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World's smallest car: Only 4 nanometers long by 3 nanometers wide!!!

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Lifer
I bet you thought the Mini Cooper was small. At four nanometers long and three wide, the Nanocar, developed by researchers at Rice University, takes the cake as the smallest car in the world.

"You couldn't build a smaller car," says Jim Tour, professor of chemistry and leader of the Rice University research team. The Nanocar is built of a single molecule, and it's impossible to assemble anything smaller than an individual molecule.

And with four independently rotating axles, built-in suspension, and oversized wheels, it looks more like a racer in the DARPA Challenge than any car on route 95. With its rotating axles, the Nanocar moves directionally, which means either forward or backward, with its wheels rolling, as opposed to sliding back and forth which is commonly done on the nanoscale. The oversized wheels and suspension allow the Nanocar to drive over positive and negative atomic steps, or nanoscale speedbumps and potholes, if you will, necessary for even the thin layer of gold that was used in Tour's experiments, which can resemble the mountainous surface of the moon.

But why build a Nanocar? For bottom-up fabrication, of course. The Nanocar was built to transport cargo across a nanoscale surface, which has always been difficult to do gracefully. This cargo could then be used for fabrication on the nano level. For example, a fleet of Nanocars could carry the materials necessary to build a computer chip on a silicon wafer, and deposit them in the appropriate location. According to Tour, this provides a more graceful strategy for chip fabrication, and should enable more precise construction and fewer defects.
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http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1875217,00.asp
 
Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
what kind of engine did the put in it? a v8 i hope😉
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The next Nanocar will have its own internal motor. Tour and his group have already produced such a motor, which is powered by photons of light -- but they have yet to power a Nanocar with it. Nature never supplies a single molecule with its own power source, acknowledges Tour, so a powered Nanocar breaks completely new ground.
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