
It sure is tough to find flying-car news these days. (C'mon, Moller, we are you shipping?) But the Seattle Times comes through with a profile on Rafi Yoeli, the Israeli conceptualist behind the X-Hawk urban rescue vehicle, which broached our radar range back in 2004. Apparently, Yoeli's gotten a basic prototype to rise three feet, and says a marketable version could be in play by 2010, with a price tag of $1.5 million. Not quite the Volkswagen Beetle of flying cars, but any progress is good progress.
Flying car proposed as new rescue vehicle [Seattle Times]
Related:
City-Friendly X-Hawk to Elevate Urbanites [internal]














Comments
Flying Car: Is now and always will be "The Car of the Future."
That'll solve the environmental crisis - a flying car that uses more gas than a helicopter of the same capacity (according to Wired magazine).
This is gonna be THE NEXT BIG THING!
This is gonna be THE NEXT FERRARI ENZO!
...as in, the next $1M+ car that rich idiots will be almost killing themselves in.
whatever, never going to happen. Moller's been talking for years (5+) about flying cars, they even have a fully functioning flying version (3 feet, HAH!), and we're still no closing to buying one.
the real problem is insurance and financing. It's a plane, not a car, so you need a pilot's license, and you can't drive it on public roads without car insurance too, plus I doubt it'll pass safety inspections (US at least) to be licensed as a road worthy vehicle. Yes, I see the bumper on the pictures, but a few hand drawn pictures don't mean much.
James, Moller's can only go up and down. And he's been working on it for a long, long time. It's never made the transition to horizontal flight. In fact, it's never been airborne without a tether. The fact that this guy has made his vertical jump in only a couple years seems good to me. Hopefully he can meet his 2009 date, but don't cross your fingers! Probably never more than a very costly research experiment..
This could very well give hoonage a bad name!
I can just see all the drunk multi-millionaires at 2 AM who get a craving for a reuben sandwich sandwich ...
"I'm a very good flyer ... very good flyer."
It was so good I said it twice.
Those 17" rims don't look so big on a ride that's 11' tall.
i think mollers actually been working on flying cars for decades...
this looks like a reject star wars prop... course, if it works, im still not interested, because i like staying right here on terra forma...
People don't take responsibility on the road, why are they going to change in the air? They already think of themselves as invincible. This won't be like BTTF2 in which even Griff Tannen drives responsibly.
So here's the real question...do we really need a flying car?
Does anyone remember a commercial around the turn of the century with Avery Brooks (Capt. Benjamin Sysko from DS9) in which he's doing an advertisement for a telecommunications company and states something along the lines of this, "Its the year 2000. Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars, where are they? Well, we don't need them with today's high speed internet connections you can connect with anywhere in the world without ever needing to go there..." it was so long ago I don't remember actual wording, but it got me thinking if we need flying cars in today's society?
That commercial kind of took away my real world desire for wanting to see flying cars.
Still, it would be cool as long as I wasn't one of the unfortunates to have a drunken millionaire come landing on my house at 3AM.
Of course we don't need flying cars, that's why we don't have them yet (well, except that one in the Boeing Museum of Flight).
What we need is a Star Trek type transporter device. Why don't we have that?
Like Dr. McCoy I wouldn't trust one of those things scrambling my molecules all over the place. How do I know it's really me coming out the other end?
I read awhile ago that some scientists did believe they transported a single atom or molecule (I don't recall which) across some microscopic distance. transporters are coming, just not anytime soon.
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