Despite the fact that a large swath of society still sucks at driving a standard vehicle on the ground, the world is obsessed with the possibility of flying cars.
And so are we.
We thought we would have to wait a whole year until the first flying car hit the market in 2017. But then Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, went and started himself not one, but two flying car companies. And the first prototype has officially been espied.
One of his companies — Zee.Aero — resides in an airplane hangar near Hollister Airport in California. The covert start-up initially received $100m in funding from Page and is run by Ilan Kroo, a professor currently on leave from Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And earlier this week, Steve Eggleston, a worker from nearby company DK Turbines, captured what appears to be a flying car on his smartphone.
Mind you, this flying car look curiously similar to an airplane that could fit in a garage. But witnesses have reported seeing the plane take off vertically and hover about 25 feet above the ground before landing, which, last time we checked, is not a thing that airplanes do.
The prototype also somewhat matches up with the plans in Zee.Aero’s patent papers. And while it’s no DeLorean, the future looks pretty exciting-slash-dangerous nonetheless.
via Jalopnik
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