Flight Future – Your Skycar Is Ready…
Friday, August 07, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Summer in Paris, it’s no picnic this year. Last month’s Paris Air Show was as exciting as yesterday’s croissant; and EasyJet have flattened aeronautic soufflés, scaling down new aircraft acquisition. As President Sarkozy likes to say: “I feel… little… faint…”
Carla arrived at L’Hospital on a motorcycle; it was certainly more chic than an entree with a police car. But what if Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had a ‘Skycar’?
The Skycar, created by Paul Moller, is a real concept car, with forty currently in production. The idea is based on a vertical take-off principle and is designed to facilitate, at greater speed and with less congestion, the 85% of urban journeys we currently do in today’s cars. We won’t see Skycars parked in our driveways for a few years yet, but Moller is preparing an innovation highway which could transform the way we commute.
Sky cars are the fusion of planes and cars. Henry Ford predicted the reality more than sixty years ago, and today we are seeing entry level vehicles priced at around $100,000. The future is no longer an embryo, it has started to hover.
Disappointing aircraft sales at the Paris Air Show disguised the surge in UAV interest – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The technology controlling drones (see last week’s column) is being transformed to integrate with rescue services, mining and other industrial purposes. The same technology will also integrate with sky cars, adding to GPS based auto-piloted systems, guiding and managing sky car flight.
As costs come down, the sky car will be most suited to densely populated urban areas, where highways are congested and new highways cannot be built.
The market opportunity for micro and jumbo aerospace, is emerging and expanding, not least in China. According to data provider, Euromonitor, in China: “The market for outbound tourism is expected to increase substantially. The RMB is expected to appreciate on the US dollar, which will continue to reduce costs for outbound travellers.”
“A greater number of middle income travellers have begun to join outbound tour groups, and those whose monthly family income ranges from RMB5,000 (£445) to RMB30,000 (£2,600) are the main consumer base of short holiday outbound travel not exceeding three days, the most popular destination being border nations or one of the SARs.”
“European destinations are also expected to grow in popularity, due to the widespread Approved Destination Status amongst EU nations. The US also hopes to attract a large segment of the Chinese outbound market.”
It may be that tourists are the first mass market for the new sky cars. Given the choice of hiring a car and driving in a foreign metropolis, or sitting in an automated sky car which will park you at the doorway of your choice, the question is simple: “What would Carla do?”
Aerospace
Flight Future – The Skycar
- Must watch the last five minutes of the presentation
Paul Moller talks about the future of personal air travel—the marriage of autos and flight that will give us true freedom to travel off-road. He shows two things he’s working on: the Moller Skycar (a jet + car) and a passenger-friendly hovering disc. Paul Moller is the president, CEO and chair of Moller International, a company devoted to engineering the combination of automobile and jet known as the Moller Skycar. His company also works on the M200, a low-flying disc, or volantor, that may go into production later in 2009. (As cool as it looks, the M200 has serious applications as a rescue vehicle.) A partner company, Freedom Motors, builds the Rotapower engine
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