Where we're going, we don't need roads.
This is a sci-fi trope in which a wheeled vehicle of some kind is capable of flying or hovering by simply rotating the wheels 90 degrees, usually up and into the vehicle in question. The hubcaps then become thrust-capable engines, propelling the vehicle upwards.
On occasion, the vehicle will only levitate without any visible thrust. In others, the vehicle will have literal jets or rockets emitting thrust from the wheels. Sometimes the wheels are perpetually stuck in the 90 degree position, or downward facing engines replace the wheels entirely.
Examples:
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Anime
- Mobile Suit Victory Gundam's infamous Adrastea- and Lysithea-class Land Battleships are capable of splitting their giant motorcycle wheels in half and taking to the air.
Comic Books
- Ninja High School has Princess Asrial rebuilding a derelict 1962 Chevy Corvette with alien technology, including the capacity to fly through these means (and beating Lola by about a couple of decades!)
- S.H.I.E.L.D. hovercars are both the Trope Maker and the Ur-Example. Nick Fury (and the reader) get their first look at the iconic Helicarrier from the passenger seat of a Hubcap Hovercraft Porsche, courtesy of course, of the explosive imagination of Jack Kirby.
Film — Live Action
- The Back to the Future trilogy:
- The DeLorean in Back to the Future Part II (and the final scene of Part I) is the Trope Codifier. Turns out that by 2015, all cars can undergo a "hover conversion" like this.
- The Time Train from the end of Back to the Future Part III also has these, except it has its own thrust engines - the wheels are still, for some reason, rotated by the steam pistons in their flying position.
- A rough-draft version of such a car appears in Captain America: The First Avenger when Howard Stark is showing off a futuristic car at the World Expo. However, it only floats for a few seconds before suddenly crashing. It didn't have wheels, though, just props placed in front of it so the audience didn't know it was a hover car until The Reveal.
Literature
- Although it doesn't use this for flying, Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang may be the Trope Codifier. To wit: the Pott family is picnicking on a beach, and the tide comes in. Mr. Pott turns a knob, causing Chitty's wheels to turn down and out in this manner. The car glides along the water exactly like a hovercraft.
Live-Action TV
- In Agent Carter, it seems that Howard Stark managed to produce at least one fully functional version of the prototype seen in Captain America, and in the climax of Season 2 it's used to tow a Gamma Cannon through a miniature black hole to seal it.
- In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., another version is seen, also implied to have been based on Howard's design, installed on a 1962 Chevy Corvette. Agent Coulson calls it Lola.
Toys
- The Foot Cruiser
◊ from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy line had wheels that folded under to give off this look, since the car is from Dimension X in the backstory. The toy itself couldn't fly, obviously.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Being set in a Post-Cyberpunk setting, all vehicles have this functionality where they can rotate wheels after gaining enough propulsion to thrust upward and become a Flying Car.
- S.O.P.H.I.A. the 3rd and all of her variants from the Blaster Master series.
- The Probulot 2000 from Crash Tag Team Racing and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, which also has its wheels act as hover engines. Bonus points for also being a Shout-Out to Back to the Future.
- A derivative appears in Elite Dangerous's first Expansion Pack, Horizons. The Surface Recon Vehicle is a six-wheeled rover for exploring planets and planetoids, and has a gimballed thruster in each wheel hub. On a low-gravity world, they fire upwards to keep the rover on the ground, whereas on high-grav worlds they fire downwards to prevent the suspension from bottoming out. The thrusters can temporarily be fired for a forward boost or a jump.
- Featured in Lego Drome Racers as a power-up for the street and off-road vehicles. When activated, the car would begin hovering above the track at top speed. The drawback of this however was that the car wasn't very stable in this state and hitting walls, smacking into obstacles and trying to fly over the tops of opponents would result in the car flipping onto its side, smacking into walls, spinning out or randomly crawling along the invisible walls around the track.
- The karts in Mario Kart 8 do this for the anti-gravity sections of tracks.
- Overwatch has these as part of the world-building: All the "payloads" on Escort maps have wheels tilted 45 degrees relative to vertical and have glowing blue (or red, depending on whether attack or defense is in control) rims. Parked vehicles that are static parts of lots of maps all also have these style of wheels.
Hal-Fred Glitchbot: (if the payload stops on Hollywood) Might as well have tires on this thing!
- Danica Patrick's F1 car in Sonic & All-stars Racing Transformed will rotate its rear wheels 90 degrees backwards, and either spin up to turn into jet turbines for flight mode, or extrude propellers from the center of the rims for water mode.
- Many of the ground-based Transformers from Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron use hubcap hover wheels when moving around at normal speed (to enable strafing), but flip down into standard wheel mode when boosting.
- The versatile hoverpod powerup in Vigilante 8 Second Offense that levitates sportscars, motorbikes, RVs and garbage trucks alike.
Western Animation
- Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!: The Mystery Machine's tires turn and become thrusters when it flies.
- The short-lived Pole Position cartoon of The '80s featured a pair of talking hovercars.
- Young Justice (2010): By Season 3, Sphere rotates her wheels parallel to the ground while flying.
