Another (More Promising) Flying Car
Posted by rbpasker on October 11, 2007
Read about the TerraFugia and visit their site.
This is an FAA-certificated Light Sport Aircraft (LSA), which means it probably has a chance!
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October 11, 2007 at 7:50 am
I saw this on /. yesterday and checked it out. Maybe it has a chance, but boy are they a long way from getting there. That said, it would be pretty sweet to have one of these things - you don’t have to stress too much about getting stuck in fog, you can get around when you get to your destination, you can store your airplane in your garage. If they can really make it for $150K, they’ll sell a ton of them, I think. Also, this is not so much a flying car as it is an airplane that can drive on the roads. With all the fences around airports these days, if they ever do get this into production, it’s actually going to be pretty hard to drive it onto the tarmac in a lot of places.
October 19, 2007 at 11:09 am
I met Carl Deitrich, the driving force behind TerraFugia, last year at MIT. Chris, you’d be a lot more convinced of the likelihood of success after a conversation with him. He’s got that great combination of total focus, scientific brilliance, and commercial savvy that I’ve seen in many already-successful entrepreneurs.
As for the airport problem, when this is in production, you’ll probably see more private airstrips popping up. (There are already more than 550 private airparks - shared strips - in the US.) Carl’s estimate for the length of needed runway was so short that it will be quite manageable.