Expensive Flying Car Unveiled At Auto Show

It’s an amazing piece of hardware, but it comes with a large number of questions – would anyone be able to afford it, would it be considered street legal – and will it fly in the marketplace, both literally and figuratively?

It’s the long cherished sci-fi concept of the flying car and it went on display at the New York Auto Show this week. It was pointedly on the ground and not in the air during its great unveiling, and no one has actually seen it reach the heights. But its creator believes it has a future and that its potential is, well, sky high.

The so-called AirCar is the long cherished dream of inventor James Milner, whose Milner Motors has been working on the idea for nearly three years. The car is a 4-door model that holds up to 4 passengers, can go up to 140 kilometres an hour on the road, has a rotary engine, is powered by an electric battery and gas, and can take off from a runway and soar above the traffic.

Milner doesn’t expect the skies to be crowded with his gadget, but thinks it will have a practical application and could actually be of use. “For trips up to one thousand miles, a flying car is the fastest door-to-door transportation,” he relates.

Still, it’s not an all-in-one solution. The creator admits to get the car off the ground, you need to drive to an airport, because it needs runway room to take off and land. “You extend the wings, and you can take off and fly. The airplane will fly at two hundred miles an hour (about 320 km/h) eventually up to 25,000 feet so you get above a good amount of the weather.”

When it lands, you simply fold up the wings and switch the steering to “road mode”, a change that converts your controls from an instrument panel to a dashboard, and adjusts the weight of the vehicle so it will be more evenly distributed.

So how much will you pay for this miracle of modern technology? A lot. The car is expected to sell for $500,000 – not counting your insurance. For that price, you could buy a Cessna 172 and a Bentley Continental – and still have money left over for gas.

Most doubt you’ll be seeing the flying wonder soaring overhead anytime soon. “People want cars that get better gas mileage or use no gas at all,” points out Brian Moody, road test editor at the car research firm Edmunds.com “The way things are litigious today, where would you fly and land it?”

And forget about parking – even with folded wings, the car measures 7 feet in width.

So will this thing ever get off the ground? Milner’s working on it, but agrees it will be at least another three years before it’s ready to take off.

If it ever does.

Find out more about the car here.

Photo courtesy Milner Motors