ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA: Inventors, since the 1980s, have been promising to turn the flying cars of Back to the Future and The Jetsons into reality.
Companies including Airbus, Toyota, Kitty Hawk, and Hyundai, and a project backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, are still racing to develop the first commercially viable Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles and cash in on an embryonic industry that Morgan Stanley predicts will be worth a trillion dollars by 2040.
To date, not one of these vehicle companies has sold a flying car. Now, a little-known Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft maker from Australia is attempting to crack the issue by adopting the strategy used by several of the world’s earliest carmakers.
World’s first crewed flying car race in the Australian desert
In the coming year, Alauda Aeronautics, based in Adelaide, plans to introduce the world’s first crewed flying car race in the Australian desert: a high-stakes series Airspeeder, billed as the Formula 1 of the skies.
“The reason I think everyone has failed until now is that they have bitten off more than what they can chew,” Matt Pearson, the internet entrepreneur who founded Alauda in 2016, told Al Jazeera.
“They are trying to invent the latest vehicles, get them into production, change the regulatory environment and then start operating passenger services. Just doing one of those things is hard. Trying to do all of them in one step hasn’t proved possible yet.”
Pearson’s mission is inspired by history, especially between 1886, when Daimler Benz invented the first vehicle, and 1925, when Henry Ford brought the cost of a Model-T down to about four months’ wages for the average American employee through mass production using conveyor belts.
“What happened in those years in between?” Pearson said. “Car makers did not focus on ride-sharing. They focused on racing. Rolls Royce, Henry Ford, Marcel Renault, and even Tesla. All of them start in motorsports.”
In the past six yeas, Alauda developed 11 autonomous electric-powered VTOL aircraft, and earlier this year, unveiled its first crewed version, the Mk4.
Powered by a hydrogen-cell electric turbo engine that delivers 1,300 horsepower, the model is billed as the fastest VTOL aircraft ever built, reaching 360 kilometres per hour within 30 seconds.
Starting next year, the Mk4 is set to be used in Airspeeder team races that will be broadcast internationally by Fox Sports Australia. Pearson said “Right now, the Mk4 costs millions of dollars each.”
“But we do not see why eventually they cannot be the same price as a Tesla. The expensive thing is not making them. It’s the engineering.”
The aerospace Sonya Brown, design expert at the University of New South Wales, lauded Alauda’s business model, saying it has merit.
“If we look at Formula One, a lot of technology came from there has found its way into passenger cars,” Brown told Al Jazeera.
“But I wouldn’t say it isn’t better than other strategies like air taxis that are being explored by companies and air ambulances that are interesting to governments. The key is that the issue is being approached differently, showing how much impact this latest technology could have in the future.”
Ride-hailing giant Uber pioneered the air-taxi concept with the launch of Elevate, the joint venture with Bell Helicopters aimed to create a network of flying taxis accessible via smartphone.
“It’s an exciting opportunity,” Mitch Snyder, Bell Helicopter chief executive, said at the time, promising to launch flying taxis in Los Angeles by 2023.
