Cool tech to see at Future Lab 2021

Mars Fetch Rover – Airbus

Anything that can visit another planet is surely worth a spot on the list? The Mars Fetch Rover is the latest Mars rover from Airbus, built for the European Space Agency and due to be involved in NASA’s ‘fetch and return’ mission heading to Mars in 2026. Arriving on the Red Planet in 2028, this little rover (V8-powered Rover SD1s were trialled but found to be a tad unreliable) it’ll head out from the lander to collect stashed deposits that have been collected by the rover that’s been on Mars since 2020.

Autonomous Truck Control – Einride

Einride has been to Future Lab before, back in 2018 with a self-driving logging truck. Now it’s back with an autonomous transportation truck, a machined that’ll roam the roads and is monitored via 5G by a human controller in Sweden. If you make a trip to Future Lab you can try out controlling them for yourself!

Electric Jet Pack – Gravity

Have you ever wanted to fly? Not just in a plane, but actually take off on your own? Enter the Electric Jet Pack from Gravity. We’ve written about Gravity before, and suffice to say we dearly want to have a go, but the jet packs we’ve seen until now have been conventional, albeit small, jets. Well the company’s latest creation is powered by electricity, and the Gravity team will be on hand in Future Lab to talk about how these brilliant suits could find futures in the medical response and search and rescue fields.

Airo for IM Motors – Heatherwick Studios

Think of this little creation as an automotive vacuum cleaner. The Airo, created by Hetherwick Studios for Chinese company IM Motors, is an EV with a twist, because it can be controlled by a driver or move about autonomously, but crucially comes with a HEPA filtering system. Essentially it moves around the city streets cleaning the air. There’s also a foldaway screen that “turns the interior into a perfect gaming-pod and when you’ve exhausted yourself”. A nice touch.

Microlino EV – Microlino

There have been a number of cars with doors at the front, the BMW Isetta most famously. Well now there’s another, the Microlino EV. With enclosed rear wheels and door mirrors that double up as headlights, this cute and quirky electric car has space for two and a weekly shop. It isn’t a render, either, as a pre-production prototype has been used as a support vehicle in Formula E. It’ll cost €12,000, run for between 75 and 124 miles and at speeds of up to 55mph.

Luca Car – TU and Ecomotive

This is the Luca Car, an EV, as you might expect, powered by two electric motors with a combined power of 20PS (15kW). But nearly everything you can see is made from recycled materials. There are interior structures made from flax, recycled aluminium in the chassis, and much of the plastic was once floating around in the sea. Funky looking though it is, we like.

NAWA Racer – NAWA

The enemy number one of electric motorcycles and electric cars is weight, but the NAWA Racer, with its carbon-fibre frame and body panels, weighs only 150kg, around 25 per cent less than a conventional electric bike. It’s also the world’s first electric bike to come with an ultracapacitor, which not only saves weight further but gives a 0.1kWh boost to the bikes 9kWh battery. That makes the electric drive system more efficient and reduces charging times. On top of all of that, it looks achingly cool, has a straight up range of 90 miles but a monster urban range of 186 miles, and the ultracapacitor will recharge in two minutes and the main batter less than an hour. Zero to 62mph? Less than three seconds. That sounds very good indeed.

Pal V flying car

Shown at the inaugural Future Lab in 2017, in the form of a model of the prototype ‘Liberty One’, the Pal-V is quite simple a flying car, and we just couldn’t ignore it. Returning in 2021 with a European-approved prototype, and with recent approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, are we closer than ever to a real flying car?

Welcome to FOS Future Lab where we report on the latest visions of future technology. We'll be boldly covering flying cars, hoverboards, jetpacks and spaceships with plenty of down to earth topics in between.

Photography by Phil Hay and Dominic James.