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Nigel G Wilcox

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Flying-Cars-Listings-1

History Introduction To Today

MCP

Taylor Aerocar (1949)
One of the best-known flying cars even though it surfaced decades ago, Moulton Taylor (1912-1995) hoped to put his Aerocar into full-scale production. It came pretty close too, with five airworthy examples produced before the project fell apart.

Aeromobil

Aeromobil (2020)
By far the sexiest design out there, the Aeromobil looks futuristic and attainable at the same time. This Slovakian company reckons it’ll have the first example of its car with customers by 2020, priced from around €1.2m (£1.1 million). That might sound like a lot of money, but it’s no more than a top-end hypercar nowadays – and while those might be very fast, none of them can fly.

Capable of switching between road and sky modes in less than three minutes, Aeromobil’s plan is to build 500 examples of its flying car, each one powered by a turbocharged 2.0-litre flat-four petrol engine. This acts as a generator for two electric motors that produce 110bhp to drive the front wheels when driving, but in flight mode the engine develops 300bhp to give a 162mph cruising speed.

Terrafugia TFX (2025)
You can't accuse Terrafugia of failing to think big. Before it has a viable product rolling off its production lines it's already thinking of what to sell from 2025, which will be here before we know it. This is the answer – the TF-X, which looks fabulous in plane form and pretty neat when being used as road transport.

A petrol/electric hybrid with 300bhp on tap, the TF-X is intended to be fully autonomous with a 500-mile range at 200mph. As if the technical hurdles aren't enough, the legislative ones will be even bigger; the idea is that whoever buys a TF-X won't need a pilot's licence as they'll just punch in a destination and then be flown there by their Terrafugia.

Airbus Pop.Up
One idea that might reach fruition one day, but won’t happen any time soon, is the Airbus Pop.Up, designed in conjunction with Italdesign. It’s wonderfully neat as it features a carbon fibre pod which can be clipped onto a wheeled chassis or underneath a giant quadcopter.

Italdesign

Terrafugia

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