What do you get when you combine an Australian entrepreneur, a Romanian lego savant, roughly forty intrigued Aussies and just over half a million legos? If you are Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida, you have just built the world’s first air-powered lego car. This week the duo debuted their Super Awesome Micro Project, a car built entirely from standard lego pieces that literally runs on air. The idea, marketed by a single tweet from entrepreneur and marketing guru Steve Sammartino, immediately earned the project forty intrigued and eager Australian backers. The message was simple enough: “Anyone interested in investing $500-$1000 in a in a project which is awesome & a world first tweet me”. And with Christmas right around the corner, who wouldn’t want to wake up to a life-size legomobile under the tree? Because kids, no matter how old we get, cool is still cool. Here is how they got here.

 
This week marked the inaugural voyage of the Super Awesome Micro Project, which was made an ever bigger success considering what the intricately-pieced car had to endure to make it to its street debut. Originally built in Romania, the lego car sustained significant damage while being shipped to Melbourne for the next leg of its journey. Repairing the car proved to be slightly more difficult than simply snapping some lego pieces back together; since the voyage took the car across the Equator, some of the pieces froze then endured extreme periods of warming, causing them to warp. But the masterminds behind the Super Awesome Micro Project were not to be deterred; their world-first air-powered lego-built gift to lifetime lego nerds was built for the streets. The end result of $60,000 worth of legos and a lifetime of creating has already taken the media and internet by storm.

 
The specs for this amazing little creation are pretty impressive themselves. More than 500,000 lego pieces were used to create the car, which aside from structural pieces like wheels, tires, and gauges, is constructed entirely of lego bricks. Even the engine, which has four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons, is made entirely from standard lego pieces and runs solely on air. The car’s speed tops out at between 20-30km, or roughly 12-17 mph. So sure, it isn’t terribly fast, but creators were “scared of a lego explosion” and besides, for a novelty item it really doesn’t NEED to go a lot faster than that to attract the world’s attention. It does look fast, though – Sammartino and Oaida designed the car to look like a Hot Rod because, as we all know, “hot rods are cool”.

 
While I doubt any of us can expect a project this time intensive or complex to be delivered to our houses this Christmas, it is inspiring to builders and creators and dreamers and lego enthusiasts everywhere. As with the rest of the budding tech world, kids, anything truly is possible.