Flying Car Hybrid Announced By Japanese Company
This article is more than 2 years old
Meet George Jetson. He’s got a lot of the same things that we modern citizens have. A wife, two kids, and a dog that loves him, not to mention a job he isn’t all that fond of, and an overbearing bossman. But he also has access to loads of things that we’ll never have — a robotic maid isn’t one of them, though animated genitalia is.
We’re talking flying cars here, and Terrafugia is talking loudest. They’re the innovative smarties behind the Transition, which was more like an airplane you could drive than a car you could fly. But their next project is the TF-X, which aims for a future filled with cars that can achieve a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), like a helicopter, with all of the air travel of a plane and the highway driving of a hybrid vehicle that also happens to have wings and propellers attached to it.
Granted, it probably won’t see a lot of public use, as Terrafugia founder and CEO Carl Dietrich sees the vehicle as an optimal option for private pilots in small airports without land transportation. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see them in the fifteenth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise.
A Rotax 912 ULS aircraft engine can switch from operating the rear-mounted propeller to powering the rear wheels. As a car, it can reach a cruising speed of 65 mph, and its air-cruising speed would be around 100 mph. As far as cost goes, the preliminary pricing is set at $279,000. That probably means that the first people to use them recreationally will be rappers and athletes.
This sounds great and all, but somebody wake me up when they release a hoverboard. Or a hover-couch, actually. I need to travel in comfort. Check out a few more concept illustrations below, and get to work designing flying plug-in outlets.
