The world’s first road legal flying car!
I’ve been watching Parajet’s Skycar development since January ’09 when I heard about what the flying car they had developed and their planned expedition to fly from London to Tombouctou, on Chris Evans’ BBC Radio 2 Show Podcast. Back then they were testing it out and preparing for the expedition.
It was mentioned on the show, a few key things that immediately caught my undivided attention:
- To fly it you only needed a Paragliding licence
- The car would be fully roadworthy to drive around town
- It takes about 3 minutes to self launch the Parafoil wing
- Runs on standard fuel (prototype ran on biofuel)
- And the key thing – they were planning to make these cars and sell them at a low price of ?50,000 (British pounds)
?50,000 for a car you can drive around and fly and without a full private pilot’s licence (PPL)? Wow!
I followed the expedition on their website as they travelled the 9000km in the car which was fantastic.
All fell silent for a while – I guess as they were in development of the production version. Well 18 months later, I see they have a new website and are taking deposits for the first 50 SkyCars right now, at yep – ?50,000. A ?10,000 deposit will secure you one the of the first to roll off the production line (or workshop) planned for delivery late 2010. If I wasn’t renovating my house right now, and I had a bit more money to spare, I’d be signing up for sure! Mind you, for double that price you can go into space with Virgin Galactic… but that’s only for a few minutes – this will give you years of fun.
This is an amazing piece of engineering, in some ways simple but very effective idea, and with an affordable price (for some).
Just fantastic.
There’s no need for me to give you more detail here as I’d be just be copying what you can see on their website, but I will point you at the Wikipedia page which also references some of the history and other good news links from last year’s expedition. The pictures above are taken direct from their website – I hope they don’t mind.
