Here’s one of the craziest and cutest experimental prototypes from Ford engineering in the Fifties, the Levacar Mach I. 

In the late Fifties, the Ford Research and Engineering Center in Dearborn was a free-wheeling operation, it’s clear. The stylists and engineers on Oakwood Avenue were dreaming big: gas turbines, gyroscopes, radio control, nuclear cars. There was appaarently no limit. This experimental prototype might  be the most adorable one, however: the 1959 Levacar Mach I.

A ground-effect hovercraft, in a nutshell, the Levacar was the brainstorm of Ford’s vice president of engineering, Andrew A. Kucher (that’s him in the cockpit above). David J. Jay served as senior development engineer on the project, while Gale Haldeman, who later did the 1965 Mustang, crafted the exterior design. Underneath the single-seat coupe were three polished discs, or “levapads,” which were fed a column of compressed air at 100 psi, allowing the vehicle to glide along on a thin cushion on air.

Kucher, who reportedly first developed the idea 30 years earlier, theorized that by riding slightly above the road rather than on it, a vehicle could travel at up to 500 mph. To the  Institution of Mechanical Engineers, executive director of engineering Victor C. Roviolo proposed a 40-to-60 passenger transport capable of 300 mph. Along with the tiny Levacar, just 94 inches long, Kucher and Jay (above) modeled larger, family-sized cars using the air cushion principle, and even devised a Levascooter, which used levapads to levitate a fraction of an inch from the floor.

The Levacar was displayed and demonstrated for visitors to the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn, where it ran on a steel tether around a small, circular track (below). Ford gave away thousands of promotional models of the Levacar Mach I, it’s said, while AMT produced a model kit in  1/20 scale. If you’d like a Levacar of your own, the miniatures  are known to show up on eBay and elsewhere now and then.