Regenerative braking, the process through which an electric car grabs otherwise wasted energy from the brakes as the car glides to a halt, is a brilliant bit of engineering for efficiency?take energy that's otherwise only good for burning up brake pads, and turn it into electricity that charges the battery.

It may also make the uninitiated driver want to vomit.

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Recently I was watching the animated movie Cars with my automobile-obsessed four-year-old son, when an interesting and unexpected physics item made an appearance in one of the scenes.

Lightning McQueen, the arrogant young protagonist race car, is astonished when he can't make a left turn on a dirt track. When "Doc" explains that McQueen must turn right to go left, Lightning is annoyed and dumbfounded by the seemingly ridiculous logic of Doc's proposition. But Doc is right (no pun intended). What he is describing is the phenomenon known as "drifting."

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If you were wondering, Timbuktu isn't some mythical city with a skyline of emerald buildings housing a race of unicorn-men. It's a real place, situated in the west African country of Mali, a city historians cite as an intellectual and spiritual center of the 15th and 16th centuries. It's also some 3,700 miles from London. Keep that in mind when you consider a scheme to cover those miles in a car that looks like an Everglades airboat designed by Luigi Colani.

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It?s designed to seat two, take off and land vertically, fly 10 feet above the ground, and reach 75 miles an hour. It?s about the size of a car, but it?s round instead of boxy. Yup, it?s a flying saucer. Next year, California-based Moller International hopes to introduce the M200G personal recreation craft, the first of what the company expects to be a full line of ?volanters??vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. The design is 300 years in the making.

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