If you don't think individuals make a difference ~ and it's trendy not to in the UK ~ the results of a YouTuber's months-long effort to build a DIY ground-effect machine has seen the design being marketed as a commercial product... the world's first and naturally from China.
As that nice man from New Zealand points out on his channel it is what anyone who has watched ground-effect videos at 0200 a.m. (and who hasn't?) wants; although at this point in time you'd need to find circa $100,000.
That cost, as with EVs, will doubtless fall in time and this really is one more regime that electrification is making possible following decades of effort in which individuals as stupid as me have lost fortunes trying.
All the action in ground-effect is taking place in the US, China, South Korea and in fact Singapore... with rearguard efforts still underway in Germany and Russia where much of the foundational work took place.
In the UK if you found the wherewithal to do any of this without being shot down by taxes, regulation, scepticism or anywhere to test it without complaint... then no-one would be at all surprised.
In fact apart from the outline I built at scale and uploaded to Boat Design's website in the US, I see no evidence of anyone doing anything whatsoever in the field.
All in all though it adds another layer to China's much-vaunted strategy to dominate the electrification of transport both on land and in the air (inset).
We're trying to do something similar with drones in and around Swindon, but as you can imagine, with products developed elsewhere.*
* By NEROS, STARK et al.
