Sure, but if you do that at any speed the braking pads will bounce and skip, making for a very turbulent ride and–more importantly–extremely unreliable braking.
Losing complete ground contact is a already a big problem with regular cars. Racers use spoilers to counteract it, and people with pickup trucks will often put a big rock or some bricks in the bed when empty just to make sure the unloaded back end doesn’t bounce up. With hovercraft, it’s a hundred times worse.
Even then, braking isn’t the real problem. A hovercraft is basically hydroplaning 100% of the time. If you rotate a car at 60mph, it turns and goes in a different direction. Do the same with a hovercraft, and you’re still going in the same direction, but now you’re going sideways at 60mph. It is basically impossible to make a hovercraft handle like a car without losing all of the advantages of a hovercraft. There’s a reason we only use them for water travel even though they’re perfectly capable of going overland.
I don’t think this can work - I’m not going to suspend disbelief.
Eddy currents have an intrinsic braking effect. Making this thing stop on command won’t be a problem.
I may get the kit and experiment with a number of circular polyurethane attachments that would directly transfer the load to the riding surface. If one could alter the orientation of these attachments relative to each other, one may be able to provide a more robust steering capability.
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First, I am not even any kind of expert here. I can see a few flaws in your argument though, even from my ignorant state. The reason racers need to stay in contact with the ground is because they are PUSHING against the ground. Lose wheel contact, lose speed quickly. Second, what you are calling breaking pads could be, you know, wheels. Smooth transitions would be what the needed advances here would bring. A vehicle like this could travel at slow speed on it’s wheels and transition to hovering when at speed. I don’t have any answer to your worry about turning except there could be a middle state where the wheels are in contact but not bearing all the weight. Allowing for control while turning.
I am available for consultation.
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