If you grew up in the ’90s, chances are you thought that by the time you were an adult, there’d be flying cars. Hey, that’s the future The Jetsons sold us! It’s been a long time coming, sure, but a flying car has finally been developed in Japan and it recently took off with an actual person onboard. Hurrah!
- It’s made by a company called SkyDrive. There are plenty of companies working on flying cars at the moment, but Japan-based SkyDrive is the first one to actually get their vehicle in the air. It gets you pretty excited for technological advancements, don’t you think?
- Admittedly, it wasn’t in the air very long… In a video released by the company, the flying car only actually flies for a few short minutes. The vehicle, which has several propellers on it, is lifted off the ground and hovers in place before coming back down. At the moment, the vehicle is only able to stay in the air for between five and 10 minutes, but hey, it’s a start! They’re hoping to increase it to 30 minutes soon!
- Safety is still a concern, of course. Tomohiro Fukuzawa, CEO of SkyDrive, is happy that the vehicle’s development seems to be on the up and up, but he’s also worried about the potential safety risks of having a flying car in operation. “Of the world’s more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board,” he said. “I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe.”
- Flying cars will never be able to replace airplanes. While it’s possible that these vehicles in Japan and elsewhere could get people from place to place over a small area, they’ll never be capable of long haul flights. The batteries are way too small, for one thing!
- There are a lot of challenges for flying cars. For instance, how would flying cars navigate the air safely? Who would regulate the traffic? How would people even afford to buy one considering the technology to make them is probably exorbitantly expensive? “If they cost 10 million dollars, no-one is going to buy them,” said Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute professor Sanjiv Singh explained. “If they fly for five minutes, no-one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no-one is going to buy them.” We’ll see what happens!
