The most surprising thing about a flying car racing company scheduled to launch in 2020 isn’t the concept itself. No, the most surprising thing about the series is that it won’t be taking place in Dubai.
Instead of the deserts of the Middle East, a startup called Alauda is planning to host the Airspeeder World Championship over the deserts of Australia. As the name suggests, the world’s first flying car race will feature prototypes of a race-engineered quadcopter called the Alauda Mark 1 Airspeeder.
Modeled after 1960’s Formula Vee car, the MK1 is powered by a quartet of 50-megawatt electric motors that draw juice from an innovative battery system offering 10 minutes of flight time. While the 10-minute limit might not be that impressive, the MK1’s 150 MPH top speed and 2.2-mile maximum altitude certainly are.
“It’s just time the world had flying cars,” Alauda CEO Matt Pearson says in a Kickstarter video. “Racing will push the technology like nothing else. It’s not enough to build the speeder: we have to build the sport. We want to bring the excitement and values of Formula 1 to the sky.”
As for that Kickstarter campaign, it isn’t offering the opportunity to purchase an MK1. However, if you’d like to live-stream the racer’s first test race next year, that is an option.
We’ll be watching, assuming Alauda’s crowdfunding campaign takes off, of course.
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