Here is the (almost) flying car !

“A flying car has been licensed in the European Union,” the press reported in 2020. On closer inspection, however, these headlines are quite click-hunting, since, while the sentence is undoubtedly true, we still need to add a sizeable “star” comment. For the time being, the Dutch company Pal-V’s Liberty vehicle has only been given the green light for road transport. Of course, this will sooner or later become the reality of the concept of cars rising into the air – the question is only when.

Nothing proves that in this rather futuristic world, which also inspires many sci-fi film directors, is still going pretty slowly today, there is nothing more proof that the company in question had already come up with the first prototype of the flying car in 2012. So it took 8-9 years of work to get a road license plate, and it’s easy to see that the biggest hurdle facing such projects is yet to come: the “take-off permit” is a much tougher nut to crack. In addition to complying with legal requirements, of course, the engineers also had to meet no less complex technical challenges. They seemed to have succeeded, as the Liberty, equipped with a 200-horsepower engine and a sizeable top-of-the-line rotor, were tested to have just a 330-meter runway to take off. The 664 kg “hybrid” structure is capable of a top speed of 180 km / h on the ground, but what is perhaps more interesting is that approx. Thanks to its 100-liter tank, it can fill up to 500 km in the air with 1 person on board.

There will be countless additional test flights ahead of PAL-V experts, while all the details that allow Liberty to gain entry into aviation are clarified. The company’s officials consider this to be conceivable as early as 2022, which, of course, is considered by many to be more than an optimistic approach. In Japan, for example, at the forefront of innovation, a date of 2023 is now floating in the eyes of developers, but it is also more of a theoretical earliest date for the launch of air taxi services. All in all, these plans should not be tackled with a single glance, as we start with the amount of money that world-renowned companies invest in research on flying cars (Audi with Airbus, Porsche with Boeing, Toyota with Panasonic). working together in such a field), we can be sure that sooner rather than later, such vehicles will actually help to relieve the increasingly congested roads of big cities.