leaves the rain tires mostly unused because in intermediate and dry conditions, they wear down too rapidly. Intermediate tires are a good compromise when the track is wet without rain and see far more use.
• Any and all turbine-powered road vehicles intended for civilian use.
  • Those that use turboshafts (such as the Y2K motorcycle or this minivan) have massive turbo-lag issues. They guzzle fuel at a prodigious rate measured in minutes rather than miles because they burn as much fuel at idle as at full throttle. Also, they are eye-wateringly expensive. And while they generate a lot of raw horsepower, internal combustion vehicles built for high performance can almost always do the same or even better at a vastly inferior price.
  • Those that use turbofans or turbojets (such as this jet Beetle) run into the basic problem that relying on pure thrust is not very efficient on-road vehicles. They eventually get to rather prodigious speeds, but acceleration tends to be slow and the noise extreme, and this is on top of the same problems turboshaft-powered vehicles suffer. The result is certainly very exciting, but very unlikely to do better than a vehicle with a powerful tuned internal-combustion engine in it.
• Installing an aeroplane engine on a car. True, installing a Rolls-Royce Merlin on '55 Chevy will make the car an earthbound equivalent of Supermarine Spitfire, but it is incredibly impractical in sense of use of space, fuel economy, safety (to both self and others who are on the road) and driveability. Even more astonishing is this Goggomobil equipped with BMW radial engine. There's also The Beast, a Merlin-powered self-made coupé that looks like a normal car except for the long hood. The engine produces so much excess heat that driver and passenger get blisters on their feet.
• The point of super/sports cars. They look pretty, they're loud, they have a lot of horsepower, and can travel pretty darn fast, but they have many drawbacks for daily use.
  • They are very low to the ground and don't always have hydraulics to assist with traveling over speed bumps, meaning an ordinary parking lot can be one of the worst enemies of a super car. Be prepared for bumper repairs or scraping bottom trying to get across uneven surfaces such as a parking garage exit.
  • Supercars offer little to no room for even an extra kid, a pet, or small luggage, making this an inversion of Bigger on the Inside trope. Even if you do get back seats, chances are they're impractical for everyday comfortable use or the space is taken up instead by the engine. This is one reason why some buyers prefer front-engine supercars as there's more space in the back for storage or even rear seating.
  • Some countries don't allow registration of vehicles that have opposite steering columns or impose severe usage restrictions. In Australia for example, the steering wheel must be located on the right-hand side (RHD) for registration on public roads, unless the vehicle is over 15-30 years old depending on what state you are in. So unless you plan on doing a lot of track days or paying thousands of dollars to convert it to RHD (surprisingly, both of which many people still do), the car will sit in a garage for years before it can even be used on public roads. Even worse are countries such as Singapore, which do not allow the import or registration of LHD vehicles to any citizen at all.
  • Due to the impractically high price of the supercars, it is likely to fall victim to being too awesome to drive, due to fear of being involved in a collision or simply incurring wear, tear, and depreciation with use; these vehicles often stay in owner's garage and are only taken out occasionally due to how costly said depreciation is. A notorious case of this fear being realized is Stefan Eriksson's red Ferrari Enzo (he owned two! the other was black), which was wrecked in Malibu - a theory on the incident was that the car was doing 200mph when it hit a 1-inch bump at an angle, which would have caused the driver to lose control if he wasn't hanging on tight. ^note This was also a dumb criminal moment for Stefan who owed payments on the Enzo to the Bank of Scotland and smuggled this and other cars overseas to evade repossession due to being overwhelmed with the high costs of the supercars he acquired; to make a long story short, his organized criminal operations awarded him a prison sentence.
  • Finally, as noted in a discussion about Ferraris and this trope on the TV show Castle, no matter how cool they look and how fast they can go such cars are ultimately no faster than any other vehicle on the street when they're stuck in rush-hour traffic. Even if you aren't in rush-hour traffic, you can still get pulled over for trying to drive these vehicles at the speeds they're designed for, making these vehicles useless on public roads from both a practical and legal standpoint. Being stuck in traffic with a track car isn't necessarily good for fuel efficiency or even fire safety, as some unfortunate owners found out when their machines caught fire and went up in flames.
  • Pony cars are a subversion; While not as agile as track-centered cars and lacking the exoticness of low-volume high-price super cars, they are usually much more affordable and still offer exciting engine power for the drag strip and tearing around a race track. Even the V8 models aren't too thirsty for their size as long as you don't go for the ultimate trim level, or an aftermarket engine-tuning package. For drivers who need better economy, V6 and turbocharged straight 4 options are available that still offer enough power for fun acceleration. Similarly, Corvettes are also subversions in that they balance their track focus with daily drivability and achieve surprisingly good fuel efficiency thanks to their multi-purpose engine design along with sleek aerodynamics.
• The Mercedes-Benz AMG-One was designed around taking a Formula 1 engine and placing it into a road-legal car for F1 enthusiasts to enjoy. It has handing to back it up too, setting a new 2022 record of 6:35.183 minutes at the infamously difficult Nürburgring-Nordschleif. Of course, this feat does come at a price, with an MSRP of $2.72 million and in very limited numbers making it hard to acquire to begin with. That F1 engine can even rev to 11,000 RPM which sounds like a thrill, but that makes it quite loud so one may want to put on some ear plugs. That specialized engine is also only rated for 50,000 km (approximately 31,000 miles) before it must be overhauled.
• The Bugatti Veyron.^note By extension, its successor the Chiron too, which was designed to surpass the Veyron even further. More on that below. Designed to be the fastest "production" car ever designed, it can go 252 miles an hour. Assuming you can find a straight road long enough to let you do so (you can't, except on test tracks). And assuming you don't run out of gas (it will go through the entire tank in 12 minutes) or have an catastrophic blowout (the tires will let go after fifteen minutes when they're brand new at top speed). It's also a production car in a very limited sense: only ten were made, and sold with a $1,000,000 price tag. Despite the fact that each one cost Bugatti (aka Volkswagen) $5,000,000 to make (I don't think they have the best accountants).
  • When the world speed record for production cars was broken by another car, Bugatti responded with the Veyron Supersport, which can reach speeds of 269 miles an hour, but the tires will give out even faster if you do somehow manage to reach that speed, and they're $20,000 a pop. Suffice to say, the Veyron is an amazing amalgamation of technical and engineering genius, but not at all practical for anyone. Due to an engineering oversight, the gears are not usually suited to that kind of power. In a lot of them the gears broke down after just over 12,000 miles. Although, if you have the money to buy a car worth a million, you probably don't have that many problems with overhauling the car every once in a while.
  • Finally, the Bugatti Veyron isn't even a good track car for the price due to the fact that it is just so heavy. With the Veyron, you get very little bang for your buck as you can honestly drive faster on most racetracks and roads in general with a much lighter and less expensive sports car. For instance, the Lamborghini Huracán, also developed under Volkswagen, costs $320,000 US fully equipped. It beat the Veyron on the Top Gear (UK) test track by 1 second. As it turns out, the Huracán even beat the allegedly higher-tier Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4.
  • The Veyron's successor, the Chiron, broke 300 MPH, boasting a 304.773 MPH or 490.485 KPH top speed. Again, good luck finding a place to let it rip. As with the Veyron, the tires are bound to be spent after that top speed run.
• The SSC Ultimate Aero Twin Turbo, the car that unseated the Veyron as the world's fastest production car (then was unseated yet again by the Veyron Super Sport) has 1,183 horsepower. Unfortunately it is rear wheel drive, meaning all that power and torque is applied only to the rear, resulting in a car that fishtails in corners at the slightest blip of the throttle. There's a reason the Veyron is all-wheel-drive.
  • Hennesey Performance was also vying to break production car speed records with their purpose-built "Venom GT". The Venom broke the 270 MPH mark, though it isn't an official Guinness World Record because the vehicle didn't meet the criteria that the Bugatti Veyron had to meet, namely 30 cars must be produced and the car must complete two top-speed runs which are then averaged. Hennesey also developed the next generation of their Venom, the Venom F5. The company was advertising 290 MPH as the goal for the vehicle's top speed. The car was planned to see limited production, with 30 units estimated.
  • Hennesey Performance also specializes in outfitting common vehicles with obscene engine power, which lets you greatly exceed the speed limits on most roads if you feel like risking time in the slammer. Don't Try This at Home.
• As mentioned above, Modified Super Cars sold by tuning companies are even more impractical compared with their unmodified counterparts. On top of the costs from the original car, more cost is added from the engine tuning and the additional performance parts. This engine tuning will typically shorten the lifespan of the engine due to extra stress, and likely also reduce fuel efficiency. The added performance can legally only be used on a race track unless you have an autobahn nearby to take the vehicle to its top speed. Also, the insurance on a supercar that has been enhanced by an aftermarket company is bound to be even higher. There are some subversions, however, where the car receives a modest boost in power but the focus is put on improving the car's handling on the track first and foremost with a higher-quality suspension and high-performance brakes for example.
• Supercars in police forces. They look like they're designed to chase criminals at high speeds, but most criminals don't themselves use supercars in the first place, so you can perfectly effectively chase them in your average souped-up police cruiser - the maintenance and parts for which are a fraction of the cost of what the city would have to pay to keep that Lambo on the road. As for the occasional criminals who actually do use very fast cars, cameras and helicopters are much safer than initiating a 300 km/h chase on busy highways, even if your department owns a car capable of doing so. Supercars can actually be drafted into a police force if local laws allow illegal, confiscated property or personal vehicles to be used in police operations.
• One practical use for the supercars, particularly all-wheel-drive ones, is rushing organs for transplant from donor to recipient when having them in the same facility or using aircraft isn't practical, which is not as infrequent as you'd think.
• Motorcycles with colossal engines in the frame; generally, it's overkill to bolt a high-liter engine like a V8 into a bike such as with the Boss Hoss Cycles, and with an engine that heavy, the bike isn't as good at taking the corners, especially with only two wheels of grip. It may sound like a huge thrill to take one for a ride in a straight line, but they are quite expensive brand-new, easily approaching the price of a respectable sports car.
• Drifting as a cornering technique:
  • While it makes the person doing it look badass, it actually makes you corner slower. It has been proved that a 600 HP drift car drifting around a track is slower than a 150 HP van going around the same track without drifting. The Mythbusters also showed the same thing with one car, just driven differently in two different runs, and it did better when not drifting.
  • In the final season of Mythbusters, they revisited the drifting vs regular cornering. While the final result is that both "always drift" and "always normal cornering" have more or less the same time, they noticed on certain corners, normal cornering is faster while some are faster when drifting. Long story short, drifting is situational.
  • The tires will wear out much more quickly if drifting is performed regularly (as demonstrated by Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear (UK) and Tanner Faust on Top Gear (US)). This can be a money pit with sports tires so don't unless you have the cash to spare.
• On land, driving well beyond the speed limit is generally this. It's so cool and rebellious to blaze down a highway like you're playing Need for Speed, and probably a thrill. However:
  • You're obviously vulnerable to being pulled over by the police, the citation you get can add even more expense by raising your insurance rates, and it's up to the individual cop if they feel like going easy on you. Or in more civilized countries, up to the exact amount of speeding you did.
  • The physical dangers are what can truly ruin your day. Exceeding the speed limit means that you're more likely to lose control of your vehicle in emergency situations, increases your braking distance and the likelihood of crashing into the back of a vehicle in a sudden traffic jam, and generally reduces your margin for error. Speeding is also not as much of a time-saver as you may think and can create an unhealthy level of stress on the car.
  • Then there's the increased likelihood that while you might get into an accident that, while not harmful to yourself or your vehicle, could have grave consequences for whoever you struck, such as a wayward pedestrian on non-highway roads, which in turn means severe legal consequences. If you end up killing someone because you went 50 miles per hour in a 25 mph school zone, you can expect a long time in prison and revocation of your driver's license. At best.
  • Of course, none of this applies if everyone else is also exceeding the speed limit; remember, safety is going at the speed of traffic, not necessarily the posted speed limit. On some roads, the actual speed of traffic may be well above the posted limit. If another car is driving well above even the flow of said traffic - perhaps weaving in and out of traffic - then this very likely qualifies for this trope.
  • Speeding is just fuel-inefficient regardless of whether it's legal to do so or not and whether the flow of traffic is doing so or not. Past a particular speed (around 55-65 mph or more, depending on car), your engine is putting out so much power to maintain the speed you're at that you'll be burning through your fuel like nobody's business. This is why lower speed limits are set during periods of fuel rationing. The longtime speed limit on U.S. freeways of 55 miles per hour was an artifact of the 1970s oil crisis.
  • And finally, speeding well above the speed limit is likely to shave maybe 1 or 2 lousy minutes off the trip for every half-hour or so you're going to be in traffic. Yeah it feels like you're getting there faster and, let's be real, it's satisfying as all hell to launch down the road like you're in The Fast and the Furious, but is accepting all the risks and shortcomings listed above to get down the highway with enough extra time that you can watch the Heinz Automato in action really worth it?
• So weird that it cries for its own entry, the Mercedes-Benz 600 (W100). While awesomely luxurious and built like a Tiger tank, it had one small fault: not a single part or technology on it was interchangeable with any other Mercedes-Benz model, past or future. None. The custom model to end all custom models. The hydraulic switch driving the 4 windows? Good luck finding it from old factory stock, and even if you can, they ask God-damned $11,200 for it. As of 2011. No figures available for present day. Other switches and valves are thought to be "reasonably priced" if they fall into the $1000-2000 range. It needs a specific hydraulic oil, custom parts that are hand fitted and sometimes incompatible between cars of the same year, a specific toolkit to be able to work on it. It may be sometimes needed to build from scratch the old factory which made it in the 1960s and 1970s only to keep them running.
  • To give a middle finger on "no interchangeable parts" thing, its enormous-for-Europe, torque-rich engine was shoved into a Mercedes 300SEL, creating a German muscle car that could go hand-to-hand with the American muscle cars of that era.
• Wankel Rotary Engines have intriguing advantages but were held back by significant drawbacks:
  • They weigh less than a piston engine for a given power output, are much more compact, can easily rev up to an exciting number of revolutions per minute (The Mazda RX-8 red-lines at 9000 RPM, limited by the durability of the transmission). They are also very smooth with almost no negative vibrations. Mazda even won a 24 Hours of Le Mans with multiple powering the venerable 787B.
  • Sadly, Wankel engines (Mazda RX-8 and before) have a history of significant drawbacks that made them unattractive for most automakers to develop; only Mazda has a history of significant investment in the design. Wankels tend to suffer from inefficient combustion, leading to lousy fuel economy for such a small engine, as well as emission troubles. The Mazda designs also burn a small dose of motor oil by design, to prevent the apex seals from wearing quickly. Their design typically has trouble with producing torque, making the engine fine for sports cars, but unsuited for trucks and SUVs where a flat and powerful torque band is more desirable than going all out for horsepower.
  • With emission regulations becoming stricter over time, Mazda Wankel research tends to be low priority. Engineering Explained on YouTube has an explanation of the drawbacks. However, their use as a generator for a hybrid-electric car was considered, where the rotor can be kept at fixed-optimum r.p.m. for maximum efficiency; this setup makes the engine solely used to generate charge for the batteries, much like diesel-generators on most modern railroad trains, known as "diesel-electric" trains.
• Typically owning Luxury Cars outright tends to be this trope, due to their prime, finicky technologies:
  • Many luxury cars have specialized parts such as high-tech shocks to improve the quality of the ride. Sadly, many luxury vehicles are made in small quantities, so the only part builder to buy from may be the vehicle's manufacturer, raising supply costs tremendously.
  • This is why particularly buying a used high-luxury car may look like a good deal, until it is time to seek out a repair shop and learn what you will be paying on top of that. As a result, leasing can be a more practical solution as depending on where you live, not actually owning the vehicle may carry tax benefits, and actually be less expensive than maintaining and owning it solely by yourself. Top Gear (UK) has repeatedly proven the point with episodes where the presenters bought used luxury cars for a song and discovered, in painful detail, why they were so cheap. Jeremy Clarkson has especially fallen foul of the trope. In one episode, he bought a used Maserati Merak, only for the engine (recently rebuilt at a cost of 10,000 pounds) to literally disintegrate during a race to Slough. In another, he picked up a used Mercedes CL600 for the price of a brand new Nissan Pixo (6,995 pounds) and bet James May that it would still be running perfectly in two weeks. When one of the ignition coils failed less than a week later, Jeremy reluctantly revealed that it was going to cost 1,200 pounds to replace, as opposed to the 138 quid it would cost to replace the same part in a Pixo. In other words, he had to pay almost one-sixth of the car's cost to replace one part.
  • One major temptation is to splurge on a relatively high tier luxury or sports car which gives the appearance of success, but these vehicles are likely to be major money pits due to having specialized parts and higher insurance rates. Truly wealthy people will more likely be driving Boring, but Practical Toyotas, Hondas, or Fords — just to name a few — while wearing regular clothing to look like any other driver out on the road. The rich person outwardly showing off their riches is limited to the movies, celebrities, etc, but many remain low-key and maintain the appearance of a regular person and thus a low profile. Additionally, many "entry level" luxury brands share a lot of parts and even platforms with mainstream brands, greatly reducing maintenance costs. Examples include but are not limited to Acura (Honda), Audi (VW), Genesis (Hyundai), Lincoln (Ford), and Lexus (Toyota).
• Having five valves per cylinder in an engine can theoretically make it breathe better and rev higher to produce more power, but going beyond four valves per cylinder has such relatively small returns for added complexity and cost that the practice was widely discontinued. Instead, performance can be improved with simpler methods like altering the bore and/or stroke of the pistons to achieve similar or better performance gains.
• Shooting flames out of an exhaust pipe looks cool and makes a car look like it's using afterburners to go faster, but on the regular roads, it just burns excessive fuel and your emissions test won't be pretty. Additionally, the backfiring sounds may violate noise regulations and lead to traffic citations by the police.

Railways

• Steam locomotives in general. True, they are simply awesome - it is like the whole iron horse was a living creature, with living sounds and steam. But they have abysmal fuel efficiency (8% is a good achievement, and the highest, 12%, has been attained on a double expansion Mallet engine), and because reciprocating steam engines work on constant force, it means you cannot use a passenger engine to haul freight trains, but each task (passenger, freight, shunter) asks for a different engine with different wheel layout. This bad fuel efficiency and the Crippling Overspecialization spelled the doom for steam once diesels and electrics had become reliable enough.
• Another means of getting fuel efficiency was to make the steam generation itself more efficient. But this tended to come with unpleasant side effects, too.
  • One obvious solution is to use compounding steam engines, where high-pressure steam exhaust is fed into a secondary cylinder or set of cylinders. The biggest snag, however, is how to arrange the cylinders. On regular non-articulated steam locomotives, several combinations are possible but almost always produce asymmetric power distribution (one high-pressure cylinder exhausting into the low-pressure cylinder) or more complicated maintenance (one cylinder or a pair of cylinders under the smoke box, with the valve gear only accessible from directly below). Swiss designer Anatole Mallet sidestepped this issue by having two powertrains on his design (the Mallet locomotive), with the primary expansion and secondary expansion cylinders being on separate wheelsets. However, with the low-pressure cylinders mounted on a swiveling bogie, the snag was making sure that the flexible steam pipes from the high-pressure cylinders were totally steam-tight.
  • The efficiency of compound locomotives could be increased by also increasing the steam pressure. However, high-pressure boilers were designed for power plants and ships where they could be maintained and repaired anytime and weren't affected by short bumps every few minutes or even seconds. Also, the fuel saving was usually eaten up by the more expensive design and the generally more expensive operation of the complicated machines. Not few designs failed due to experimental locomotives breaking down pretty much on each test run.
    • Honorable mention for high-pressure steam: The Velox boiler was designed to start up within a short timespan of no more than 20 minutes. The starting process within this "short timespan" involved a diesel-generator set, two electric starting motors for turbines, one gas turbine and two kinds of fuel, sometimes also fuel pre-heating. Not much later, it wouldn't take much more than starting up the oil burners and throwing a burning rag into the firebox to heat up a conventional oil-fired Stephenson boiler from cold in even less time. Oh, and the Velox boiler is designed to stand upright which limits its size in rail vehicles.
  • The second obvious solution is to use a condenser and heat exchanger and pre-heat the water going from the tender to boiler. The result is condenser locomotive. The additional bonus is that they eliminate the smoke and the steam and the "choo-choo" sound. The water is also effectively recycled in a closed circuit, and none is lost, eliminating the need of jerk waters. The problem is that the condensers and heat exchangers are large and effectively take a place from one goods wagon. They are feasible only when you need to haul really heavy loads extremely long lengths with no chance to replenish the water for boilers. Crossing deserts comes to mind.
  • The Italian engineer Attilio Franco came up with the idea to pre-heat the water with exhaust smoke. One of his prototypes was the only quadruplex ever made, a twin-boiler, 3,000hp behemoth that was built and tested in Belgium. It operated fairly well, and the combination of the pre-heating and the compound engines helped it save coal. However, its cramped twin-boiler design made two firemen necessary, and the costs of an extra crew member ate up the savings, not to mention that one of the firemen couldn't get into contact with the rest of the crew while the other one had to leave his working-place to see the driver.
  • In the late 1930s, Franco was joined by Dr. Piero Crosti, and they developed somewhat more conventional locomotives with the same pre-heater system, but with two pre-heaters mounted on the sides of the boiler rather than one in line with the boiler. These machines actually worked pretty well, and yes, they did save coal in comparison with conventional locomotives. The somewhat worsened view ahead due to the chimneys on the sides of the boiler was considered only a minor nuisance and lessened by installing only one pre-heating boiler underneath the main boiler and only one chimney on the fireman's side of the boiler. Firing them up was considerably more difficult, though, until the Germans and Brits were smart enough to reintroduce the "normal" chimney to generate draft while the locomotive was standing. What really killed the Franco-Crosti locomotives, however, was rampant corrosion: After a couple of years, the preheater pipes looked like someone had shot them with a machine gun. Stainless steel pipes would have eliminated this problem, but they weren't worth installing in a time when spreading electrification and dieselization displaced steam locomotives more and more.
• German streamlined steam locomotives not only looked cool but actually saved some fuel. The main reason was that the streamlining was a shroud wrapped around the entire locomotive from the top of the boiler almost down to the rails. However, the fully-enclosed running gear lacked ventilation and was prone to overheat, and maintaining it through the small hatches on the sides was difficult.
  • 05 003 took the cake. The "half-sister" of record-breaking 05 002 was not only a streamliner but also a cab-forward locomotive. It burned coal dust that had to be transported from the tender all the way along the quite long boiler to the firebox. It may have been awesome when it was new, but not so much a few years later in World War II. Thus, 05 003 was the first of the three class 05 locomotives to be converted into a standard, non-streamlined locomotive.
  • 05 003 wasn't the first German cab forward. The Prussians had three different prototypes built in 1904. They all had one thing in common: Despite being cab-forward designs, the locomotives weren't rotated. Instead, the driver's cab was mounted in front of the boiler. For one, this design made any communication with the fireman difficult, speaking tube or not (like the noises on a steam locomotive running at speed made the use of a speaking tube feasible, not to mention that the driver had to turn around and look away from the tracks ahead to use it). It also didn't really facilitate boiler maintenance.
• American railroads had such stuff, too.
  • Check out the Pennsylvania Railroad FF1. At the time, 4,000 hp was a lot, the technology was practically space-age. But, the locomotive was simply too powerful for period rolling stock, it had only two speeds to choose from, and so it would regularly rip couplers out of freight cars, or worse, derail the cars.
  • The Budd Metroliner. An EMU designed by and for the Pennsylvania Railroad to run top-notch high-speed services in the Northeast Corridor. Its maximum speed was beyond 160 mph. Not that the Pennsy had any stretch of track that would have allowed for anything close to that speed.
  • This seems to be a consistent problem for the Pennsylvania Railroad because they built the 4-4-4-4 T1. The T1 was powerful, fast, and looked cool. It was also a maintenance nightmare, ate coal like nobody's business, and was prone to wheel-slip, which will destroy an engine's running gear in a matter of seconds if not quickly corrected. All 52 were scrapped within ten years of production.
    • There is some speculation as to how much of this was due to the design, and how much was due to engineers being used to much older conventional engines. The wheel-slip, in particular, was due to engineers not being used to handling a machine of such power and opening the throttle too quickly, while excessive coal consumption was again due to lack of familiarity with these radically-different machines. The real reason they were scrapped within ten years was not because of their flaws, but because of the switch to diesel-electric locomotives. Incidentally, there is a group that is attempting to build another T1 from scratch and they intend to see just how good it could have been when handled properly.
  • Their predecessor, the sole 6-4-4-6 S1 No. 6100, was even more awesome and more impractical. It was the most powerful express steam locomotive ever built, but it carried only 40% of its weight on two mechanically independent sets of four driving wheels each. These were overwhelmed by the sheer power of the boiler which made wheel-slip almost inevitable at any speed below 50mph, and its very long rigid wheelbase restricted it from lines with sharp curves, such as through the Allegheny Mountains where such power would have been most useful. Its main advantage was that it could theoretically reach speeds way beyond 120mph even with long consists of heavy riveted Pullman coaches. This, however, wasn't very useful as there was very little track on the Pennsylvania system that was straight and flat enough for it to operate at high speed excepting a few places in the Midwest. Also, such high speeds on rails had just been outlawed. This also meant that the Pennsy couldn't even brag about #6100's performance advantage if they couldn't even prove it legally.
  • But Pennsy's Duplex madness didn't stop there. The next idea was to build Duplexes that could haul freight trains. Spot the mistake. No, seriously, adding a third driver to one of the engines and reducing the diameter of the driving wheels from 80" to 77" in comparison to the T1 was thought to cut it. Thus came the 4-6-4-4 Q1 into existence. It looked somewhat like a T1 with a third driver in the front engine, requiring the rear engine to "run backwards" with the cylinders mounted behind it on both sides of the firebox. And it was semi-streamlined like the T1 because it was intended for passenger and freight trains, but there's no proof it ever hauled a single regular passenger train.
    Eventually, Pennsy abandoned the idea of dual-use steam locomotives, but they were too proud to abandon Duplexes and build more 2-10-4 J1s (the Canadian Pacific put 2-10-4s in front of the Dominion passenger express train, by the way). Nope, they designed the Q2, this time a freight-only 4-4-6-4 with no streamlining. Did the smaller drivers eliminate the Duplex-inherent problems? Nope, but they made it possible to mount the rear cylinders somewhere else than directly beneath the firebox, namely before the drivers where they belong. Did the 8000hp? As if. No, what actually got this longest non-articulated steamer ever made into serial production was the introduction of — wait for it — traction control. And even then, they could only pull marginally more than a J1 with two-thirds of the Q2s' horsepower.
  • Triplexes. So how can the tractive effort of a locomotive be increased? More drivers under the tender. The problem was, the boilers simply didn't generate enough steam to feed that many drivers. The Triplexes broke tractive effort world records when they started up and ran out of steam almost immediately afterwards. They were practically useless past walking speed.
  • Streamlined express engines, especially the 1930s-type steam engines, are fast and pretty, but they are expensive to manufacture, often require specialized crews, and cannot be used on any train except the express. Besides, while streamlining itself was and still is considered a good fuel-saving means, most streamlined steam locomotives actually consumed more coal because the streamlining slapped onto them made them heavier.
  • The 2-6-6-6 Allegheny-class steam engines of the Chesapeake and Ohio could produce 7000 horsepower on average, but they weighed more than the Big Boy, and the 40-ton axle weight left the monsters restricted to only the heaviest lines.
  • Speaking of Chesapeake & Ohio, their steam turbine-electrics existed for less than three years between construction and scrapping. The modular construction promised to make repairs easier than on conventional steamers. Unfortunately, they were so complicated that it took a lot longer to find any faults in the first place. That and the brand-new express line they had been built for was canceled, rendering them useless.
  • The Baldwin 60000, one of the largest locomotives ever made. The designers intended it to be the train of the future, but its sheer size meant that the controls were too complex for most engineers to operate, and the firebox tubes had a nasty habit of bursting. If that weren't bad enough, it was so heavy that the test run damaged the rails it was on, thereby ensuring that the railroad companies would not be interested. It didn't even go faster than any other locomotives. Only one was ever built, and it's been stationary in a museum for the last eighty years.
  • There was also the Baldwin #6000, the sole specimen of the DR-12-8-750/8 model made in 1943. The goal of this predecessor of Baldwin's "Centipedes" was to put a whopping 6,000hp into a single twelve-axle unit by installing eight combinations of 750hp diesels plus generators. Making this beast was already impractical in the middle of World War II, especially since it was meant for express passenger trains, so it never got more than four diesels and 3,000hp. It only existed for some two years before it was half-scrapped and rebuilt into another Baldwin #6000, one of the two prototypes of...
  • ...the "Centipedes" themselves. This time, Baldwin got only 3,000hp out of only two 1,500hp prime movers, but these locomotives were usually run in back-to-back pairs. "Babyfaces" or not, you must admit that they were pretty cool. However, maintenance was a nightmare, partly because not even two of the 56 units were alike, partly because they had 48 brake shoes each. And as cool as they looked, three EMD E units or three ALCo PA/PB units (or three of Baldwin's own DR-6-4-2000 units) remained the better choice for express passenger services in practice.
  • The Union Pacific Coal Turbine. Exactly What It Says on the Tin: So you have plenty of coal at hand, enough to feed steam monsters like the Challenger or the Big Boy. But you want to go away from steam with its abysmal efficiency. What do you do with all that cheap coal? Burn it in a turbine — like you would burn liquid fuel in a gas turbine. But wait, you can't simply dump pieces of coal into a turboshaft engine, they'd take too long to burn, so what do you do? Grind the coal to dust in the tender that's been converted to a mobile coal bunker. Why that's a bad idea? Because the coal dust will be accelerated to very high speeds in the turbine whose blades will be under constant bombardment of tiny pieces of solid fuel — which actually don't come out of the grinder in the tender that tiny. Also, the sulfur in the coal will turn into sulfuric acid which will eat away your precious turbine blades. Maintenance of this monster (which still doesn't have enough space for a cab so it has to be MUed from an Alco PA-1 running ahead which eliminates the need of firing up the turbine for marshaling) will be so costly that you could also have burned mineral oil in the first place.
  • Which the UP did as well. Their first gas turbine engines ran on 16 wheels and had 4,500hp. The prototype had an onboard fuel reservoir and two cabs, but gas turbines are horrendously thirsty, turbines of that size even more so, and the range of that locomotive was so minimal that the production units were built with only one cab because the other end was coupled to a 12-wheel oil tender. The third generation became a massive three-section type with 8,500hp which could be increased to 10,000hp by mounting additional electric motors on the tender axles. All these locomotives ran on Bunker C oil which was pretty much refinery leftover and therefore dirt cheap, but they used such insane amounts that the UP had to keep them on the lines as much as possible because leaving them standing with their turbines running was still too costly, and the already bad wear on the turbines would only increase with constant shutdowns/startups. Besides, Bunker C didn't stay that cheap when new uses were found for it in the plastics industry. Now imagine what would have been, had these locomotives still been around by the time of the 1973 Oil Crisis.
  • Even the mighty Big Boy had issues. Due to its immense weight, and significant front overhang on tight curves, it had many speed restrictions that no other locomotive needed to worry about. Big boys rarely (if ever) left their home territory between Ogden, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. A distance of less than 500 miles. Most of the turntables, and indeed the roundhouse stalls they might have used between spins on the turntables were simply too small to fit the behemoths.
• Even England, the motherland of railways, isn't safe from this.
  • In the late 1940s, Oliver W. Bulleid decided to pretty much reinvent the steam locomotive with Southern Railway's Leader class. It was a steam locomotive that didn't look like one at all but rather like an early diesel. Instead of having a set of drivers in a rigid frame coupled by rods and directly powered by steam pistons, it had steam motors in its two six-wheel bogies, and its track view surpassed that of all other British steamers because it had one driver's cab at each end. It actually worked pretty well.
    Otherwise, it was quite half-baked. It had one lateral aisle through the entire engine room. This, however, required the boiler to be placed out of centre, causing the locomotive to be unbalanced. The countermeasure was to fill scrap metal under the floorboards in the aisle which in turn made the locomotive too heavy. The fireman's room was in the middle of the locomotive and prevented any communication between him and the driver; it was also badly ventilated, and the fireman would have burned his shins on the hot air from the firebox if he hadn't worn protectors; and in the event of the locomotive falling over, he wouldn't have had a chance to get out unlike on conventional steamers whose cabs have an open rear end.
    The best part: The first Leader, 36001, wasn't a one-off prototype but the first of the actual serial production run. When the Leader project was stopped, 36002 was almost finished, and work on 36003 had commenced.
  • Britain also experimented with turbine-engined locomotives, building several prototypes, but never got them to work well enough for full service. Not only were they more complex and less reliable than conventional steam or diesel engines but turbine engines have to run at a constant RPM in order to work properly, meaning that the engine couldn't be throttled back when the locomotive was moving at reduced speed or even when not moving at all, negating any savings from its better power-to-weight ratio. It didn't help that the third and last British gas turbine locomotive prototype was built like a semi-streamlined kludge based on an old steamer. The idea was abandoned for good after the 1960s.
  • On a lesser note, the Great Western Railway "King" Class locomotives. They were powerful express locomotives but were severely restricted on where they could go due to their weight (a whole ten tons more than the more numerous "Castle" class), only being able to travel to Birmingham and Plymouth and being too heavy for the Royal Albert Bridge into Cornwall.
• Oliver W. Bulleid of Leader-class infamy was eventually sent to Ireland after World War II where he made quite a career. At that time, Ireland was very short on coal including locomotive coal. Diesels were still far away, so peat was used as locomotive fuel instead, but it suffered from poor efficiency in locomotives designed to burn coal. What Bulleid did to solve this problem was take the Leader, remove most of its shortcomings, simplify it, also to make it cheaper, and design the boiler to specifically use peat as fuel. Thus came the CC1 into existence, also known as the "Turf Burner". It was still an impressive, innovative locomotive. But for one, even after simplification, it was still too complex and expensive for piss-poor Córas Iompair Éireann to operate and maintain, also because it was one of a kind that couldn't use any parts from any other locomotive class. Worse yet: Coal came back to Ireland, and all of a sudden, CIÉ was left with one locomotive that couldn't run on coal and absolutely had to burn peat.
• The German ''Schienenzeppelin'' (Rail Zeppelin). It was basically a propeller-driven aerodynamically designed railcar, which had a pusher propeller and an aicrcraft engine. It could attain speeds up to 230 km/h and was luxuriously fashioned inside. The big problem was that because of the pusher propeller it could not haul additional wagons and the Deadly Rotary Fan in form of the pusher propeller when calling a station.
• Soviet 12,000 hp diesel locomotives. Yep, twelve thousand horsepower in what counted as one, single locomotive. The 4TE10S was actually a four-section locomotive developed from two- and eventually three-section types, but still. It took a while for the Soviets to realize they didn't need that much power. The Baikal-Amur Mainline for which the first four-section, 12,000 hp 4TE10S locomotives were built was single-track with sidings too short for anything that justified more than the 9,000 hp that something like a run-of-the-mill 3TE10M could produce. And before goods trains could grow heavy enough for that much power elsewhere, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and the post-Soviet economy didn't generate enough cargo to make trains that heavy.
  • In 1984, one year after the first 4TE10S was made, the Soviets managed to put 6,000hp into one single, one-section, one-engine diesel locomotive, the TE136—long before EMD produced their own 6,000hp engine, the SD90MAC. In 1985, they made another one, in 1990, they made two single-cab sections and lashed them up to form 2TE136-0001, and that was it. There was also the one-off, double-section 2TE126-0001 which grew too heavy for even 16 axles, so another four idlers had to be fitted.
  • And speaking of the SD90MAC, that also falls under this category. ElectroMotive essentially got into a dick-waving contest with General Electric, and both rushed a 6000hp locomotive to market (GE produced the AC6000CW). In order to crank out that much power, both companies needed to design new prime movers (the actual diesel engine within the locomotive) as their existing designs simply couldn't be scaled up that much. Railroads are, by nature, leery about unproven new technology, as a single engine failure can block an entire main line and cause tremendous delays of other trains. Both new prime movers had significant teething problems and as a result, most railroads weren't interested in them, and most locomotives of both models were sold as 'convertibles' with lower-powered but service-proven engines with the option to 'upgrade' them later, an option which has never been exercised. In fact, many of the 6000hp models have been either downgraded with existing prime movers in the 4400hp range or simply sold for scrap. With this out of their system, both EMD and GE went right back to building locomotives in the 4400-4600hp range and shifted their efforts from increasing raw power output to improving fuel efficiency, reliability, and emissions levels.
  • The best thing to ever come from a single-section, single-engine, 6000hp diesel locomotive is the speed record for diesel-powered rolling stock: The Russian TEP80-0002 reached 271kph (168mph) in 1993. As cool as this is, it had no practical purpose as high-speed EMUs are much better at this than a 180-tonne diesel locomotive with the same wheel arrangement as a GE U50 or an ALCo C-855. TEP80-0002, one out of only two ever made (looks like there's a pattern, doesn't it), now resides at the October railway museum in Saint-Petersburg.
  • The Soviet AA20 was awesome and impractical for one and the same reason: it was a 14-coupled steam locomotive. It produced crazy amounts of tractive effort for a non-articulated steamer, and it was therefore acknowledged by Stalin himself. At the same time, it derailed and ruined tracks whenever it ran and destroyed every switch it went through.
  • The Swedes seem to have built a somewhat more practical awesome locomotive for hauling ore from Kiruna to Narvik. The Dm3, a 1D+D+D1 articulated electrical locomotive delivers 7600kW (just a tick over 10000hp) through old-fashioned coupling rods and hauls 5200 tons.
• Deutsche Bundesbahn built their Class 103◊ single-unit electric locomotives with continuous 7400kW (one-hour peak power output of 7780kW/10,580 hp). Despite being designed to haul 5-to-7-car passenger trains at 200 km/h (125 mph) with high acceleration, they pulled heavy intercity trains with usually 11 and sometimes 12 or 13 cars at the same speed from 1979 on. Yes, they could do that with ease. No, they couldn't withstand that workload without wearing out alarmingly quickly. By 1985 already, they spent so much time at the workshops that keeping the Intercity network running was increasingly difficult, and yet, taking the entire class out of service with nothing even resembling a good replacement at hand was a tempting idea.
  • To make things even worse, they had a tendency to wear out even quicker when constantly run below 160 km/h (100 mph)^note The speed of 160 km/h is significant in Germany as it is the maximum speed legacy signaling allows. In other words, running trains above that speed requires improvements in infrastructure which at the time were not at all common - even in 2016 the Intercity Express (in many ways the Spiritual Successor of the Class 103) has significant stretches of legacy tracks allowing speeds no higher than 160 km/h due to their long transmission gearing, so using them in less straining long-distance services was pretty much out of question, too.
  • Romanian Class 47 locomotives◊ are single-unit electric locomotives with continuous 6600kW (almost 9000hp) of power, designed to take on trains loaded with 3000-3600 tonnes on mountain lines. However, most of them are used for passenger trains, which is a waste of potential.
• Tilting trains are pretty awesome and practical if done right which means the Italian Pendolino, the Swedish X2000 and a few Japanese types including the N700A-series Shinkansen. As for basically all the other tilting train designs, well...
  • The French TGV Pendulaire P-01 was seen as a solution for the problem that the expansion of the high-speed TGV network required the construction of new high-speed lines or at least the costly conversion of existing lines for higher speeds: Just build a TGV that tilts in curves! After all, tilting trains were highly successful in Italy where they're called Pendolino, so why not do this with the TGV? Why not take France's flagship train one step further to coolness and make a tilting train out of it? Why not, you may ask? Well, due to the way that the car bodies of the TGV's intermediate sections are mounted, it is impossible to tilt each one of them independently. Alstom didn't realize that before they had actually started building the P-01. The only way to make it work was to tilt all intermediate sections at once. This meant that the first intermediate section would tilt way too late, and the last one would tilt way too early, thus making going through tight curves even less comfortable than without tilting. Thus, the prototype has never been used in revenue service.
  • Deutsche Bahn had similar negative experiences with tilting technology. While they did not have the problem caused by Jacob's bogies, basically all tilting trains had problems with fatigue cracks or materials aging a lot faster than expected under the added stress which the German designers didn't take into consideration. The best German tilting trains were the class 610 DMUs and these were made by Fiat Ferroviaria in Italy and essentially small diesel Pendolini. Tilting trains these days are mostly run with the tilting mechanism disabled or have been retired early and former Bahnchef Rüdiger Grube is on record as saying that tilting technology has proven a dead end for DB.
    That said, the main reason why tilting trains failed in Germany was that they were made in a time when every last piece of rolling stock that the DB received had to be "Made in Germany", period. So Germany had to build tilting trains, but Germany couldn't build tilting trains and had to kludge something together including using Leopard II components as the actual tilting mechanism. This was also an era in which the DB rejected the idea of testing prototypes and wanted to put even the first specimen of a brand-new class into revenue service ASAP with precious little to no prior testing. Smarter railroad companies in e.g. Finland, Poland, or the Czech Republic acquired tilting trains by importing Pendolini.
  • The British APT-P ("APT" standing for "Advanced Passenger Train") was the fastest British train for 23 years and at the same time a semi-failure, but not directly for tilting reasons for a change. The idea behind it was to dramatically increase the average speed on the curvy West Coast Main Line without straightening the tracks. At least it was electrified, so there was no need to use gas turbines like on the one-off, experimental APT-E which would have been too expensive after the Oil Crisis. (Besides, we've already covered British gas turbines.)
    Nonetheless, the power cars were the main cause of trouble. British Rail wanted two of them, but not at the ends to avoid the coaches being stretched and bunched between two powered vehicles (although the High-Speed Trains ran and still run as "sandwiches" between what's basically two diesel locomotives with no problems). So they both ran in the middle of the train. However, they were so packed with technical components that installing an aisle for passengers to walk through them was out of the question, and the APT-Ps were divided in two (and labeled as two half-trains joined at their power cars). This required two dining cars plus crews for only six coaches each. Eventually, one power car was removed from each train, but this didn't solve the problem of having divided trains.
    Also, the power cars were unnecessarily complicated. The pantographs had to swivel to the sides to equal the tilting movement. It took the Swedish manufacturer ASEA-Brown-Boveri and until The '90s to realize that power cars with no passenger seats don't have to tilt. Granted, an X2000 entering a curve with everything tilting but the power car looks weird, but so do Volvos.
    That said, the APT-P became the main precursor for the Pendolino, for the tilting equipment worked quite well.
• Japan, anyone?
  • When the EF200 was built, it was Japan's most powerful locomotive class by far. Not only didn't JR need anything close to this powerful, though, but the Japanese railroad power grid proved too weak to feed an EF200 at full power, so they had to be derated. Even the sixteen-wheeled, two-section EH500 is only rated at two-thirds of the EF200's original power.
  • In The '90s, the Japanese Railways wanted to increase the coolness factor of the Shinkansen bullet trains with a new generation, the 500 series, the first of its kind to reach 300km/h. In order to also make it look as fast as it was, and to get away from the not-too-pleasant, blocky looks of the previous generations, the 500 series' cross-section was made rather rounded instead of almost square. This, however, came at the cost of a tight and cramped interior. So, the 500 series is about as cool to behold as it's unpleasant to ride. It also turned out very expensive to build and maintain, and since people weren't willing to ride it and chose the older generations instead (which is easy on a line where you have a train every few minutes), it didn't nearly cover its own costs. Only ten were built.
• Three-phase AC electrification for railroads was pretty awesome about a dozen years into the 20th century. It didn't require rectifiers, and it allowed for much more powerful locomotives than the DC electrification used on tramways and underground rapid transit. But there were a couple of caveats:
  • For one, it was still too early to uncouple the motor speed from the AC frequency. This essentially meant that early three-phase electric locomotives had only two speeds to choose from. The same, however, applied to certain early single-phase AC locomotives like the Pennsylvania Railroad FF1 mentioned below.
  • The electrification absolutely required multiple overhead wires. This may not seem like a problem until you have to install the overhead catenary above your first switch.
    The experimental Marienfelde-Zossen line in Germany where speeds of up to 130mph were reached as early as 1903 had three wires arranged vertically. Electrifying switches was completely impossible that way, so there was only one electrified stretch of track, and moving the experimental vehicles anywhere else required steam locomotives.
    The Italians were somewhat smarter. First of all, they put one phase on the rails, thereby reducing the number of necessary overhead wires to two. These could be arranged horizontally. Even though this worked well enough that this system persisted in northern Italy until The '60s, it still required dead wires above switches and therefore above large parts of bigger stations and yards in order to prevent short-circuits.
• The Great Western Railway's initial use of broad-gauge tracks made quite a few problems. While the usual British standard gauge railway lines had a loading gauge that was much too small, causing problems to this day with bilevel railcars and when trains cross from continental Europe (the first generation of Eurostar had to be custom-built for a lot of British quirks, including the rather narrow loading gauge), Brunel's broad gauge caused problems in the opposite direction. You see, the main reason for a small loading gauge is that it saves a lot of money. Brunel's trains could only run on broad-gauge lines, and he could not share his tracks with other railroads nor have his trains run along other railroad lines. In addition to that building to his exceeding standards was fine on main lines but prohibitively expensive on branch lines and just like airlines today operate feeder services at a loss to get passengers for their main lines, railways without a feeder service would have much lower passenger numbers. The last broad-gauge lines were converted to standard gauge before the 19th century was over. Unfortunately, Spain made a similar mistake in choosing a non-standard broad gauge, because they thought it would bring advantages. It didn't. The Australian state of Victoria and (initially) parts of Canada followed that example, with the former adding dual gauge tracks to allow out-of-state trains to operate and the latter converting to standard gauge.
  • That said, many countries had defense in mind when choosing broad gauge. A break of gauge makes it difficult or even downright impossible for an invader's supply and troop trains to use the invaded country's railway tracks, greatly slowing down their supply chains. It isn't a coincidence that Spain, Portugal, and Russia, the three most significant users of broad gauge in Eurasia, had been invaded by France earlier in the 19th century.
• The Chinese Vehicle Straddling Bus, admit it; that thing looks all kinds of awesome. The idea, presumably, is to create a bus that is more convenient than its lane-hogging brother. What they have actually done is invent a bus that if it accidentally swerves, to even the smallest degree, it will cause a three-car pile-up - a prospect even more frightening when you add the prospect of many tons of bus landing on your head. Its doors are 9 feet above ground, entailing a complete refit of every bus stop on its route. Oh, and don't think this is just some crazy concept vehicle - the Chinese are fully planning to not only bring this thing into full service by 2011 but also sell it to America.
  • It's actually a tram and it runs on rails. Still, this vehicle will be unable to get through busy traffic any faster than a regular motorcycle because there might be a car on the rails. It may also have slight issues with bridges and overhead power lines. In the end, it is impractical in cities and unnecessary between cities. Maybe Chinese cities are different?
  • The company finally tried to test it in 2016, repurposing a stretch of road without even bothering with permissions. When the authorities wanted to have a chat about that, it turned out that the trials had failed and the owners decided to disappear, leaving the "bus" at the improvised test track— where it demonstrated all its failings by blocking the road and creating traffic jams.
• There is no technological barrier to making high-speed trains go 400 km/h or even faster than that. In fact, some trains in revenue service today have reached that speed in unmodified test runs. However, due to many factors, including aerodynamics, running trains at those speeds draws way more energy than the increase in speed it produces. Add to that the fact that most trains have to - you know - stop once in a while to load and unload passengers and the difference between a 300 km/h and a 400 km/h train becomes a few minutes of time saved for a few ten thousand euros of money wasted on electricity to accelerate to those speeds. Current Maglev technology is more energy efficient at those high and very high speeds, but it has its own downsides and also fits this trope in many ways. Another problem with extremely high speeds is that tolerances become much smaller and braking distances become longer (reducing capacity of any given line), not to mention the infrastructure that does not always support those speeds. In the high-speed networks of many countries, Boring, but Practical solutions like upgrading a curvy legacy line from 80 km/h to a straighter alignment allowing 200 km/h is much more cost-efficient and saves much more time along the whole run than high top speeds.
• Jet engine powered trains. Nuff said.
• Similar to Brunel's broad gauge, San Francisco's BART has also suffered from building its own wide gauge. While the gauge provides a smooth ride and a degree of safety in the earthquake-prone Bay Area, it made repair and replacement of the aging system's equipment extremely difficult, as they can't use any track replacement equipment designed for other railroads. Mechanics resorted to buying parts off of eBay because of the nonstandard gauge before new BART trains started rolling off the assembly line.
• There's a reason there aren't a whole lot of monorail-based transit projects. The key problem is that the whole monorail system has to be grade-separated. That is, it has to be completely off the ground, whereas most urban rail systems can be street-level, above, or below as needed. The costs involved in building monorails mean that it's most cost-efficient to build a single track. Switching tracks has been prohibitively expensive and almost impossible until very recently. Pretty much the only plus to them is that they can receive electricity from the rail itself, eliminating the need for unsightly overhead wires. For these reasons, monorails are mostly limited to short loops around theme parks and airports. These issues are discussed in this video by Tom Scott. Monorails are held up along with jetpacks as prime examples of Zeerust rather than practical forms of transportation.
• In the town of Grenada, Mississippi, at a particularly dangerous railroad crossing with high-speed trains that had seen one too many crossing accidents, in 1940 inventor Allonzo Billups invented a new type of crossing signal that utilized a very different type of warning◊, involving the words "STOP - DEATH - STOP" flashing in red neon accompanied by an illuminated skull and crossbones and a small air raid siren as the audible warning. Apparently, scaring people into stopping for trains was the most effective way at the time to reduce crossing accidents. Due to the onslaught of World War II and the scarcity of neon that resulted, this ended up being the only one made. The way the signal was designed to work required a very complex system of relays that would be an easy feat to pull off in the 21st century, but a bit too advanced for the 1940s. As a result, over the decades the signal began to deteriorate (sometimes the siren would keep wailing after the signal deactivated and not stop until a railroad worker came to fix it), and in 1970 the "death crossing" signal was removed and replaced with typical crossing flashers and bells that are still there to this day. It also helps that speeding passenger trains don't use the railroad line anymore, which is now mainly used by freight trains.
• Pneumatic rail. Imagine those tubes they use to move letters around office buildings but trains instead of letters. These are theoretically incredibly energy efficient as propulsion is entirely provided by stationary external engines and energy normally lost braking is stored as air pressure for later use (or transferred to other parts of the line). More sophisticated designs can even theoretically use passive solar heating (read: getting hot via sunlight) to harness energy for free. But you have to build a giant pipe around your track and constantly maintain it to make it airtight. The second part makes this impractical even on subways.
• The concept of the Hyperloop as a whole is almost certainly this. The idea is to make Maglev trains even faster by placing them in an evacuated tube. Some companies claim this will be cheaper than a plain Maglev. Even ignoring the almost certainly astronomical cost, there are many issues. First is passenger turnaround. Either the sides of the train will need to have docking airlocks, or there will need to be a system to pressurize and depressurize a large amount of tube space. Both of these options will slow turnaround considerably, which becomes an even bigger problem when you note that most Hyperloop designs have a series of one car vehicles carrying a handful of passengers instead of long trains carrying hundreds. The next problem is the question of what will be done in an emergency. Getting every passenger to wear a pressurized suit seems unlikely, and without that, any accident that depressurizes the car will be fatal, and even if the car stays pressurized, passengers will have to wait for someone to figure out how to get them out if their car stops. Furthermore, unless the expense is taken to build redundant hyperloop tubes, a single stoppage will cause delays for hundreds of commuters for hours. If anything damages the tube, a large part will have to be shut down, and any cars already in the tube traveling at high speeds who hit the column of 1 atmosphere air will react like they hit a brick wall, and it wouldn’t take much to poke a hole in a hyperloop tube. Finally, there's the fact that it took almost five years for Virgin Hyperloop to go from being founded to the first alpha prototype, clearly a long way from completion and the car is fairly obviously thrown together from a decommissioned private jet.
  • This becomes especially obvious when Elon Musk admitted he hyped up the hyperloop to delay or kill California's high speed rail project, so people would have to keep relying on cars.

Ships

• Supertankers. They have reached their maximal practical size already in the late 1970s, and Seawise Giant, launched 1979, demonstrated with all her 450 m length and 657,000 tonnes displacement that building any larger is impractical. Due to her enormous size, she could not enter neither Panama nor Suez canals nor the English Channel nor the Malacca Strait, and she could enter only in a handful of harbours because of her length, beam and depth. All the supertankers of her size have been scrapped, and the largest supertanker currently in service carries roughly half the tonnage of oil Seawise Giant did.
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel's final project, the SS Great Eastern. Being five times larger than the biggest ship that came before it, and remaining the biggest ship in history for 40 years, she was certainly pretty awesome. But 'practical' is not the word to use when such an insanely expensive ship, which has a capacity for 4000 passengers, carries just over forty on her maiden voyage. It didn't help that her entire reason for existing vanished before she was complete. She was supposed to perform long-endurance missions and service Australia, and other colonies with Welsh coal, but coal was discovered in Australia (and a few other colonies) making it rather unneeded.
• And talking of huge ships, the Wyoming was the biggest wooden ship ever built, at 140 meters long and having six masts - and at that size, you really shouldn't be building things out of wood. The thing was so long and so heavy that the wood in its construction visibly bent and sagged, which made her so leaky that she needed to have a pump system installed to bail out the water regularly. Unsurprisingly, she foundered and sank in a storm.
• Neo Windjammers are experimental modern large cargo ships powered primarily by wind. With a much lower fuel cost (but still some due to requiring engines for still days) they could theoretically save a company millions in fuel bills and be much more environmentally friendly to boot. Unfortunately making gigantic sails and spinnakers has proved to be a huge engineering problem. The proposed rigging is unlike anything built before and it would require teams of specially trained sailors to keep everything pointed in the right directions, which means more paychecks to sign. And of course, these proposals still make normal cargo ships look fast. To top it off, fluctuating oil prices mean that a nautical firm can't be sure how much money they will save with super windjammer if any at all.
  • Much tamer cargo sailing ships have been proposed that only derive around 20 percent of thrust via wind power. While this is much simpler than the above, it reveals another problem: it doesn't work with container or bulk transport ships. It only works with ships that have a closed containment system like oil tankers. Otherwise, there is no place to mount masts.
• A lot of alternative energy-powered trains and ships are rather impractical, simply because they don't really make that much of either a cost or environmental benefit. Both trains and ships are already very highly efficient forms of transportation and are large enough to fit carbon filters. Maritime and rail combined contribute about 1% of global carbon emissions,^note And even most of that is from small pleasure vessels and simply converting more of the power grid to green energy would substantially reduce even that ^note Ships pull off the power grid in harbor and some trains use electricity from the power grid.while every little bit helps, efforts to reduce air pollution from these two sources could probably be better spent elsewhere for the foreseeable future or used to make these two forms of transportation more eco-friendly in other ways.
• Nuclear powered ships, while they have found relatively widespread use in major militaries (where money is no object) and are used in Russian / Soviet ice-breakers that straddle the line between "civilian" and "not that", are virtually unheard of in civilian applications. While they can run for years without refueling, emit virtually no emissions (an issue is how "clean" the wastewater is - in modern ships it has almost potable water standard, but that was not the case in the 1960s when "nuclear merchant ships" were seriously considered) of any kind and can even be self sufficient in terms of water via desalination. They however need an extremely reliable nuclear reactor that works under space constraints - historically that means a Pressurized Water Reactor - and the commonly employed economy of scale on land (Modern PWRs have electric net outputs well in excess of a Gigawatt - no ship will need more than a few hundred Megawatt of engine power for the foreseeable future) simply doesn't work for ships. Another issue is that while nuclear powers like the U.S. have employed highly enriched fuels to make submarine reactors smaller and reduce the radiation danger to the crew, there is not a snowball's chance in hell that any private company will ever be allowed to sail a ship fueled with weapon's grade material. Boosters of "SMRs" ("small modular reactors") hope to be able to deliver economically viable reactors in the range of engines for the biggest container ships and while their main target market is on land, the sheer amount of container ships would make that market enormously lucrative - if it weren't for onerous insurance requirements and longstanding bans or "shadowbans" (There Ain't No Rule because it wasn't needed in decades, but there will be if it is needed) on serving certain ports...
• Every so often you hear about plans to build a modern replica of the RMS Titanic (with modern safety precautions) so that people can experience what it would have been like aboard the legendary ocean liner. However, the most common reaction from anyone with any knowledge of seafaring is, "Why?" Even looking past the ethical dilemmas (ranging from jokes about Tempting Fate to more serious concerns about respecting the memory of the lives lost in the original sinking), the fact remains that a Titanic replica would be a step down from modern cruise ships. Not only are today's ships larger and more fuel efficient than Titanic, but altering the design of a ship from 1912 to meet current safety and environmental regulations while still looking like a ship from 1912 is far more complicated and expensive than building a modern ship planned from the start with those standards in mind.^note For instance, those iconic smokestacks would serve no purpose for a modern ship that runs on diesel fuel Lastly, Titanic lacked many attractions that are common on cruise ships today like theaters, casinos, water slides, etc. In other words, a Titanic replica would cost more than an average modern cruise ship while offering considerably less to passengers beyond novelty, making it no surprise that these endeavors inevitably get stuck in Development Hell.

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