Driving flying cars has been an ongoing topic for years now, and it seems like the idea is finally becoming a reality rather sooner than we all expected.
A video from the world known engineering company, SkyDrive, shows its manned compact vehicle using eight propellers to hover into the air and make its way — with a few wobbles — around a test field. But while the clip may excite fans of Blade Runner and Back to the Future, the test run leaves mankind far from a future of airborne vehicles whizzing into the sky to avoid traffic.
The company hailed “the first public demonstration of a flying car in Japan” and said the aircraft, around the size of two parked cars, had circled the testing field for four minutes. “We want to realise a society where flying cars are an accessible and convenient means of transportation in the skies,” SkyDrive CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement on Friday.
The firm said it wanted the vehicle to be available to buy in Japan by 2023, with reports suggesting it could cost upwards of $300 000 (about R5 million). Now that’s a lot of budgeting to do.
A German company tested a flying taxi in Singapore in October, saying it hoped its invention — also shaped like a big drone — would revolutionise travel in traffic-choked cities while Volocopter had already tested its battery-operated, two-seater taxi elsewhere around the globe but the Singapore trial was the first in the heart of a city.
SkyDrive said they will continue to conduct test flights under an expanding range of conditions in order to improve their technologies further and achieve full compliance with the safety provisions of the Civil Aeronautics Act. To this end, based on the results of SD-03 testing, they aim to obtain approval for flights outside the limits of the Toyota Test Field before the end of 2020.
http://en.skydrive2020.com/2020/08/28/0828pressrelease01/
Main Image: My Modern Met