This crazy air-powered hotrod is built out of LEGO — and it works

In what could be one of the most epic / insane / unbelievable projects to hit the web in recent memory, two men from opposite sides of the globe have come together to build a functioning hotrod out of LEGO blocks. More than half a million LEGO pieces, to be exact. And yes, there is a video to prove it.

Dubbed The Super Awesome Micro Project, the undertaking was the brainchild of Melbourne-based entrepreneur and marketing guy Steve Sammartino and 20-year-old Romanian Raul Oaida, who met online. It gained momentum when Sammartino sent out a random tweet asking for cash to help fund project:

Anyone interested in investing $500-$1000 in a project which is awesome & a world first tweet me. Need about 20 participants… #startup

— Steve Sammartino (@sammartino) February 29, 2012

That tweet saw forty Australian investors cough up US$25 000 to help build the car, after reading a crazy prospectus which didn’t even mention what the money would be used for, and stressed that the “project has high risk and may fail”. They only found out exactly what they were funding after they handed over the cash. But what an investment.

The life size car and its engine (besides load-bearing parts and the tyres) are made from ordinary Lego pieces and it runs on air. The engine is especially impressive — it has four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons — and the entire car took 18 months to construct in Oaida’s garage. Okay, so it’s not going to break any landspeed records — it has a top speed of around 20-30km/hr, but its inventors are scared to go much faster in case the construction explodes. It is made mainly of LEGO, after all.

Image: Josh Rowe / Super Awesome Micro Project