Toyota wants you to stop calling it boring, and dang it, Toyota is going to give some hipster kids money to build a flying car in order to prove its coolness. The goal is to get a prototype in the air by next year, with four rotors helping lift it off of the ground. But wait, no, this actually sounds like a drone.
Toyota isn’t the main company behind the person-sized drone. Nikkei Asian Review reports that Toyota instead gave a startup called Cartivator more than $350,000 and the help of its mechanical engineers to develop it. Cartivator also received money from online crowdfunding, according to Engadget. The single person-drone also has three wheels in addition to its four rotors, according to the BBC, which totally also makes it a car. Would hoon.
Cartivator, which has around 30 volunteers working on the “Skydrive” car, said that it can reach 62 mph at up to almost 33 feet off of the ground. The company also claims that its drone thing is the “world’s smallest flying car” at 9.5 feet long and 4.3 feet wide, according to the BBC. And if the picture to the left is true to the product, that is going to be a small, small area for a person riding inside.
For comparison, a teeny, tiny Smart Fortwo is nearly 8.9 feet long and 6.2 feet wide. That drone-car sounds like the right size for my cats, not me.
Cartivator plans to have the drone-car commercialized in time to light the torch at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, according to Engadget. But the new round of flying-car hype could very well be over by then, since this is a reoccurring thing that never seems to take off (ha, ha).
But with all of the airport madness, perhaps riding—likely alone, at this size—in a smushed drone-car is preferable to flying in any other fashion. Maybe, after more than 100 years of trying, it’s finally the flying car’s turn to soar.
Eh, probably not.