I’ve been fascinated by flying cars since I was a kid. I first got to sit in a prototype flying car back when I was still a teenager and visited what is now Moller International with my father. That vehicle never flew though, over time the prototypes being created by the company advanced got faster and far more capable but have yet to make it to market.
Let’s explore where flying cars are today and why the name doesn’t adequately reflect what any of these vehicles do.
The Brief History of the Flying Car
While the work to create a flying car goes back to the 1800s the first one of that kind of work was Moulton Taylor’s Aerocar III. This vehicle, which could be bought in the late 1940 and early 1950s was a car that looked far more modern than other cars of its day wedded to a wing and propeller which could detached for car use. Storing those two things was problematic and you still generally needed an airfield to take off, though out in the country you could land on roads particularly if they were on private property (my father used to do this a lot with his small plane back then.)
This concept of a modular approach to the problem was advanced in the 1970s with the AVE Mizar where they took a Pinto and wedded it to the back half of a Cessna Skymaster creating a Pinto based solution costing in the $250K range. I was woefully underpowered, overweight, and the two parts in the prototype separated at altitude killing all the firm’s executive staff ending the effort.
During this period there were several attempts to create gyrocopter-based vehicles and, more recently one of the first flying cars to be approved was the PAL-V flying car which I’ve seen fly, and it is impressive in the air and on the ground and carries its blades and tail with it.
In general, however, vehicles that try to perform in two environments don’t do well. Amphibious cars tended to suck as cars and as boats, and “flying cars” tended to suck as cars and as planes. One of the big problems is that if you want a car to fly, you must dramatically cut its weight, making it relatively unsafe on the road if hit by a car or truck that doesn’t fly and is at full weight.
However, we now have amphibious cars that work reasonably well as both cars and boats, but they aren’t cheap, the WaterCar Panther is an example of this, and it is basically an amphibious jeep with decent car and boat performance but it’s low six figure cost and complexity likely still make it out of reach for most people.
The Next Generation
Most recently the FAA has approved a design out of Alef Aeronautics that looks very promising though its $300K price tag will likely keep it out of reach of most people. This flying car looks like an unusual modern car, it is electric, and its lifting fans are shrouded by body work making it look far more car like than other drone-based alternatives.
The advantage to this design is that it can take off vertically and comes closer to the flying car concept in that it can take off from any open space. And given the fan blades are fully shrouded, it is far safter than other drone designs which leave the blades exposed and could prove very dangerous to bystanders.
The big shortcoming for electric drone-based designs is range, these would be fine for short hops to the store, where you likely don’t really need a flying car, but would make range anxiety issues, which are apart of electric car owner life, much more pronounced. The expected range of this latest car has a range of 200 miles on the road and 110 miles in the air, with the idea that you’d just fly through traffic.
But there is one huge problem, the FAA currently doesn’t allow someone to take off in the middle of a road legally and air traffic control hasn’t even spun up to include drones let alone flying cars making having many these things in any one place extremely dangerous.
The Switchblade Flying Car
The Switchblade Flying car is like some of the earlier airplane-based designs but isn’t modular so you don’t have to store the flying bits or worry about attaching them. While this design will require an airfield and a pilot’s license (the drone designs are eventually expected to be autonomous and not need a pilot’s license) it will function under existing FAA rules.
Expected to price out at a more reasonable $170K and with specs giving it a 125-mph top speed on the ground and 190 mph in the air it is much more practical today than some of the more advanced drone-based designs though you still aren’t jumping out of traffic.
It is a fascinating design, but sales will be limited by those two requirements of needing a pilot’s license and an airfield to take off. (Could be ideal for some of the folks who are near an airfield, can afford to build one, or are on a farm where, thanks to crop dusting, the limitations of where you can take off or land are more liberal.
Wrapping Up:
We still aren’t where we thought we were going to be after Jetson’s TV show set the bar for flying cars too high. And let’s be clear, the only true flying cars were cars wedded to wings. What we mostly have today is people carrying drones, or planes that can be driven on the road. This last is less “flying car” and more drivable aircraft because none of these vehicles are ideal on the road and have had to make massive tradeoffs to be able to fly. But if you want to impress folks at your local Cars and Coffee, any of the recent vehicles would pull an impressive crowd.
Still, we are getting ever closer to being able to fly instead of drive, ironically with video conferencing, drone, robotic, AI, and telepresence technologies continuing to advance, you could have how much longer we’ll even need to travel in the future. It would be sad if we finally got this technology right just as we no longer needed it.
