TechStuff Classic: Where's My Flying Car?

somehow I did. Anyway, as you may guess, this is an episode about flying cars and why ain't they everywhere already? Gosh darn it, let's listen in if this is the future, Where's my flying car? Where's my jet flying car? Why are my meals in pill form? It's because jet packs and flying cars are really dangerous. Yeah, they're not practical very much, and at least not yet, and they're really

tricky to do in a way that is safe. You know, even if you're talking about completely automating it, and we're going to talk about some cars where they're taking that approach, where they're making it as automated as possible, it's you know, it's there's a lot of logistics to work through. I mean, just imagine, like in my neighborhood alone, if I had a flying car and it was all automated and everything, and it could detect other flying cars, I still have

to worry about things like power lines. And we don't have autonomous cars that go on a two dimensional plane yet. So I mean adding that third dimension is more complicated than it probably sounds. So the flying car, I mean, obviously that's been something in science fiction. What might surprise you is how old the concept of a flying car is. It did not take very long after the invention of both cars and planes for someone to say, hey, wouldn't it be awesome if a car was also a plane.

Uh So back in eighteen eighty five, that's when you get your first gasoline powered automobile, which was invented by a fellow named Carl Friedrich Benz and Mercedes Benz. And then in nineteen o three we had the first flight of the Right brothers, right, which, depending upon your view of history, was the first you know, uh, solid like heavier than air flight. Uh. There's definitely some debate there, but generally in the historical ranks, generally speaking, people say

nineteen O three first flight. At any rate, it was right around that time. So eighteen eighty five was the first gasoline powered automobile. Keep in mind that there were other types of automobile, steam powered, electric powered ones, but gasolene powered started in the late nineteenth century early twentieth century. You get the Right Brothers, So how long did it take before someone came up with an idea of making

up car slash plane? Seventeen fourteen years after the Right Brothers flew, someone says, clearly, awesome, two things can be combined, right, this is the chocolate and peanut butter of the technological age. They must become one. And that person was but Glenn Curtis. He created the Curtis auto Plane. Then the names of these things, by the way, are my favorite that they

really only get better. Yeah, it's sort of like what you encounter when you when you look at steampunk, where people come up with the most creative uh, goofy goofy, like like multi collaborate names. So the Curtis auto Plane wasn't really a true flying car and what we would think of today, right, it didn't look like a car that could suddenly take off and you wouldn't he have Doc Brown say where we're going, we don't need roads, and then you have the big Back to the Future

music come up. It's it looked more like a plane that you could sort of drive around if you needed to. Um. So it was a plane, a small plane, relatively small plane with a forty foot wingspans about twelve point, thank you very much. And it had a rear mounted four bladed propellers, so the propellers on the back of the plane and so have on the front of it, which is fairly common in a lot of the designs will

be talking about today. Um and uh. But but it never really flew, now, it just kind of hopped off the ground a couple of times, never really caught flight. So if you ever watch any of those kind of like a toddler going and flying and started jumping really hard. Yeah, if you look at any of those old timey movies where people were working on the early early versions of airplanes, and you see lots of planes that get a little bit off the ground and then immediately come right back down,

that's kind of what this thing did. It never never attained true flight, to be fair. At the time, I think that a lot of especially kind of hobbyist created planes exactly. We're just you know, we're really just hopping. So that probably wasn't terrible for no, for a first attempt at making a car that was also a plane.

Not bad, not great, but not bad. And it would take another twenty years before someone would create something similar, or at least according to all the research I was doing, there probably were other people, hobbyists, mechanics engineers who are trying to do the sort of thing, but not all of their attempts have been recorded for posterity's sake. But in ninety seven, a Waldo Waterman created the aero bile

or aerobill or aerobilly anyways, it was. It was a student baker, which, as we all know from the Muppet movie is a bear's natural habitat, so student baker not. If you were to look at a picture of a student baker, I don't think the first thing that you would think is that looks like that sucker could fly through the air. And yet Waldo Waterman was determined, Yeah, this one was that was a three wheeled car, but

the wheels were detachable. Yeah, well had detachable wheels and a rear mounted propeller, and it never ended up getting uh sufficient funding. The wings itself were also detachable. That's also a very common thing and a lot of these early designs where you know, you would take all the parts that you didn't need off for it to be a car, and then once you got to wherever, them

in a very large trunk and run. Yeah, or a trailer that you would tow behind the car get to wherever you're going, Like whatever airstrip you're going to put your plane together, Yeah, you'd actually have to assembol it and then it would be a plane. So it was, which is something that is very worrying for me. I have to say, guys, I I personally do not have the kind of engineering background to really feel comfortable flying

in something that I have just built. Can you imagine looking into the trailer and you're seeing like three or four just random nuts and bolts in there and think that's good enough? You know it's because it could be like going to Ikea, like you put your furniture together and you're like, it's always a few spare bits, and you're like, well, you didn't say that we're spare bits, But I could have sworn I followed the instructions. Yet that was sort of what these early flying cars were

like too. So really, you're gonna notice while we talk about this, so for these early ones, it's going to sound more and more like it was a plane that converted into a vehicle that could travel on Rhods. That's the case for most of these early ones. Robert Edison Fulton Jr. A distant relative to another Fulton we talked about in how steam engines were Yeah, the steamboat, the steamboat Fulton. Yeah, so steamboat Fulton was not He was

not a direct descendant of Robert Fulton, the steamboat engineer. Uh. Robert Fulton, I believe had one son who never had any kids, but several daughters. But obviously you wouldn't have the last name Fulton through that line, So we're talking like a cousin distantly related in that sense. But still his dad was a friend to a certain Thomas Edison,

which is why Edison had had the Edison in his name. Um, yeah, I would guess that if it were Robert Nicola Fulton, we would all be just fawning over him because of Tesla's and I know we both lost some geek cred there I think anyway, His version was an aluminum body car that had detachable fabric wings to turn it into a light plane, and it also had a detachable propeller that would serve as propulsion. And they built four prototypes

but it never went into production. UM and the following year, Consolidated Vaulty developed the convert Car, which was a two door sedan with detachable airplane unit. So in this case, it's like an entire kind of airplane kit that you could fit on top of this car. And they had some success, at least, well, they had limited early success with their with their tests. Didn't think, Yeah, yeah, they had two successful tests. Um, they had two successful tests.

Improved they could they could fly for about an hour and travel it around forty five seventy two I'm sorry, not forty five. I could travel a total distance of forty five miles or seventy two kilometers on a gallon of gas. Us. But it was pretty good. Yeah, so to flights going pretty slow, but unfortunately the third flight not so successful. Yeah, and that that was pretty much the end of the project, right. They were trying to

get some marketing dollars behind it. After the crash that was a complete disaster for them, and it was it was scrapped. They decided not to go forward with it. Molten B. Taylor builds the Arrow Car, which was actually inspired by Robert Edison Fulton Junior's design. It also had detachable wings and a detachable tail so they could stash those in a in a trailer. Yeah, this is one of those that you would put all those parts in a trailer, tow it to the airport, then take everything out,

assemble it on the car. And according to the Wall Street Journal, a practiced owner could assemble the Erow car from into flying form within ten minutes. Ten minutes to turn into an airplane. I can't assemble a microwave dinner and ten I don't. I certainly anyone who watched me play Minecraft knows ten minutes is not enough time for me to assemble anything. This was another tail end propeller. Yeah, and it looks like a mini car and only six

were ever built. In fact, one of them I think was current, was on the market recently for just over like a million dollars or something like. It actually looks very quaint, like it looks like a quaint little antique car that for some reason has had an airplane tail merged onto the end of it and wings that sprouted out of it. So yeah, but if you, if you, you could easily imagine removing those and it would look

like a little Yeah. So this one was more of a car, although again you could not, you know, effortlessly convert to flying form, which is really what we're going for here, right. We want a car that you could drive on the streets and then when traffic is getting really badly you put sug button and it transforms like in an anime, and it would be a while and still would will be a while before we'd see something like that. Uh So, nineteen sixty, Paul Mahler introduces the

x M two. Now Maller will be well, we'll go ahead and tell Mahler's story. It's kind of a disappointing story. But the x M two was the first prototype of his sky car concept that one would hover, but he couldn't get it to fly. So he would continue to to kind of refine this design, and in nine was

the first one. Nine he introduces the M two hundred X, which could fly in an altitude of about fifteen meters or around fifty feet, and then he would later introduce the sky car M four hundred, which is a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft vt o L vertical takeoff or landing really, which could reach speeds theoretically of four hundred miles per hour or six hundred forty four kilometers power.

But the cruising speed. Yeah, can you imagine your average motorists controlling a vehicle traveling traveling at that speed, I literally cannot have the cruising speed. Now that was the top speed. The cruising speed was three miles per Oh, well that's much better, yeah, or five hundred sixty three kilometers per hour. Fuel for the vehicle included simple simple household items yasolene was one diesel okay, alcohol okay, kerosene

and propane all at the same time. Yeah. Well it's you know, because it was using some pretty powerful sure which which also yeah, exactly, the average voters just has those lying around all right, exactly. You know, you can just go to one filling station and find all of those. Some filling stations you might, but not many had a range of about nine hundred miles, which is about hundred fifty kilometers. Is that the same as it's car mode range.

Uh no, no, it's Kira mode at a mileage of twenty miles per gallon or thirty two point two kilometers per gallon. I know, really usually do leaders per kilometer, but there's only so much conversion I can do. Guys, I have to apologize for my American nous. But the initial price for the M four hundred was quoted to be a millions Macarou's one million bucks. But the promises

of Muller never quite panned out. So in two thousand three they did a demonstration where the M four hundred hovered, but it hovered on a tether like it was tethered to the ground. It did not fly. Um, so it wasn't really awe inspiring or giving a lot of people confidence in the project. And in fact, by two thousand nine they still didn't have a flying car to show off, and Maller ended up filing for personal protection under Chapter

eleven as in bankruptcy. Turned out apparently the company had spent something like one hundred million dollars over forty years trying to get this flying car designed to work, and it had not happened hundred million bucks. So yeah, it was definitely a tough, tough story. Now, Maller, while he filed for protection under Chapter eleven, the company, Maller International is still from why I understand, still operating in a

very limited capacity. So the company didn't go away, but Maller certainly had to look for some financial protection after after just not being able to turn this around. Now that leads us up to the last one we're going to talk about before our break. Uh. It dates back to two thousand one, the Skywriter X two R. So this one is designed by Macro Industries Incorporated, and it's another VT O L type of vehicle, and this one

uses ducted fans as propulsion instead of propellers. So, uh, it kind of looks like like a casual glance, you would look and say, oh, those are turbines, but they're not actually turbines. So it's around casing. On the inside of this casing is a fan blade and those fans turn and provide the lift, and you can tilt the ducts in different directions so that you can do the vertical takeoff and landing, or tilt them forward so that you get that forward propulsion like I like a hover carrier. Yeah,

that's a little hover carrier thing. According to the website, they were the car would have lots of dynamic routing information, so it would allow it to plan out a route that would keep it clear from the pathway of other flying car motorists, because they actually said their goal is to make the flying car reality for the average consumer. But of course, you know, to you and I, we just sit there and think about Atlanta traffic right now.

Just imagine the traffic that's passing past our building right now. Sometimes you guys can hear it. I know you can well imagine all of that traffic in the air. That's kind of terrifying, completely terrifying. Although by two thousand one, certainly we were starting to get into computer systems that would at least help you detect some of that little right.

So the idea is that it would have a lot of automated systems to help prevent collisions, to help you plan a flight path that wouldn't put you across someone else's flight path. Uh, you know, And of course as technology has advanced, we've got better with like collision detection and prevention, that kind of stuff. Automated systems that can take over in case a manual accident is about to happen. So things have gotten to the point where you could kind of see a reality here, but it's one that's

kind of early. Yeah yeah, And you know, I I heard a little bit about this and it sounds like a kind of solid plan. Where did did this one actually happen? They said that the first models of this car would be available within five years the project receiving adequate funding. As far as they can tell, the project has yet to receive what they call adequate funding, So uh, that five years is kind of the perpetual five years off from now, just like most technological advances are ten

to forty years away, and it's it's always gonna yeah. Now, maybe they'll end up getting enough funding where they'll become a real player in the space, but as far as I can tell, it's kind of one of those vaporware type things. And was this another one that was more more like an aircraft that drives than a Yeah yeah, I mean it looks more like a plane than it

does a car. It looks like it looks like a plane that's small enough when everything folds up for it to fit into your garage, as opposed to a car that can turn into a flying machine. It looks like a plane that can be driven on the roads right, right, and not the kind of thing that you'd expect to take out onto the highways and drive around in traffic. Right. Hi, guys, it's Jonathan from twenty. I apologize for my hovering. That's a flying card joke. But we need to take a

quick break, all right, So we're back now. The next car on our list is one of my favorites because it's so different from all the other ones we've been mentioning so far. Like all the ones we've talked about either had some sort of VT O L system where they were going to hover and take off and then fly forward, right, which I'm actually kind of impressed by.

I think that that a vto L would be a little bit more difficult to engineer, and therefore, yeah, it's got some challenges, but it would assume you could get it to work, it would be way easier for your average driver, right, because it wouldn't mean that you wouldn't have to go find a long strap in air strips so that you could get up to enough speed to get lift and then take off. This would allow you to convenient Yeah, Yeah, you're at a standstill, you lift up,

you fly off where you want to go. And I think you need to be at a standstill with some you know, like hundred feet of clear space around you so that you didn't you know, destroy your surrounding. My precision is amazing. I am fully confident I could take off from like a crowded parking lot with tiny scratches. Maybe. So we're talking about now the Parajet skycr and the Parajet skycar is one of my favorites. Parajet, you kind

of get the feeling here. There's a para sail or a parachute that is attached to essentially a dune buggy. So it looks like something that came out out of Mad Max, right, like, you know, you could take this to the Thunderdome in style and um, and it has this para sale that you can deploy, and on the very back of the dune buggy is an enormous fan. So it looks a lot like like like one of those everglades and boat boats and the kind of archer likes, yeah exactly would be one of those. So it's the

stune buggy with the fan on the back. And the parasale that you deploy, And the way it works is that you would if you wanted to actually fly, you would take the parasale part out, lay it behind the car, start up your fan, and then start driving and once you hit about thirty seven miles per hour or sixty kilometers per hour, you would have enough lift there from the para sale to lift off the ground and use the fan to control your pitch and your role. That

sounds so terrifying but wonderful. The videos of this thing I absolutely adore. Now, granted again you don't have any wings, so it's not like a you know, air lane slash car. This is a car that has a pair of sale and a propeller on it. That's pretty much what you're talking about. And it sounds like it would still count as a as a light sport vehicle. Yes, yes, you would have to have sport aircraft. You have to have a light sport aircraft piloting license to to be able

to fly this legally. Obviously there in fact, a lot of the ones we're going to talk about, the earlier ones we were talking about, never really got beyond prototype or concept, so it was kind of right, right, they never had to think about this kind of thing. Also, I'm sure that the regulations of the f a A were a lot lighter when the f A didn't exist,

so there's some probably helped. The next one we'll talk about has kind of a very uh lase attitude about air regulations, but I'll mention that when we get into it. So this one, you would actually have to have a pilot's license to operate in flying mode, but a sport pilot license, which I believe it's a little different from it.

They are different classes, just like there are different classes of motorist licenses, there are different classes of pilot licenses, right, And since a light sport aircraft is I think you have visual site rules on that one, so it's right, and it's small enough, it can only be a one or two seater just the pilot and up to one passenger.

You know, max weight of like six which is one thousand, three twenty pounds, and a max speed of a hundred and twenty nuts, which is like a hundred and thirty eight miles per hour or two d and two kilometers per hour. So it's going relatively by the speed of planes slow, right, and so all you really need is a driver's license and a this this sport pilot certifications. You don't need the full medical thing where a doctor approved by the f A comes out and says like, yes,

you are mentally and physically fit to pilot. Right, you can be as unstable as you like as long as you don't because the damage that you'll create a few crash is relatively small. The Parajet skycar, it's top speed is well within those parameters. Is that a hundred fifteen miles per hour or about a hundred eighty five kilometers per hour on the ground. In the scare, it's fifty five miles per hour or nine kilometers per hour. And that's not a big surprise. You're flying by para sale.

It's not like not like like you got a turbojet. A gallon of gas will take it about fifty six point five miles on the ground or two hundred nautical miles in the sky. And it costs one hundred nineteen thousand dollars for a dune buggy, which is high for a dune bug gam sure, but it's approximately average for

light sport. So this, when you think about this, this you know, first you say Oh, this is kind of a weird thing for people to spend money on, but it's actually something that has been used for first responders and disasters. They've used them to get medicine to remote locations because you can fly it and then land it and then drive over rough terrain because it's a dune bugge. So yeah, you can get to places that might need medical relief or other disaster relief. And it's actually become

a useful tool. So while we kind of laugh about some of these designs because they're either impractical or they they're crazy extravagant, this one actually had a practical use. We will return to this classic episode about Where's my Flying Car in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. That's more than I can say for the pal V one, which is a three wheeled vehicle that converts into a gyrocopter. I I don't know what

you're talking about. I want one of these right now. Okay, So it looks like a have you ever seen the Mono tracer? You might not have. There's actually one in Atlanta, and I think they only ever made something like seventy of them. I do not believe that I have seen it. Have you seen tron? Do you know what the light cycle and tron looks like? That's all right, that's a mono tracer and if you just make a couple of adjustments, that's essentially what the pal v one looks like. But

instead of two wheels, it's step three. It's got two in the back, one in the front. It handles like a motorcycle, and the gyrocopter rotor folds down and the tail folds in to make it a pretty compact vehicle. So when you decide that you want to go flying around, you drive it over to an airport, you unfold the rotor and the tail, and then once the road gets going,

it's self propelling. Relates a gyrocopter will have to do a whole episode on how gyrocopters were, absolutely, but it can then do a you know, a vertical takeoff because it's just like any other gyrocopter and you can fly it around. And this is where the blase attitude comes in. They say, like, you know, it's designed to fly around or below four thousand feet, which is about which that's under the visual flight rules traffic, meaning you don't have

to have lots of instruments you can. You can fly by sight, right, your cabin doesn't have to be pressurized at that at that height, and you're not really going to be interfering with commercial Yeah, and they essentially say that, you know, at that height, the government doesn't really care, so have fun. That's essentially what the messages. I'm not if that is accurate. I think that there's a problem.

It's kind of terrifying. Really. It can reach top speeds of a hundred twelve miles prour or KOs prower on land or in the air. So uh yeah, terrifying no matter how you put it. But it looks awesome. I mean the pictures and everything the video is is really it's a ton of fun. So they have made prototypes. These exist, Yeah, you could get one of these. Uh. Then there's the aero Mobile V two point five, which is another propeller driven aircraft that also acts as a car,

so really plane first, car second as a car. The wings for this aircraft fold back along the fuselage, so it's not detachable. They actually fold and they create this kind of funky elongated car body. Because the wings are they're not necessarily short, so the whole car is a long car and The very back of the car is

also kind of funky. It has this sort of uh, these tail fins that pop out of the back, so the tail of the aircraft think of like a horizontal tail with two verb cool tail fins that pop up directly under those tail fins are the rear wheels for the Aero Mobile two point five. So what you're saying is that if you drop your middle school or off in this car, they're gonna make their there. They're gonna

get a lot of wedgies. Possibly they're either going to be told that they have the coolest parent ever, or they're going to be ostracized for the rest of their lives. It's middle school. That's kind of how it goes. So, I mean, you know, really, if it weren't that, it'd be something else. Um there. This one has a double steering wheel, which I thought was really cool. The outer steering wheel is designed to drive the car and the inter steering wheel is designed to drive it when it's

in the air. So it's a steering wheel, not a not a joystick for the air travel exactly. And it's you know, I guess too. To conserve space, they built two in one. Um I don't. I haven't seen pictures of how this looks, so I don't know exactly, Like if the second one, the one in the middle, if it projects out a little bit, I would imagine when I have to. Otherwise I can't. I can't see how you would be able to manipulate it. But the description

I thought was really interesting. And you just you push a button to go into aircraft mode and that makes the wings unfold and they lock into aircraft position. And you would have to do this at an airport. This is one of those those cars where you would have to drive it to an airport, get on the landing strip, unfolded wings until they're locked into place, and then you could drive until you reach liftoff speed and take off. So you couldn't just do this on the street. That

would be bad um. And it has a top speed of a hundred and twenty four miles per hour or two hundred kilometers per hour when it's an airplane mode, and has a range of about four d thirty miles or seven kilometers and according to the designer, who is Stefan Kleine. Stefan says that you can refuel this at any standard gas station which suggests that it is actually using regular gasoline or diesel, one of the two. It's

not using any kind of airplane fuel. Automotive fuel is becoming for especially for these small sport craft, a more popular choice from what I've been reading right now. This one has not yet been certified by the government, but we imagine that it would probably fall under the same certification as other UH flying cars have under the light sport aircraft designation, So uh this would also be another one where you would have to have that pilot license

or to operate it. The wingspan on this thing is twenty seven feet wide or eight point two meters, which is why I say it's an aircraft first in a car second, because you know, at twenty seven feet when you fold that back, that means that car has to be pretty long. It's it does not look like a car. Like you. You look at this and you think, I don't know what it is, but it's not a car. It sounds like not that many of these that we've been talking about would look like cars in any kind

of yeah, this car shape. I think a lot of these would go to amateur pilots who have a lot of income. Pretty typical of amateur pilots anyway, because it's expensive to be a pilot. Oh sure, sure, but you know, and and there there is a problem of many of the public airports that you can land in. Once you land there, there's no public transportation that goes out of them there. They're too small to have even like a

taxi stand or something like that. So so you need to and it can be a pain if you if you fly your plane somewhere and you want to immediately go elsewhere. Therefore, this thing that you could drive on the ground as well as in the air, bass more expensive than any other thing you could speaking of. More expensive actually you have. All right, So here's the grand daddy of flying cars. This is the one that's been the news recently, right, Yeah, the Terrafugia UM trans transition. Yes,

why do I always forget that word? It's really it's a transition. It's it's kind of built for a purpose of transitioning from car to airplane airplane. Uh yeah. The Terrafugia tagline is we are driven to fly, which apparently I wrote the tagline. Someone there is very like minded to you that that's terrifying. UM. Their their first model This transition has been in development for seven years. As of flight testing finally occurred in UM they are taking

pre orders. Uh wow, how much is it? Uh? Two dollars I got chick my account, which you know is high for a car. Um, it's actually really high for a plane as well. The first car that's also a plane, it's a steel Seeing as how your choices are so limited, and that's almost entire I think that every single one that we've talked about has has projected a lower price

than that's one. Um. But okay, so so this is a this is a two seater street legal airplane that converts between driving mode and flying mode in supposedly under a minute. And it's a it's another press of button. It doesn't kind of thing. Um. Yeah, it would fit into a standard single car garage. UM has a full vehicle parachute in case anything terrible happens at above five feet.

Very important, yes, and supposedly meets the federal motor vehicle stand safety standards that have been put forth by the uh National Highway Traffic and Safety Administrations. So that's that's something else that we have to talk about. I mean the fact that these vehicles have to meet two different sets of standards, right, they have to meet as certain set standards by the f a A and another one by by the highway. You know, they have to be

both safe as cars and safe as aircraft. And that is that is a lot of safety stuff to talk about, which I think is one of the reasons why none of none of this has come out of prototype, particularly yet, especially not for consumer purchase. Now, when would these things be available? Like, are we talking ten years? Uh, they've they've they haven't really projected a date that I've seen. Yeah, I saw someone saying that it might be in as few as two years, which means by theoretically these things

could be available. And again, because it would be a light sport aircraft, you would have to have a pilot's license to operate it, so I assume you would also have to drive this thing out to an airport, just like some of the other ones we've talked about. Absolutely, that's that's exactly the gig for this sort of thing. Um, well, that that means that it's not going to be something that's going to absolutely fill the skies as soon as

it rolls off the production line. No, this is also way more of a drivable aircraft than it is a flying flying car. Um, well, who's going to make a flying car, Lauren, I want my flying car? Well, okay, you know this, this this thing is actually pretty clever. Um. The the engine is a is a very popular light sport aircraft engine. It's called a rod Tex nine twelve. I s um at least I assume that is that is precisely how you say that, because I don't know

all that much about plane engines. As it turns out, is a weird talk. It really is. I mean, this is an engine that's really being lauded for its fuel economy and has a whole lot of onboard computers to run all kinds of terrific diagnostics for you that that are going to read out in a way that's useful even if you're not an engineer. So, so it's a

So it's a pretty cool engine. And they're they're talking about I mean, okay when they say that it fits in a standard single car garage, where we're talking about a seventy eight inch or two meter tall vehicle with a eight meter twenty six ft wingspan and six m or nineteen ft length. Um, if you want to compare that to say, like a camera. Um, you're you're talking about a little bit taller about half meter inches not

not half a meter one point five ms. I was thinking half a meter shorter, and then words didn't happen. That's significantly shorter, alright. So it's shorter than the camera is shorter than the camera is shorter, but it's it's just about as long like a hundred and eighty nine inches or five meters is what you're talking So on a wingspan on a camera, it's about seventy two inches. Wow, man,

I have been out of the car game for too long. Uh. But yeah, as it turns out, you know, this is this is another one of those propeller based aircraft right right right, it's it's a real propeller and um, and you know it's what's interesting to me is that they're using this single engine to to go back and forth, you know, to to switch back and forth between powering the car and powering the plane. Yeah. Well that's really cool that you've got this one engine that can do

two very different jobs in the same vehicle. The fact that it's turning a propeller and then can switch to this other completely different drive train and control the car, you know, give the car the propulsion it needs to drive around. That's engineering. Feats like that that I think are really really interesting. Even if the vehicle itself is never a success commercially, the fact that that was an

innovation is really cool. Yeah. So the question I have for you, Lauren, is anyone working on like a prototype that the average driver could use to fly around? Not someone who you know has trained as a pilot, but someone who would just maybe a couple of hours, could figure out how to operate this thing. Okay? Well, strangely enough that that same company, Tara Fugia, is working on the t f X, which is a four seat hybrid

flying car. Okay, and and and part part of my problem with this I'm going to say right off, is that this could not qualify as a light sport vehicle. You would need an actual pilot license in order to drive this because it contains a because you can carry

more than two people. Right. Also, from what I understand, has not only propellers, which are used for vertical takeoff and landing, so in other words, they pivot right where they would pivot up, and they the propellers themselves fold in on the pods that they are mounted on, So then the pods would move up to vertical position, the the blades would fold out, they would start to rotate,

you would gain altitude. They would then start tilting forward, so you'd start going forward, and then it switches over to from why I understand horsepower engine that provides thrust. Yeah, that that rotex I was talking about is like a hundred horsepower engine. Yeah, which is a little bit more reasonable. I mean, it's going to take you up to that like hundred and twenty so mile per hour kind of

range that we were talking about earlier. That seems reasonable for your average driver to handle, right, a three horsepower engine for cruising, it says, I guess what it means is that once you get up to a particular speed, this engine would would switch over and you would move

much faster. Now. The proposal, from what I understand, also involves lots of automation, to the point where practically everything would be handled in the air by essentially autopilot, right, you know, to the to the point that if the computer decides that a route that you have chosen is dangerous or that you are flying into undesirable territory that it would declare an emergency to authorities on your behalf right, and it would force you to go and land at

an airport. Yes, so yeah, this thing. But this thing, because it has the VTOL approach, means that theoretically you could take off from any location, not just in airports, right, as long as you've got that level clearing of about a hundred feet, which is right. So it's they are supposedly working on this. They pretty much have this just in constant drawing us. Yeah, they've they've got some shiny

computer animations of it. They said that there would be something like eight or twelve eight to twelve years of testing before this would ever become an actual thing, So we are a good ways out from seeing this if it ever in fact becomes real reality. I think a lot of that's going to depend upon the success or failure of the transition UM. If that ends up being a success, that makes it more likely that they'll be able to do more development on the t FX. I

honestly don't know what to think about this. I I you know, granted, when I was a kid, I wouldn't have been able to imagine a car that could take you door to door without you ever touching the wheel. And yet now we're starting to see cars in the prototype stage at various companies like Google and other and like actual car manufacturing companies too, so we're starting to see that, So maybe it's possible. It's just I think that flying is way more complicated than driving. Yeah, that's

that's the thing. I mean, I really don't think that, you know, all that autonomous car stuff is complicated enough as it stands. We just did a whole episode of Run Forward thinking about it, and so so check that out if you if you want to get a full

breakdown of how difficult this problem really is. Although certainly, yeah, lots of companies are working on it, but I don't, you know, between that and the fact that so many regulations and and laws would have to be in place in order for this to be a reality, And all I would take is maybe one really bad publicity, like like accident, even if no one was hurt, That's all

I would take for it to essentially ground everybody. So uh, yeah, And I don't want to be doom and gloom about it because I think that especially these these drivable planes are a really interesting concept and I really hope that a couple of these companies make some consumer level ones for the next couple of years. Even if you know, two seventy dollars, it's not something that this personal consumer

is ready to drop on anything. Um but but yeah, you know, it's it's that that single engine clever idea is is pretty awesome, and and having something that lightweight that that you're still comfortable driving is is pretty rad I you know, I am skeptical but hopeful. Let me put it that way, like, if it never happens, I won't be surprised. If it does happen, I fully expect that, you know, for it to get cleared, it's going to have to be the best of the best technology out there.

So hopefully we will see this within our lifetimes, in that ten to forty years years. Absolutely, But you know, if we don't, then I'm sure we'll figure out how to get around traffic some other way. And that wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions about topics I should cover in tech Stuff, please let me know. You can reach out via Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h S. W and I'll talk to you again

really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.