A boy wonder Lego enthusiast from Romania has built the world’s first life-size Lego car! With a compressed air-powered radial engine, it has space for two passengers and can hit a top speed of around 20 mph. Gizmodo dug up this crazy build.
Christened the Super Awesome Micro Project, the Lego car was conceived by Steve Sammartino of Melbourne and snapped together in Romania by twenty year old Raul Oaida. The build, which took almost two years to complete, utilized crowd sourced funds to the tune of almost $22,000. While the car consists of more than 500,000 Lego pieces, the frame, wheels and gauges are not, as evidently some things cannot be fashioned from Lego.
Even the engine appears to be built entirely out of Legos. Sporting 64 cylinders (4 banks of 16 cylinders,) the radial design locates the pistons in a circle around the crankshaft, like what airplanes use. What isn’t fully disclosed is this motor is powered by air and if you look closely at the video you can see an air compressor cloaked with Legos.
It is quite an accomplishment but the real reason for the build is Australian Steve Sammartino is a PR guy and he wanted this to be a rolling credit on his techie, hacker, crowd funding, Portlandia resume. Whatever the motivation, this thing sure gives him the building blocks (ha-ha) for shameless self promotion.