Behold, the Ultimate Municipal Truck... Of the Future!

Cities are always trying to build a better municipal fleet. From Boston wanting to turn road workers into automatic pothole detectors to the prospect of compressed natural gas powering the buses of Columbia, Missouri, experimentation in the realm of vehicular problem-solving is booming.

But what would happen if you took every neat idea in the realm of public works and piled them all onto one city vehicle? Probably it would 1) get stolen and sold on the black market for millions of dollars, and 2) weigh so much it would be outpaced by a sloth. Still, it's a wonderful idea: Strap a pavement-measuring laser, a GPS, a robotic weed-killing spritzer and a whole bucketload of other neat gadgets to a carbon-fiber body, and create the Ultimate Municipal Supertruck of the Future! You can see what it would look like in the highly realistic illustration above (don't steal my idea), which is based on real technologies that public works, transportation and police agencies around America are using or plan to implement soon.