JUST A FEW YEARS AWAY, CEO ASSURES US
Flying-car builder AeroMobil revealed its third-generation prototype at the hip South by Southwest (that’s SXSW for short) festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday. The Slovakian company says the transforming concept will take flight in 2017. We’ll believe it when we see it.
The company has been around for about five years now. It officially revealed this prototype last October, but used #SXSW to talk about the company’s future with consumer-ready vehicles.
The AeroMobil 3.0, according to the company, makes use of existing infrastructure for “real door-to-door travel.” The vehicle fits into a standard parking space, can be used in traffic and can take off with just a few hundred yards of concrete or grass. Yup, it can take off and land from a well-manicured field.
The 3.0 is built using advanced composites along with avionics equipment, autopilot and a parachute-deployment system for safety. The wing angle is adjustable, which leads to shorter takeoffs, while a sturdy suspension lets it land on rougher terrain, according to AeroMobil. The company is still looking for the right combination of materials and components to satisfy both flight and road regulations, but expects to solve these problems within two years. CEO Juraj Vaculik estimates the initial cost to the consumer to be somewhere around a few hundred thousand euros (that doesn’t really narrow things down too much).
The AeroMobil uses a Rotax 912 engine that can motivate the vehicle to 99 mph on the expressway and 124 mph in the air. This version seats two and has a range of 435 miles in the air. A second, more passenger-friendly version, which wasn’t given a timeframe, will seat four and provide a greater range, assuming no one crashes and burns in these next few testing years.
Besides all of that, there are a still a ton of questions, including how the government is going to regulate these things, what kind of license you will need to fly them, convenient places to take off and land, autopilot problems and many, many more.
On the other hand, we’re one step closer to an actual flying car for the public, which is surely just a few years away. Surely.
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