The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, worth $30,000, was awarded to Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Carl Dietrich for his design for a flying car dubbed the Transition. Carl took the prize money and sank it into his startup venture called Terrafugia, Inc. with the intention of commercializing the Transition Personal Air Vehicle by 2009. The $148,000 Transition will fly 2 people up to 500 miles and then allow them to drive home from the airport, provided they fold up the wings.
The MIT flying car enters a near-monopsony that paradoxically has many competitors – fansite Roadabletimes, lists 80 attempts at variations on the flying-car theme over the years, of which 39 are on-going, including our current fav, the Moller Skycar.
The idea of the flying car has an almost irresistible attraction for gadget enthusiasts, as well as to Freudian psychoanalysts. Flying-car yea-sayers include the outrageously optimistic Paul Moller, who is quoted as saying that 25% of us will be using flying cars within 10 years, with that number rising to 90% within 25 years. The dissenting viewpoint is nicely captured in the article Bad Ideas Never Die, which decries device convergence in general, and skewers flying and amphibious cars in particular.
The only flying car ever to beat the odds and have been certified as airworthy and deemed roadworthy was the Taylor Aerocar circa the 1950′s, but it did not sell well. Carl might have been better off putting his MIT monies into CSCO or JDSU or gold or silver or commodities or almost anything other than general aviation.
Terrafugia – company website
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A popular flying car definitely seems like a Holy Grail for inventors. A lot of people have been waiting for one for a long time.
Is the infrastructure even in place to support flying cars on a wide scale?
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