According to the founders, it has what it takes to become an part of the regular road traffic, while at the same time being able to land and take off in any airport in the world. AeroMobil is a flying car that perfectly makes use of existing infrastructure created for automobiles and planes, and opens doors to real door-to-door travel.
As a car it fits into any standard parking space, uses regular gasoline, and can be used in road traffic just like any other car. As a plane it can use any airport in the world, but can also take off and land using any grass strip or paved surface just a few hundred meters long. The current flying car prototype AeroMobil 3.0 incorporates significant improvements and upgrades to the previous pre-prototype AeroMobil 2.5.
It is now finalised and has been in regular flight-testing program in real flight conditions since October 2014. TheAeroMobil 3.0 is predominantly built from advanced composite material. That includes its body shell, wings, and wheels. It also contains all the main features that are likely to be incorporated into the product, such as avionics equipment, autopilot and an advanced parachute deployment system.
AeroMobil 3.0 also implements a number of other advanced technologies, such as a variable angle of attack of the wings that significantly shortens the take-off requirements, and sturdy suspension that enables it to take-off and land even at relatively rough terrain. AeroMobil has been around for five years, pursuing the dream of building a functional and practical flying car. Its third-gen prototype was revealed last October, and today at SXSW, AeroMobil CEO Juraj Vaculik revealed a bit more about the company's past and future and the challenges that remain to go from prototypes to fully fledged consumer vehicles - which the company plans to accomplish in 2017.
Vaculik and his co-founder Stefan Klein's dream of building flying cars wasn't simply a result of wishing to free their cars from the bonds of earth. As natives of what is the present-day Slovak Republic, they were motivated by a desire to escape the oppression of the then-communist government of Czechoslovakia. Of course, the Iron Curtain fell in that country 25 years ago, but the dream of driving and flying in the same vehicle remained.
While political restrictions on travel are no longer such an issue, Vaculik still sees the world's drivers and air travelers restricted by other bottlenecks: traffic jams, inefficient air travel (particularly for trips under 400 miles), and a lack of infrastructure for places where people want to go. Naturally, he feels flying cars can alleviate such issues.
"We need to move traffic from a 2D space to a 3D space." To do so, there are some daunting technical, financial and regulatory hurdles to clear, plus additional infrastructure to accommodate the forthcoming flying hordes. First up, the construction of the car itself. AeroMobile is still searching for the right components that will keep the car light enough for flight, but sturdy enough to pass stringent governmental crash and safety requirements.
Vaculik expects that AeroMobil to solve those problems in two years. Super lightweight and strong materials don't come cheap, by the way -- Vaculik estimates that the initial consumer version will cost at least a couple hundred thousand euros. The AeroMobil doesn’t come out of the blue: as Vaculik said, the one unveiled in Vienna it’s their third prototype; the first tests date back to the mid-90s.
And the romantic idea of the AeroMobil is even older, deep-rooted in the two founders childhood, spent largely inside the Iron Curtain. Actually, during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which ends communist era in former Czechoslovakia Vaculik was one of the key persons in the Student Movement which has started process of democratization and established new post-revolution government in Slovakia, according to his official biography in the company’s website. “When I was I young, I kept looking at the Danube, willing to travel, but at that time it wasn’t so easy,” he said, linking together mobility and freedom.
The company identified three possible target markets for their product: commuters working in a range of two hundred kilometers or so from their home, business people who don’t want to spend too much time waiting in queue for check-in in airports and, most important, residents in nations with little or no infrastructure for planes. Two hundred meters for take off and about fifty for landing, is all that this flying car needs to operate, no need of long landing fields or other amenities.
While emotional and attractive, the idea of personal aerial vehicles, does bring along problems as well. If it becomes popular, it will change completely not only the way we move from place to place, but also our relationship with the sky, which, so far, is one of the few place yet relatively unspoilt and not contaminated by human presence. Noise, pollution, not the mention the risk of collisions, will all have to be dealt with.
Below you’ll find the official video of the AeroMobil flying.
This is not going to stop innovation, anyway, as AeroMobil is not even the only company operating in this space. US-based Terrafugia, is another. The European Union itself is working on a project called myCopter, focused on ‘design of an intuitive and user-friendly human-machine interface and required pilot training’, and on ‘understanding societal needs that are necessary for the acceptance of personal aerial vehicles in today’s society’.
Researchers believe that the aircraft should take off and land vertically to minimize space requirements, and fly at relatively low altitudes along predetermined flight corridors in order to alleviate road congestion during rush hours.
A German firm called E-Volo is already developing a prototype, called Volocopter, based on this specifications. Sure enough, the adoption rates of all these personal aircrafts, will depend a lot on the price tag. The Terrafugia Transition costs $279,000. The Volocopter, €250,000. As for the AeroMobil, there’s no fixed price yet.
