The first flying car, 'Model A,' approved by the FAA and it's 100% electric

Ragnell@kbin.social to Technology@kbin.social – 83 points – The first flying car, 'Model A,' approved by the FAA and it's 100% electric
usatoday.com

Alef Aeronautics' 'Model A' has a driving range of 200 miles and a flight range of 110 miles. The company plans to start delivering cars by late 2025.

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The company, founded in 2015 by Dukhovny, Konstantin Kisly, Pavel Markin, Oleg Petrov in Palo Alto, California, has been test driving and flying the car's prototype since 2019.

"The constraints were: it has to be a real car (driving in driving lanes, parking in parking spaces), it has to have a vertical takeoff (otherwise it is not a real flying car), it has to be affordable for most people (not just the rich)," Alef said.

The following year, the first sub-scale prototype was built, and in 2018, the first full-size “skeleton” took to the skies.

It's for real this time. Whether or not it will be a Tesla lemon, time will tell. But the FAA is generally EXTREMELY safety-conscious.

I remember a video we watched in an engineering class back in the early 2000s about a guy who was making "flying cars" that were tested and "flyable".

They still don't have a practical prototype.

There's a suspicious lack of real photos and video of this soon-to-be-ready vehicle that's set to ship to consumers in just 2½ years. Surely they're not still in the very early R&D phase, right?

The best actual photos I can find is of an oversized drone with a basic frame the size of a car, a "cockpit" in the middle that will barely fit 1 person, 8 propellers where the entire "car" would normally be in a car, and some light-weight foam side panels slapped on. No car engine or car wheels (except some small castors to roll it around).

Along with the (paraphrasing) "it's supposed to be a slow-moving vehicle while on the ground" comment in the article, I guess they're building a big drone with a small lawn mower motor to move you around on the ground.