On 28th June 2021, the flying car completed an air test in 35 minutes between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia.
The crossbred car-aircraft runs on petrol pump fuel and has a BMW engine. It could fly around 600 miles (1,000 km), at a height of 8,200 ft. and had racked up 40 hours in the air.
This car takes 2 minutes and 15 seconds to transform itself into an aircraft.
Prof. Stefan Klein, the inventor of this car drove it directly off the runway and into town upon arrival.
The vehicle reached the speed of 170 km/h in the air and it can carry two people with a combined weight of 200 kg.
It requires a runway as it cannot take off and land vertically unlike drone taxi prototypes.
This prototype has taken around two years to develop and the cost is less than 2 million euros.
It would be a big success if the company attracts even a small percent of global airlines or taxi sales.
The United States had ordered around 40,000 aircraft alone.
Future of Flying Cars
Flying cars are regularly used to clarify what the future would resemble and it appears to be what’s to come is nowhere flying cars will before long be a reality.
This flight starts a replacement era of dual transportation vehicles. It opens a replacement category of transportation and returns the liberty originally attributed to cars back to the individual.
The company has another model, AirCar Prototype 2, which is within the pre-production stage. It’s a 300HP engine and is predicted to possess a cruise speed of 300km/h. The corporation has planned to develop a spread of models within the future: three and four-seaters, twin-engine vehicles, and also an amphibious version.
If you’re getting to buy one, be warned that AirCars can’t begin and land vertically, you’d still need a runway.
The ongoing progression of flying cars will have extreme impacts upon several policies and standards that govern future tests, developments, evaluation, validation, and deployment of technology. Showcasing existing regulations and establishing proper incentives which will serve to systemize and sustain a full-scale Flying Car Transportation web are going to be required. Within the next section, a summary highlighting the applicability and potential impacts of M&S toward the longer-term deployment of flying cars within the existing transportation fleet is presented.
By the year 2025, flying cars will be available for commercial purposes. There are many of the associated challenges to sustain the technology that will necessitate virtual and/or live M&S for testing and validation. For instance, the evolution of flying cars will demand new policies and standards to manage the transition and handoff periods between manual and autonomous vehicle control and therefore the complex transition between ground and flight dynamics.
A related deliberation is the need to synchronize and command a functional range of motion for a flying car. Suitable design identifications will depend upon live and virtual testing, and M&S to figure out technical standards that meet all functional requirements and are likewise cost-effective and sustainable.