The World’s First Flying Car Will Launch In 2017

This is by far the coolest thing we've seen at SWSW‬ Interactive this year.

Peter Thiel, the outspoken Silicon Valley venture capitalist once famously said,

 “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Well, now we’re about to finally get flying cars!

A Slovakia-based company called AeroMobil just unveiled their flying car prototype at SXSW Interactive. It gets up to 700 km of flight on a tank of regular gasoline. It’s scheduled to go on sale in 2017 and it will be aimed at a wealthy clientele of early adopters (you will need a pilot’s license to “fly” it).

Autonomous self-flying cars will be the next step. Just imagine a flying car service like Uber!

Here’s a good promotional video the company has created for its Flying Car prototype:

Specs

General characteristics

• Crew: two
• Capacity: two passengers
• Length: 6 m (19 ft 8 in)
• Wingspan: 8.32 m (27 ft 4 in) wings extended
• Width: 2.24 m (7 ft 4 in) wings folded
• Empty weight: 600 kg (1,323 lb)
• Powerplant: 1 × Rotax 912 four cylinder horizontally-opposed liquid and air-cooled piston aircraft engine, 75 kW (100 hp)

Performance

• Maximum speed: 200 km/h (124 mph; 108 kn) maximum road speed: 160 km/h (99 mph)
• Stall speed: 60 km/h (37 mph; 32 kn)
• Range: 700 km (435 mi; 378 nmi) Road range: 875 km (544 mi)
• Driving fuel consumption: 8 l/100 km (29.4 mpg_-US; 35.3 mpg_-imp)
• Flight fuel consumption: 15 l (4.0 US gal; 3.3 imp gal) /hour