I don’t usually link to car adverts, but an exception ought to be made in this instance, as both Leonard Nimoy, and Zachary Quinto, who do, or have, played Spock on “Star Trek”, reunite once more onscreen.

The Aerocar N103D, a car that – as the name suggests – flies, has been floating around since 1956. So much for flying cars being something of the future then.

In a further twist to the story, the Aerocar came into being the year after Marty McFly’s 1985 jaunt back in time to 1955 in Back to the Future.

Coincidence?

Everything is mathematical… fear manoeuvring into small parking spaces no more – if you have a good understanding of maths that is – a formula devised by London professor Simon Blackburn and Vauxhall Motors, should make the task far easier.

The formula was released after a Vauxhall survey showed 57 per cent lacked confidence in their parking ability and 32 per cent would rather drive further from their destination or to a more expensive car park, purely to avoid manoeuvring into a small space.

One day, in the not too distant future perhaps, cars will no longer roll off production lines, they’ll be assembled with 3-D printers:

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

At this stage however “printing” cars doesn’t look to speed up their manufacture any though, the process here takes some three months to complete.

There’s often a manifest disconnect between motorists and cyclists that sometimes results in both groups loathing each other. While it’s easy to understand the concerns of a cyclist, who probably takes exception the “king of the road” attitude of motorists, what is it about cyclists that bothers drivers?

Tom Stafford, writing for the BBC, attempts to work out why, and advances the thought that the average motorist sees cyclists as being disruptive to the “moral order of the road”:

No, my theory is that motorists hate cyclists because they think they offend the moral order. Driving is a very moral activity – there are rules of the road, both legal and informal, and there are good and bad drivers. The whole intricate dance of the rush-hour junction only works because people know the rules and by-and-large follow them: keeping in lane; indicating properly; first her turn, now mine, now yours. Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren’t allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside.

I’ve watched one or two F1 races in my time, and while I’ve marvelled at the way F1 cars are often almost rebuilt during pit-stops mid-race, I’ve never much thought about how such cars are assembled in the first place… and it’s not quite the way I envisaged it might be though.

New York based photographer Amy Stein’s work features some less than usual subjects… stranded motorists whose cars have broken down. It’s not only a job that entails a lot of driving, but one that has seen her meet people most of us ordinarily mightn’t:

The encounters are always unpredictable. In West Virginia Stein spotted a group of guys in orange climbing over the hill with guns while their friend stayed behind to fix the truck. The man doing the work – Gary – said his friends figured they might as well get some hunting in while they waited. He agreed to have his picture taken, but only if he could have his hunting mask on. Then there was the time when Stein and her husband, who accompanies her sometimes, came upon on a broken-down work crew of federal inmates. The prison official said he didn’t want to be in the picture, but the inmates agreed to be photographed if they could take their own picture of Stein with their phone cameras in return.

A new year, and new things to think about. Take driverless cars. We’ve been hearing a little bit about the concept in recent years, and I guess sooner or later they’ll be part of the traffic we’re sharing the road with. But what happens if/when a so-called driverless car breaks a road law? Who takes the blame, or gets the infringement notice?

The occupant of the car who instructed the car to mobilise… or, I don’t know, the operating system (trick question or what?):

Still unclear, even with these early adopters, is the precise responsibility of the human user, assuming one exists. Must the “driver” remain vigilant, their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road? If not, what are they allowed to do inside, or outside, the vehicle? Under Nevada law, the person who tells a self-driving vehicle to drive becomes its driver. Unlike the driver of an ordinary vehicle, that person may send text messages. However, they may not “drive” drunk – even if sitting in a bar while the car is self-parking. Broadening the practical and economic appeal of self-driving vehicles may require releasing their human users from many of the current legal duties of driving.

It seems driverless vehicles won’t just be conveying people though, they’ll also be carting goods and freight around, and, by the sounds of it, may have no human occupants at all, not even a delivery person. If the vehicle, say, runs a red light, how is a person meant to take responsibility in that situation?

Gunther Holtorf has spent the last 23 years on the ultimate road trip, and has clocked up so much mileage, in the same Mercedes Benz G Wagon, that he would have crossed the globe the equivalent of 20 times.

Some food for thought. The pace of US economic recovery, which has been relatively tentative to date (go read about QE3), may depend a lot on the purchasing intentions of Millennials, or Generation Y, people born between 1980 and 2000, give or take, who so far seem to be showing little interest in making big purchases, such as cars and houses.

All of these strategies share a few key assumptions: that demand for cars within the Millennial generation is just waiting to be unlocked; that as the economy slowly recovers, today’s young people will eventually want to buy cars as much as their parents and grandparents did; that a finer-tuned appeal to Millennial values can coax them into dealerships. Perhaps. But what if these assumptions are simply wrong? What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending – most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy – and for the speed of recovery.