As of 28th June 2021, the world is one more step closer to realizing another fiction fantasy of millions, flying cars. We only saw it in movies like Back to the Future, but a prototype called AirCar completed a 35-minute flight between two airports in Slovakia.
According to the reports, the AirCar is capable of flying around 965 Kms at a height of up to 8,000 ft.
Powered by a 160 hp BMW engine, the crossover between car and plane runs on Petrol and can achieve a cruising speed of 193 km/h.
The flying car made its first successful flight on Monday, and reportedly, after landing it on the airport, the inventor Professor Stefan Klein drove it straight into the city.
The video uploaded by KleinVision said that the AitCar has completed 142 successful landings, and has completed around 40 hours of test flights.
The car seats two passengers as of now and is not yet cleared for commercial flights.
BBC reported that the AirCar takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from a car to an airplane.
It must be mentioned that, unlike various drone-taxi prototypes, AirCar cannot take off and land vertically and requires a runway.
The vehicle took about two years to develop at a cost of around £1.7 million, according to Klein Vision, the company behind the project.
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New Era of dual transportation vehicle
Telegraph quoted an aviation expert describing the car as, “the love child of a Bugatti Veyron and a Cessna 172″.
This may be because of AirCar’s Veyron-looking front and very thin wings in the back.
After exiting the AirCar following the test, Klein declared the flight has started a “new era of dual transportation vehicles.”
“It opens a new category of transportation and returns the freedom originally attributed to cars back to the individual,” Klein said. “AirCar is no longer just a proof of concept; flying at 8,200ft at a speed of 100 kt (115 miles per hour), it has turned science fiction into a reality.”
It is no doubt a huge milestone as the concept of flying cars enters the realization phase.
Hyundai’s chief executive of European operations said on Tuesday that he believes flying cars will be a reality in cities throughout the world before the end of the decade. Earlier this month, the South Korean car manufacturer and General Motors said they’re pushing ahead with developing flying cars.
In a report in 2019, Morgan Stanley said that “autonomous urban aircraft may no longer be the stuff of sci-fi comic books.”
The management consultancy firm said that advances in technology, including much more efficient batteries, could create a $1.5 trillion market worldwide by 2040. The most bullish forecasts put the value of the market by 2040 at $2.9 trillion.
The report quoted Henry Ford from 1940 saying, “Mark my words: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming.”
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Ford was teased for the statement, but now, decades later, the same technologies that power drones and steer autonomous vehicles could launch “flying cars” from the pages of sci-fi comics to the skies of our cities.