![]() Solve the vertical-liftoff problem and you've got a flying car that can roll out of the garage and go straight to the sky. If Moller can't get to a car-worthy vertical engine with his top-down approach, someone working on drones will get there from the bottom up. Money and brainpower are pouring in-because there's a market. Drones are small vertical-lift gadgets, but they keep getting bigger and more powerful. But something new is changing that: the boom in drones. His company in Davis, California, has long worked on inventing this new technology by itself, and that's always expensive. The Skycar's problem remains engine development, Moller tells me. Nonetheless, he's been taking preorders since the 1990s. Its four rotary engines tip up for vertical takeoff, then turn horizontal to fly-though as of last year, he'd gotten the Skycar only about 40 feet off the ground. His M400 Skycar, constantly on the verge of being ready, looks like a cross between a Corvette and a Cuisinart. He's also made millions of dollars on technology he's spun out of his work, and wowed a discerning crowd with a 2004 TED Talk on flying cars. He has spent more than $100 million trying to perfect vertical lift engines, which at one point left him in personal bankruptcy. "Unless the flying car can take off vertically, it is not going to change personal transportation," says Paul Moller, who has worked on this problem for 50 years. The company says the model has been certified by the Slovak Federation of Ultra-Lite Flying, although that sounds as reassuring as learning that your heart surgeon's degree comes from the Medical College of Turks and Caicos. The prototype can fly 430 miles, and as high as 9,800 feet. It's shaped like a wasp, with wings that fold back for driving, but also takes off like a plane. In March, a Slovakian company called AeroMobil gave a talk about its working prototype at brainy carnival South by Southwest. Inventor Moulton Taylor got his Aerocar airborne in the 1960s and almost sold Ford on the idea of marketing it. ![]() Over the years, Ford worked on a flying car, and Chrysler worked on a flying jeep for the military. The AeroMobil's working prototype can fly 430 miles, and as high as 9,800 feet. ![]() The thing flew, and one now sits in the Smithsonian. That piece could be attached to a plane fuselage, which had to stay at the airport while you drove into town in the front part. The car end of an Airphibian was a four-wheeled cockpit shaped like the head of a beagle. His family started the company that became Greyhound Corporation, and his father was president of Mack Trucks. If we're concerned about overpopulation, we should develop human-piloted flying cars that are so cheap everybody can get one.Ĭredit for the first flying car goes to Robert Edison Fulton. Add a third vector-the air above the Earth's surface-and the probability of chaos goes exponential. Automobile accidents kill 1 million people a year around the world, and cars just move in two vectors. The second obstacle is ensuring safety and order once a whole lot of individuals suddenly start zooming around in the air. That's a seriously hard engineering feat. A mass-market flying car pretty much has to go straight up and down from the driveway-quietly, safely and cheaply. It doesn't make much sense to market flying cars to suburban moms who would then have to race them down Stone Brook Chestnut Lane to achieve liftoff. The first is developing vertical takeoff and landing capabilities for a car-size vehicle. Two main obstacles have kept us from living in a Jetsons cartoon.
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