There are street legal autogyros that are a lot cheaper and make more sense as a crossover vehicle
I feel like “mass-produced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Also, insurance is going to be insane.
You don’t get insurance on these
You’re right; I forget insurance is for the poor.
Also “car” - can my local mechanic service it and give it a flying certificate? If not, it’s not a car.
More like a barely road-worthy airplane.
a plane. A flying car is called a plane.
A plane that looks a bit like a car.
I bet it handles like a boat on the roads though.
If wings don’t fold, fold your brain.
Yeah, I too once thought flying cars were the best idea since sliced bread. I’ve since grown up and realized that they’re just airplanes with extra steps, cause it’s not like you’re ever going to be able to land it on a highway or whatever. It will always be cheaper to just buy an airplane and a car and use one to get to the other.
I guess the problem is that if you take your car to the plane, then your plane somewhere else, suddenly you don’t have your car. And then if you drive somewhere else you don’t have your plane any more.
I think it’s pretty obvious that rental cars and commercial flights make a lot more sense for most scenarios. But I guess it’s possible to imagine scenarios where this vehicle makes sense, either for extensive round trips or for places where car rentals don’t exist but the roads are nevertheless pretty good.
Yeah I was gonna say, there’s a whole-ass rental car industry exactly for that kind of purpose. But this isn’t the sort of thing you buy because it ‘makes sense’, you buy it because it’s cool and you have fuck-you money so that’s enough of a reason.
This is more complicated than you think. The vast majority of airports in the US are tiny little things you would barely know are there unless you’re a pilot. Most don’t have rental car services. Many are in communities where even lyft/uber are not available.
The flying car thing is still pretty dumb. But it’s not as dumb as it might first sound. One of the #1 problems my family has when we fly our (very small, very old) plane on trips is how to get from the airport to anyplace reasonable.
Or you could buy a Skyhawk, three Toyota Camrys and fuel for a year.
Okay I will admit it was impressive to see how they solved where to stow the wings and essentially shrink the airplane footprint to a long car footprint, but who is this for? Who out there has $1mil to blow and is like, “I have to drive directly from the tarmac to my hotel”?
This thing needs 300m of runway in its airplane form to get airborne, so forget city or even suburban takeoffs. And you’re not going to just drive this thing around. At the end of the day, this is still a (very fancy) plane that drives.
Just find the tallest rooftop parking structure with a low wall sturdy enough for a ramp.
No thank you, I’ll take a drone cab over this any day.
Mass-Produced
I want to see these masses who can pay the million :)
an assembly line that can make 2 per year still qualifies as mass production. At the level of people who can afford a million you can’t sell more than a couple per year anyway. There are a few car companies that have production numbers in that range.
A million doesn’t get you what it used to, and you’d be shocked at how many quiet millionaires there are out there.
OK. Yes, then I want to get this shock :)
There might be a lot more millionaires than before, but it’d still be a much smaller number who could drop $1M on a flying car.
It’s cheaper than a private jet and there are LOADS of them buzzing around polluting the skies.
That may be true, but private jets are significantly more practical than this. If you’ve got private jet money, you can just afford to buy a jet and a decent car at your destination.
With the range of a cessna skyhawk ($400k-$500k aircraft), no way it’ll replace a private jet.
Way more expensive than most private aircraft, though.
I’m still of an opinion that private aircraft is for sports and for farmers and for doctors\firefighters\rescuers in remote areas like rural Siberia. And, of course, for people wiping their ass with money.
It’s unfortunately not the same as having a spaceship in some sci-fi universe. The word “ship” hints why, the legal infrastructure, the expenses and most of all required qualifications make flying a plane more demanding.
I don’t see how making a weird car-like plane changes that.
This looks to me like yet another in a surprisingly long line of airplanes that are also designed to be driven on roads in someway, but they’re basically all noticeably worse at either task than vehicles designed specifically for one of those tasks. It also invariably ends up more expensive than two specialized vehicles, so there’s never really any reason to build these.
A million and get a pilot licence.
I mean you can get a licence for 20-30k, the maintenance is deadly on a plane though, you could buy a very nice car each year on that money.
What problem does this solve? And is that problem worth all the negatives this brings?
No
Apart from all the discussion regarding how stupid this is, how the fuck would this even fit on a road? I doubt the wings would be durable enough if they were retractable. This shit would take up 2 lanes and fuck up any and all intersections. And as a added bonus, it would fuck with everyone elses perception who are used to the distances you keep away from regular vehicles when theyre turning in front of you. This shitheap wouldnt even make it to the airport because someone will probably misjudge the turn radius with the wings and fuck it up on the way there.
They fold to the rear. So apparently they are - at least supposed to be - durable enough.
Seen this like 10 years ago lol
We have had helicoptors for all these decades
I hope its a popular buy among all our billionaires.
It’s not a flying car. It’s an airplane.
It’s by definition trying to merge two opposite specs into one vehicle using the worst aspects of the two.
