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THE DECADES-OLD dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on roads may be becoming less illusory.
Japanese company SkyDrive, among the many “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person on board.
In a video shown to reporters, a contraption that looked like a motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.
Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes “the flying car” can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical.
“Of the world’s more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board,” he told The Associated Press.
“I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe.”
The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Fukuzawa said.
Unlike aeroplanes and helicopters, evtol (electric vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.
They could do away with the hassle of airports and traffic jams and the cost of hiring pilots.
Battery sizes, air traffic control and other infrastructure issues are among the many potential challenges to commercialising them.
“Many things have to happen,” said Sanjiv Singh, professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who co-founded Near Earth Autonomy, near Pittsburgh, which is also working on an evtol aircraft.
If they cost 10 million dollars, no-one is going to buy them. If they fly for five minutes, no-one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no-one is going to buy them.
The SkyDrive project began humbly as a volunteer project called Cartivator in 2012, with funding by top Japanese companies including car manufacturer Toyota, electronics company Panasonic and videogame developer Bandai Namco.
A demonstration flight three years ago went poorly. But it has improved and the project recently received another round of funding, of 3.9 billion yen (€31 million), including from the Development Bank of Japan.
The Japanese government is bullish on “the Jetsons” vision, with a “road map” for business services by 2023, and expanded commercial use by the 2030s, stressing its potential for connecting remote areas and providing lifelines in disasters.
Experts compare the buzz over flying cars to the days when the aviation industry got started with the Wright Brothers and the car industry with the Ford Model T.
Lilium of Germany, Joby Aviation in California and Wisk, a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk, are also working on evtol projects.
Sebastian Thrun, chief executive of Kitty Hawk, said it took time for aeroplanes, mobile phones and self-driving cars to win acceptance.
“But the time between technology and social adoption might be more compressed for evtol vehicles,” he said.
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My little kamikaze 50
Cannay wait for the days of real life WipeOut racing to arrive!
Kinda going to ruin the age old pastime of taking a drive out to Dublin Airport to “look at the planes”
@5☆Fily: it’ll make it easier to get to the airport.
@John “J” McCarthy: if you live five minutes flight away
Turning fender bender into human render
Finally! A flying car … well sort of ! I would call it a Dronicopter
A 2 minute video showing about 5 seconds of wobbling 2m above the ground at 2mph. I don’t think this project will win over any new investors. Can’t see how much of improvement has been made in 3 years and €30m
Does it have a flux compacitor? Thats the deal breaker or maker!!
This lad did it with his bathtub a few years ago..
The Sky M5O should be great craic. Personally was hoping for the cars from Minority Report.
Traffic noise is bad enough without thousands of small noisy helicopters flying over our houses. There will be no oasis of calm anywhere. People in scrambler bikes going illegally through parks is bad enough, how about them being over your house?
If or when, this technology gets to the point that it’s feasible, the only way to ensure any level of user safety would be through some version of AI automation, rather than individual user control.
This would mean that an automated fleet of these vehicles would operate on demand, with users requesting one using an app like other transport services, rather than be something an individual user would buy.
This type of point to point airborne transport would scale up for automated transport and would likely only further the rich and poor divide, with the wealthy literally living in high towers that have no access from the ground, high above an every increasing global urban sprawl with the insect like masses below…
It’s a feckin helicopter!! What’s the mad excitement about???
Hell ya I want I want I want now haha beat waiting on slow laus to work, have to watch out for good old Dublin seagulls doe
@Mark Murphy: Problem is where will they all land!!?
What if they started simple and made it a hybrid, so there would be “no fly zones” in the city etc – but in the country you could use it to “hop” over a few fields on the way home or something.
Battery could charge as you drive (like current hybrid). Hopefully in the future it will be a fully flying vehicle. I reckon though we will need fusion power rather than battery power by then though. Only other way around traffic jams is to start digging downwards and have motorways underground.
Great for getting an aerial photo of Dublin Airport.
So, it’s a bigger version of a bloody annoying drone. Great.
Those blades all over the vehicle and the idea of safety don’t marry
Really! It’s just a big drone that can carry a person. Didn’t look very stable. I’d hate to see it flying in Irish weather
I thought I see one of them on the m50 last year .Tured out to be a micra flipping over.
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