The waisted fuselage and empennage – the rear section that houses an aircraft’s stabilising surfaces – culminates in the mounting for the propeller, but does such a convincing job of looking like a jet turbine that more than one person has asked the team if they’ve thought about doing exactly that. In fact, it gets less car-like the further your eye travels along it and more intriguing. Car designers, in their more fanciful moments, tend to describe the body-side as a fuselage the AeroMobil genuinely has one, and it’s beautifully sculpted. Serious credit must go to designer Adam Danko. True, its form and surfacing posits a third way somewhere between car and plane without looking like either, but if you picture a McLaren flying car you wouldn’t be far off. “We’ve maxed out on the use of carbon-fibre composites to achieve the weight targets we’d set ourselves,” MacAndrew says. Like all aircraft, the AeroMobil is ruthlessly weight-optimised: its maximum take-off weight is 960kg (720kg without occupants or fuel) get up close to it, and it’s clear that it isn’t just plausible, it’s convincingly engineered and expertly executed. “The next phase is to build a validation prototype.” “V3.0 has racked up 50 flying hours, and we’ve done many thousands of flying hours on the simulator, so we know what v4.0 can do,” Doug says. Finally, modern avionics are now vastly lighter and easier to package.
Vw hover car 2017 software#
Design software and CFD (computational fluid dynamics) mean that the tools now exist to prove the physics virtually in a way that a start-up could never have imagined previously. Primarily, the tech now exists to merge what are two wholly different if not incompatible sets of requirements, in engineering the thing so that it actually works, but also in navigating the labyrinthine legislative framework – both in automotive and aerospace. But he agrees that a number of factors are converging to turn the mirage that is the flying car into a reality. But I couldn’t find it.”Ī decade or two ago, he probably would have. I figured there had to be a reason why no one had ever done a flying car, why it just couldn’t happen. “I looked at v3.0, and was searching for the smoking gun. “Antony said, ‘You really need to check these guys out,’” he tells me. Doug began his career working on the original Discovery, and developed the new Mini, before moving to Woking. McLaren’s ex-boss tipped off a former colleague, Doug MacAndrew. “Finally he said, ‘OK, I’m in.’ His involvement has made a huge difference, as we move the project towards the production phase.” When he arrived, he spent 20 minutes examining every element of the car,” Juraj recalls. “He told me he flew to Vienna not knowing what to expect. Having presided over the development of the SLR and the creation of McLaren as a standalone carmaker, Sheriff is a man with a finely honed bullshit detector. Sheriff is now chairman of Princess Yachts, but you might remember him as a former VP of Fiat and MD of McLaren Automotive. But when a consultant called Glenn Mercer, McKinsey & Company’s former head of automotive practice, told him he was really on to something, and introduced him to a guy called Antony Sheriff, the path to v4.0 was set.
He approached more investors and industry OEMs than he’s ready to admit, and faced down a lot of rejection. How credible can a bunch of Slovaks in a big garage building a flying car really be?” We got a great response, but of course plenty of people still looked at what we were doing as a… curiosity. “We presented v3.0 in Vienna,” Juraj says, “which was personally very emotional for me. Ten months later, v3.0 appeared, the work of 12 people, deepening the proof of concept, and developing the company’s IP to an extent that AeroMobil now found itself registering multiple patents and on the radar of heavyweights like NASA and Boeing. It looks a bit shonky now, but at a global aviation gathering in Montreal, the industry acknowledged that there was more than just pie in the sky going on here. By the time an old school friend called Stefan Klein started selling him on his vision for a flying car, Juraj had prospered in the advertising industry and was supporting start-ups in Slovakia.ĪeroMobil was founded in 2010, and the first prototype, v2.5, appeared in 2013. Costs are lower in eastern Europe while still guaranteeing access to the EU, but there’s also massive expertise here. AeroMobil’s HQ is an impressively polished facility on the outskirts of Bratislava, a region that currently produces more cars per capita than anywhere else in the world, home to huge PSA and VW manufacturing facilities, and soon a shiny new £1bn JLR factory. Slovakia is not Silicon Valley, but don’t be too hasty about making judgements.
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