World’s first flying car takes to the skies

The promise of flying cars in future is turning into reality as the world’s first flying car has completed its initial test.

Google co-founder Larry Page’s flying car company Kitty Hawk’s latest model ‘Flyer’ has recently completed a test flight. Flyer is set for one person and is operated by a joystick.

The vehicle is entirely electric and flies between three and 10ft off the water. Powered by 10 separate lift fans, the vehicle can fly at a top speed of 20mph for up to 20 minutes before requiring the need to be recharged.

Flying taxis to operate from next year

However, there are indeed some limitations to the vehicle. As Futurism explains, Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun described Flyer is a recreational vehicle instead of a daily use car, but could one day be used to transport people around cities and getting rid of road traffic. Though the vehicle is small in size, but its lithium polymer battery power lasts for about 20 minutes. Air traffic control systems and vehicle safety standards still pose as hurdles for the vehicle at the moment.

Video Courtesy: Kitty Hawk

Lead engineer Todd Reichert said that the team’s goal is to ‘take everything hard out of flying, basically to be able to give people an experience where it’s super-easy to fly’. He described Kitty Hawk’s progress as moving from ‘recreation to exploration to transportation’.

These flying cars might be near to their public roll out as personal vehicles are already available for pre-orders, but the sale price hasn’t been publicly disclosed yet, but as per CNN, Flyer is set to be expensive and is opening up its test flight program to business partners and social influencers. Kitty Hawk also has other plans as it is testing its pilotless flying taxi of another aircraft named ‘Cora’ in New Zealand.

However, Flyer is not the only one in flying cars’ race. Companies including Airbus, Uber, EHang, Joby Aviation, and Volocopter are testing or developing their own forms of flying vehicles too, as per Digital Trends.