Forget about the Jetsons — it's time to make the flying car a reality, a reality that won't take more than 24 months. The company creating the futuristic vehicle fit for Marty McFly and Korben Dallas is called AeroMobil and is based in…wait for it…Slovakia. The team has been working diligently on this prototype for many years and is currently on its 3rd iteration of what I'm calling (but unfortunately AeroMobil is not) the autoplane.
The company says:
The AeroMobil 3.0 is predominantly built from advanced composite material. That includes its body shell, wings, and wheels. It also contains all the main features that are likely to be incorporated into the final product, such as avionics equipment, autopilot and an advanced parachute deployment system.
The first model for sale will have two seats and feature a range of 435 miles, a take-off speed of 81 miles an hour, and a top flying speed of 124 miles an hour. There will also be an autopilot feature for those times when you want to take it all and consider just how insane it is that you are flying in an autoplane.
Even if you're sticking to the roads, the fully-stocked airplane cockpit infuses a bit of aviation into even the most mundane street-going experience, making for perfect Instagram photos for first dates you'll be trying to impress every night of the week.
The rest of the autoplane is stunning as well, especially in comparison the only other viable flying car project currently in development, the unfortunately designed Terrafugia.
Price? Nothing's set yet but you can expect a price between a top-model Tesla and a smaller plane in the couple of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the car may be finished in two years, it's not yet street legal in the US. Who knows how long it will take to also get approval from the FAA to fly in American aerospace. But the prospect of having a city stacked with flying cars is both frightening and exciting — frightening because of all the insane safety concerns, but exciting because it could finally relieve congestion in the cities that now house over half of the world's population.
Of course, this plane is mostly going to be in the hands of aviation enthusiasts with access to runways, and so the city dream is still far off. Regardless, this could be a momentous development in urban transportation as well.
