FLYING CAR (IT WON’T GO AWAY)

NOW: CHINA GETS INVOLVED. ARE WE FINALLY CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF?

There’s something about the idea of cars taking flight that has captured our imaginations. Yet we’re still stuck with cars that are as flightless as the dodo, though perhaps not quite as extinct – yet. Clearly, the obstacles to flying cars, both practical and administrative, seem intractable.

So what makes the Chinese so interested in flying cars? And not just any Chinese, either: to be specific, the company whose full name is Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. This is the company that not only makes cars under its own name, but also happens to own Volvo, Proton and Lotus. Those brands number among the world’s foremost in car innovation. Geely also owns the company that makes one of the world’s most recognisable vehicles, the London taxi. (They’re working on an electric version.) Most recently, Geely signed up as lead partner of the Bloodhound land speed record bid. Then there’s the flying car thing. In November, Geely completed acquiq sition of flying-car developers Terrafugia. ugia. Us-based Terrafugia thus became a fully owned subsidiary of Geely, which has as committed itself to investing to make ke the flying car a reality. To show how w serious it is, in anticipation of the takeover Terrafugia tripled the size of its engineering team.

Founded in 2006 by five MIT graduduates, Terrafugia has delivered a number mber of working prototypes. The company y aims to deliver its first flying car to the market in 2019. Four years after that, at, we’re told, we should expect to see the he world’s first VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) flying car. As part of the new w management structure, a 30-year veteran of the helicopter industry and former managing director for Bell Helicopter China, Chris Jaran, has been recruited as CEO. Jaran sees the first priority being the expansion of the company’s R&D capabilities.

“The team at Terrafugia have been at the forefront of believing in and realising the vision for a flying car and creating the ultimate mobility solution,” says Zhejiang Geely Holding Group founder and chairman Li Shufu. “This is a tremendously exciting sector and we believe that Terrafugia is ideally positioned to change mobility as we currently understand it and herald the development of a new industry in doing so.”

Where others have promised much but failed to deliver, Terrafugia says the Transition is the world’s first practical flying car. “It offers the

convenience of driving and the speed of flight and will incorporate autonomous technologies that will make the Transition safer than any other small aircraft in the sky. Terrafugia has already developed and flown two full-scale prototypes and has received all of the special legal approvals necessary to bring it to market in the USA.

Terrafugia’s vision for the future: “The TF-X, a mass-market flying car with the potential to revolutionise the way we all get around.” Powered by electric motors with vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities and computer-controlled flight, the TF-X is labelled the flying car of the future.

The Transition is described as a folding-wing, two-seat, roadable aircraft that is designed to fly like a typical Light Sport Aircraft in the air and drive like a typical car on the ground. It will run on premium unleaded automotive petrol, fit in a single-car garage, and convert between flight and drive modes in under a minute.

In the Transition, a full suite of automotive safety features, including airbags, pre-tensioning loadlimiting seatbelts, a crumple zone and safety cage will be supplemented, for flight, by a full vehicle parachute. It will also incorporate advanced autonomous flight technologies such as automatic terrain avoidance. The first prototype was built and flown in 2009, followed by a second iteration in 2012.

Terrafugia’s master plan for flying cars starts with bringing a GA aircraft to market that provides meaningful new value to the existing pilot population while allowing the company to demonstrate to nonpilots that this platform could be more useful than a car in certain cases, and much easier to operate than many non-pilots would expect. The second step is to develop a second product for a larger market that is enabled by simplified flight technology: VTOL vehicles for urban short-range travel. “Uber, Airbus, and other powerful corporations are already working on early stage concepts that target this market opportunity, but it will be many years before they become a reality,” the company says. The third phase is to develop a third product “that more closely resembles the pop-culture vision of a flying car. Think Blade Runner or Back to the Future.” Their vision for this type of vehicle, the TF-X, will require less training time than a traditional pilot’s licence and its price will be consistent with high-end luxury cars.

So why a flying car? Why not just a separate car and plane? “There absolutely are better performing pure cars and pure planes. But the convenience and flexibility of being able to change plans at any point provides more freedom to the end user than even extremely high performance planes or cars,” CEO Chris Jaran wrote in an op-ed piece in Professional Pilot.

Jaran says the Transition will beat high-performance GA aircraft on decision-to-destination metrics for average trips up to almost 300 kilometres because the user will spend less time on the ground planning a flight, shuffling flight bags, and warming up the aircraft. “But it’s not just about the time savings,” he adds. “Human desires are nonlinear; metrics of traditional aircraft performance can’t be used to predict market share. If minimum thresholds of acceptable performance are met, comfort and convenience can be more highly valued than performance in today’s world. Look at your smartphone compared with a desktop. Even though the desktop can have much better performance at a similar price point, Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of the iphone, not the imac.”

There’s still a long road ahead, he admits. Besides the tough job of making the first step, there’s also raising capital, investment risk and regulatory challenges to consider. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that there is a future for the flying car.”

Like many pilots and engineers before him, Jaran wants to make personal aviation a bigger part of everyone’s life. “Not so much for the romance of it, but rather because I know it has the potential to be so much more useful than it is today… my goal is to make personal aviation a practical transportation option for everyone, to turn the dream of the flying car from science fiction into reality.”