I think it would be more apt to call this a driveable compact plane. It clearly looks a lot more like a plane than it does a car, it just happens to be compact with folding wings and four wheels on the base.
I,too, wonder how one gets off calling this a car. You even have to launch it from an airport.
That old joke about "where are the flying cars? Have you ever heard of airplanes" misses the essential dream: To go into your garage, hop in your car and lift off and go wherever. That's the flying car. Sadly, unless we make some strides in the direction of gravitational manipulation or fusion drives, I'm not sure that'll ever be a reality.
I do agree that that's the true vision of the flying car, but I think there's still room for something that is more car-like than the vehicle in the article. Something that functions more or less like a car for short trips but could replace freeway travel with air travel. And which requires considerably less training/certification than an aircraft.
Still not an easy problem. Closest is probably the doomed Moller Skycar. Once we have self-driving land-based cars (and widespread mainstream acceptance of them), a lot will open up since we could relieve the burden of human control.
I don't see how a flying car makes any sense. Instead of accidents on the ground (which are fatal enough), now you'll have them falling out of the sky.
Granted, I was just in an accident a few weeks ago, and it dramatically changed my view on driving altogether. Crashes aren't just something that happens "to someone else". People are very irresponsible, reckless, and impatient when it comes to moving vehicles.
That's why you need advanced auto-pilot before this is feasible. And bear in mind that there's a lot more room for collision avoidance in the air. You'd probably have to have something like special lanes in the air to minimize the number of directions that another vehicle could approach, and to keep them out of the commercial airspace. You'd need a special license to go "off-road".
Making an airplane easy enough to fly that most people could conceivably pilot one, with a similar amount of training as currently required to learn to drive, is the interesting and important thing here. It also happens to be something that this airplane does nothing to address.
Once you have an airplane that's as easy to fly as a car is to drive, you can do all of what you're talking about, and there's no reason to combine it with something that can drive it on a highway. It's not that big of a hassle to switch vehicles at the airport.
Are they actually making this airplane easier to fly? As far as I can tell, it will have the same flight controls as any other small single-engine plane. More degrees of freedom in the air means more to do to keep the plane going where you want.
As far as licensing, you still need (in the US) to get a Light Sport certificate, which is most certainly a higher bar than a drivers license.
I agree that the Light Sport standards lower the bar for pilot and airplane certification, and that the result is great for general aviation. But lets not pretend that this airplane plays a big role there.
As I said in the previous message, "It also happens to be something that this airplane does nothing to address."
In short, the one thing about the "flying car" concept that's interesting in the real world is making the things easier to fly. This "flying car" misses that one thing.
I assumed driving meant moving on land with a (most likely) combustion-powered platform that was connected to the land with wheels.
No wheels and no ground contact sounds like hovering to me.
For what it's worth, you can beat the TSA for under $30k - a used Cessna 150 can be had for around that price. The cost of a rental car at your destination will take quite a while to add up to the other $270k.
It looks a little fragile to perform well as a car. I imagine a significant pot hole might be enough to damage the skin. I understand the need to be light and aerodynamic so that it is flight-worthy, but this looks more like a toy then a real solution. It reminds me of those cars that can also perform as a boat -- they do neither well, their remarkable feature is that they do both.
Light aircraft get into accidents and are repaired and returned to airworthiness with some frequency. This isn't a mysterious unknown. Getting it fixed is going to be way more expensive than patching up a regular car, though.
This sounds cool but I'm not familiar with it. Why is it called a "flying car"? Is it the price point - is $279K significantly cheaper than most private airplanes? Or is there something in the construction that makes it more "carlike" than most private airplanes?
And this is if you buy new. There's a huge market for used light aircraft out there, as they last for decades. You can buy a nice light airplane for less than 1/3rd of what these guys are charging, and something one could consider entirely decent for less than 1/5th.
I can understand that, but I think the two markets are different enough to be worth pointing out. People who buy used cars are often buying something a few years old. By the time a car is ten years old, it's being traded around for a tiny fraction of its original cost, and maybe even headed off to be junked/recycled. Maintenance costs are starting to skyrocket, and because of all that, people tend to trade up frequently.
A used airplane is probably decades old. It's probably selling for a similar price to what it originally went for when it was new. Maintenance costs are high, but they were high when the thing was new, so that's not particularly remarkable.
I'd wager that the majority of light aircraft flying in the US today would qualify for "antique" license plates if they were cars. It's a substantially different market, where the equipment lasts longer and buying used is much more common.
"Roadable airplane" doesn't get the web traffic "flying car" does.
If you just want an airplane, you can get a lot more airplane for $279k. You can get a nice new Cessna 162 for $150k.
I'm not sure what the benefit of the concept is. You're only ever going to drive it from your house to the airport and back. A routine traffic accident will be very expensive and will attract unwanted attention and paperwork from the FAA and NTSB.
If you buy a regular plane you can leave it at the airport for very reasonable tie down or hangar fees, and know it's going to be safe and well cared for.
edit: Anticipating an objection, one could posit this is good for commuters. There is actually a segment of the general aviation population that fly themselves to a job in another city and back every day. You could use a roadable aircraft to drive to the office.
I'd say it's cheaper and better to buy a car and pay to keep it parked at the airport.
Still looking for any practical advantage. If anyone thinks of one I'd love to hear it.
Just thought of another possible objection: "But you don't have to get out, you can just drive into the airport and take off"... no, you can't. You're getting out of that plane to do your preflight checks or you have a death wish.
I think the biggest motivation for me would be to be able fly to someplace, maybe a small airfield, and not have to worry about making arrangements for a rental car or find someone to pick me up.
I doubt this is the final answer, but it's a good start.
Knowing nothing about aviation, I find air planes with one engine very scary. Even when I am not traveling in it, since I don't want one to fall on me either. So I am glad we probably won't see millions of these "flying cars" being sold. If I imagine to have one of these fall off the sky as often as I see broken down cars on the side of the freeway...
A lot of US interstates have a speed limit of 80; in that case it's only marginally faster speed-wise. But, going between two points on a straight line helps too. I'm more amused, though, that it's less efficient when the wheels aren't touching the ground. I guess I always just assumed that air travel was more efficient than a vehicle that touches the ground, creating lots of relative drag.
You travel a [generally] significantly shorter distance when flying, and at a notably higher rate of speed (though normal cruise speed will likely be lower than max rated)
So a drop in mpg is completely understandable
Also, there is a lot more causing drag (the wings at least) when it is flying vs when it is on the ground
Also, planes need to continually lift your weight against gravity. There is vertical force that needs to be produced in addition to the normal horizontal travel.
I thought the principal of lift means the aircraft is sort of resting on the air (in a manner of speaking) and doesn't need to produce vertical force. Much like a boat doesn't need to produce vertical force to stay above the water.
I may be completely wrong, the concept of lift never made sense to me. It always seemed like free energy.
Wings can only produce lift when they are at a certain angle to the direction of travel; this is called the "angle of attack". Meaning, aircraft expend a certain amount of energy deflecting air downward to stay airborne.
Sort of. (And caveat: I'm a software guy, I just happen to love airplanes.)
Airplanes generate only forward thrust (unless you're in a VTOL craft which we won't talk about). This forward force is what ends up generating lift due mainly to two particular, but separate, applications of physics.
First, wings take advantage of what is called Bernoulli's principle. Picture a wing: it is longer on top than it is on bottom due to the "chamber" of the wing. I.e., the asymmetric difference in the shape of the top and bottom of the wing. This causes the air that flows over the wing on top to be at a different speed than the air on bottom, since the air on top gets compressed. (Remember that in a river, if the river narrows, the current speeds up because you still have a stable amount of water to get downstream. If the volume status the same, higher pressure = higher speed, roughly.)
So, by Bernoulli's principle, the slower air on bottom has more potential energy than the air on top -- and that results in more outward pressure by the air, i.e., it pushes up on the wing harder than the air on top pushes down (which has more kinetic energy and less potential, due to the higher speed). Because the wing is not creating energy, the air is merely converting to and from kinetic/potential.
However, that's not the entire story of lift!
Wings are also angled, with their trailing edge down as compared to the leading edge. This angle is defined as the "angle of attack". Think about it like this: when you stick your hand out of the window of your car while driving down the freeway at high speed, you can tilt your hand up and "take off". The wind hitting your hand pushes it up because of the angle. This seems kind of straightforward, right?
If you continue tilting your hand closer and closer to the vertical, at some point it falls back down. You have "stalled" and are no longer generating enough lift to fly. Airplanes do the same thing, so they have to balance the lift they generate with the other factors.
Airplanes fly mainly through the combination of these two things: lift generated by the relative difference in airspeed above and below the wing, plus lift generated by the angle of attack.
I hope that is explanatory, and if I'm wrong on anything, someone else will come correct me!
Your picture of how lift works is fairly off base.
The speed difference being due to asymmetry is wrong. Symmetric wings still generate lift by having air flow over the top faster than the bottom. Symmetric wings flying upside down also still generate lift that way. Asymmetry helps, but is not necessary.
The important thing to understand about aerodynamic lift, and that few people do understand, is that the Bernoulli's principle action and the air deflection action are the same thing. They are not two different mechanisms which act in concert. They are two different ways of looking at a single phenomenon.
If you deflect air downwards, you will generate a speed and pressure differential between the top and bottom of your wing. The pressure differential will produce an upward force on the wing that is precisely equal to the downward force on the air. Likewise, if you generate a pressure differential between the top and bottom of the wing, you will deflect air downwards. They're two different results of the same action.
To truly understand why wings generate lift (which is the same thing as why wings generate a faster airflow over the top than the bottom, or why wings generate a lower pressure on top than on the bottom, or why wings deflect air downwards), you need to understand the Kutta condition.
A wing moving through air has two stagnation points, which where the airflow splits. There's a stagnation point at the front of the wing. Any air above that point goes over the top, and any air below that point goes underneath. At the back of the wing, the stagnation point is the point where the air from the top and bottom meet again.
The location of the front stagnation point depends on the angle of attack. If the wing is flat, the front stagnation point will be right at the leading edge. As you tilt the wing upwards, the front stagnation point moves toward the underside of the wing.
The Kutta condition says, in short, that air won't go around a sharp corner. Thus, the rear stagnation point is always at the trailing edge of the wing. This is why wings are shaped like a teardrop, and that sharp edge at the back keeps the rear stagnation point from moving around.
With the front stagnation point mobile, and the rear stagnation point fixed, you have an asymmetry that causes circulation. This is a rotational component to the airflow around the wing which causes air to flow over the top faster than the bottom, such that the stagnation point is at the trailing edge. This circulation causes the air to be deflected downward, and causes lift.
In summary, wings generate lift by deflecting air downwards, which is equivalent to saying they generate a pressure difference between top and bottom, which is equivalent to saying they generate a speed difference between top and bottom. Wings accomplish this by having a sharp trailing edge, which causes circulation that deflects the air. Wings are shaped the way they are not because the asymmetry is necessary to generate lift, but merely because it's more efficient that way, by changing where the front stagnation point occurs, or by generating less turbulence in the air.
Those are two different things. Boats float because of buoyancy. As long as the volume of the water that the boat's mass will displace is less than the boat's total volume, it will float.
Lift, on the other hand, requires forward motion through the fluid and produces a downward force. A floating boat will rise even higher in the water as it begins to move because its hull produces lift. An airplane is not buoyant (well, technically it is, but not for any practical purpose), so it requires forward motion in order to stay airborne.
Lift is anything but free energy. Remove the airplane's energy source and it won't be in the air for long!
Well, the free energy thing. The 747 weighs something like 735,000 lb.s but it's four engines only produce around 200,000 lb.s of thrust (if I'm reading wikipedia right)
So the plane doesn't have enough power to counter-act its weight. There's something about the air that's actually supporting the plane. And no one knows what it is yet.
Of course we know what it is. It's LIFT. The engines only have to be able to overcome the drag caused by the lift in order to fly the plane. In reality they are far more powerful than needed, so they can accelerate it to very high speed.
Forget the plane, let's look at something a bit simpler that's basically the same principle.
I have a driveway that's maybe 10 feet high from end to end. At max thrust, my legs can (or used to be able to) lift around 350lbs straight up. But yet I can push a 500lb+ machine up the driveway without much trouble. Does that mean I'm producing free energy?
Hrm... This seems a little like the worst of both worlds. It's horrible as a car (in the sense of something you'd drive to work everyday), and for the money it's not the most cost effective airplane either.
Many people seem to think "flying car" == "I can just launch and avoid all the rush hour traffic, and then land in my driveway". The reality of course is far different, you have to drive this to/from an airport.
I'm curious what problem this is intended to solve.
The plane's need for a runway makes this impractical (unless you start tacking extra lanes on interstates), but for VTOL "cars" it'd make sense to build smaller-scale landing pads that feed into highway on-ramps.
> "This seems a little like the worst of both worlds."
We (staff of the Museum of Flight) said the same thing about Moulton Taylor's Aerocar [0]. It doesn't do either thing very well, and that's a big reason there hasn't been a hugely successful product in the space yet.
That said, it does solve a specific problem: it cuts significant time off for those who regularly make trips in the hundreds of miles, particularly between semi-remote locations.
Imagine you lived in central Kansas, and had radio transmitters, oil fields, or clients spread all across the state. You could fly from small airport to small airport [1] in considerably less time than it would take to drive, and then have a car available to drive out to your destination.
One of the advantages this variant has over other past attempts is that it's classified under the (new) "Light Sport Aircraft" category [2]. It's much easier to get a LSA license than a normal pilots license, among other things.
The "Light Sport Aircraft" designation might very well be a big deal. I'm hoping that this is just the first of many light sport aircraft that make flying more practical for more people.
> "You'd have to be doing a LOT of that sort of travel"
Of course. Most aircraft are significant investments; you don't drop that kind of money unless you've got really good reason.
That said, if you're one of the few for whom this particular use case is relevant, I can't think of a viable substitute. If you try to use a traditional aircraft, you're left needing ground transportation at various remote sites that may not have taxis. If you drive from site to site, you might end up spending an extra 3-5 hours on the road every day. So if you're running a high-revenue business that requires a high amount of travel, this (or some other flying car) might be a game-changer.
> "do you still have the B-17 out front?"
I stopped working there when my son was born, and left the state a year and a half ago. This is the first I've heard of the B-17 being out of its hangar, but apparently it's open for summer tours:
I seriously don't understand the appeal of this. For the money they're charging, you could buy a great normal plane, a great normal car to use to drive to the airport, another great normal car to keep at the other airport you use most often, and have enough money left over to rent cars at other airports you visit for the rest of your life.
That is the price now. Competition and mass production will drive that down (if not for this particular manufacturer / model, for others in the same category).
People still have to buy it now for that to happen, so wondering about the appeal is still completely pertinent. Also, when was the last time an airplane, or even a general type of airplane, started out expensive and then got cheaper as time went on?
Competition and mass production hasn't brought the price of any Part 23 (not kit) plane below 6 figures.
There's less variety of engines than airplanes, so the engines are produced in greater volume, but even after years of mass production their prices are still high - a new 150-200 HP engine will set you back more than a nice luxury sedan.
Think about it. First off, look at the price of a Cirrus. Not much (if any) cheaper, although it's a fully certified plane (not a light-sport).
This plane offers several important advantages. First, no hangar fees. You land and drive home.
It runs on AUTOMOTIVE GAS. This is a huge advantage.
Finally: weather avoidance. If the weather turns bad, you land and continue your trip on the ground. When it clears up, you go to the nearest airport and take to the air again. This is probably the greatest thing about a roadworthy plane.
The critical part of all this is SAVING OUR AIRPORTS. We have been robbed of thousands of airports over the last few decades by corruption, greed, and stupidity. It goes all the way up from the people who move next door to an airport and then start bitching about it (ahem Santa Monica) to the politicians who pander to them while taking handouts from developers; to those developers who goad all of them on so they can move in for the land grab.
Stand up for your local airport. They are an irreplaceable part of our national transportation infrastructure. Without them, advances like the Terrafugia and electric planes will die because there will be no market.
Take a flying lesson! That's a unique opportunity that the rest of the world has squandered. Just ask Europe, where user fees have essentially destroyed general aviation. And the Obama administration has been trying to do the same thing here year after year after year.
This is more for pilots who want a more mobile aircraft than normal folk who want a car that flies.
Owning a Cessna means you have to pay for a tiedown or a hangar at an airport. With this, you can hangar it in your garage. The added expense doesn't really make sense, but it certainly makes it more convenient.
The same with premium laptops, people like myself don't mind paying an extra $1000 for a MacBook knowing its an easier, smoother experience. Likewise, a wealthy pilot might prefer this to a Cessna because it makes things simpler.
64 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 93.8 ms ] threadThat old joke about "where are the flying cars? Have you ever heard of airplanes" misses the essential dream: To go into your garage, hop in your car and lift off and go wherever. That's the flying car. Sadly, unless we make some strides in the direction of gravitational manipulation or fusion drives, I'm not sure that'll ever be a reality.
Still not an easy problem. Closest is probably the doomed Moller Skycar. Once we have self-driving land-based cars (and widespread mainstream acceptance of them), a lot will open up since we could relieve the burden of human control.
Granted, I was just in an accident a few weeks ago, and it dramatically changed my view on driving altogether. Crashes aren't just something that happens "to someone else". People are very irresponsible, reckless, and impatient when it comes to moving vehicles.
Once you have an airplane that's as easy to fly as a car is to drive, you can do all of what you're talking about, and there's no reason to combine it with something that can drive it on a highway. It's not that big of a hassle to switch vehicles at the airport.
As far as licensing, you still need (in the US) to get a Light Sport certificate, which is most certainly a higher bar than a drivers license.
I agree that the Light Sport standards lower the bar for pilot and airplane certification, and that the result is great for general aviation. But lets not pretend that this airplane plays a big role there.
In short, the one thing about the "flying car" concept that's interesting in the real world is making the things easier to fly. This "flying car" misses that one thing.
It looks a little fragile to perform well as a car. I imagine a significant pot hole might be enough to damage the skin. I understand the need to be light and aerodynamic so that it is flight-worthy, but this looks more like a toy then a real solution. It reminds me of those cars that can also perform as a boat -- they do neither well, their remarkable feature is that they do both.
1: http://www.terrafugia.com/images/photogallery/March10_2012%2...
2: http://www.terrafugia.com/images/photogallery/LeavingGarageW...
No, it's not. You can buy lower-end models of Cessna and Cirrus at similar price... and Cessna Skycatcher costs only half of that ($149,900).
A used airplane is probably decades old. It's probably selling for a similar price to what it originally went for when it was new. Maintenance costs are high, but they were high when the thing was new, so that's not particularly remarkable.
I'd wager that the majority of light aircraft flying in the US today would qualify for "antique" license plates if they were cars. It's a substantially different market, where the equipment lasts longer and buying used is much more common.
If you just want an airplane, you can get a lot more airplane for $279k. You can get a nice new Cessna 162 for $150k.
I'm not sure what the benefit of the concept is. You're only ever going to drive it from your house to the airport and back. A routine traffic accident will be very expensive and will attract unwanted attention and paperwork from the FAA and NTSB.
If you buy a regular plane you can leave it at the airport for very reasonable tie down or hangar fees, and know it's going to be safe and well cared for.
edit: Anticipating an objection, one could posit this is good for commuters. There is actually a segment of the general aviation population that fly themselves to a job in another city and back every day. You could use a roadable aircraft to drive to the office.
I'd say it's cheaper and better to buy a car and pay to keep it parked at the airport.
Still looking for any practical advantage. If anyone thinks of one I'd love to hear it.
Just thought of another possible objection: "But you don't have to get out, you can just drive into the airport and take off"... no, you can't. You're getting out of that plane to do your preflight checks or you have a death wish.
I doubt this is the final answer, but it's a good start.
Surprising to see max speed is 115 mph, for some reason I thought it would be much higher.
So a drop in mpg is completely understandable
Also, there is a lot more causing drag (the wings at least) when it is flying vs when it is on the ground
I may be completely wrong, the concept of lift never made sense to me. It always seemed like free energy.
Airplanes generate only forward thrust (unless you're in a VTOL craft which we won't talk about). This forward force is what ends up generating lift due mainly to two particular, but separate, applications of physics.
First, wings take advantage of what is called Bernoulli's principle. Picture a wing: it is longer on top than it is on bottom due to the "chamber" of the wing. I.e., the asymmetric difference in the shape of the top and bottom of the wing. This causes the air that flows over the wing on top to be at a different speed than the air on bottom, since the air on top gets compressed. (Remember that in a river, if the river narrows, the current speeds up because you still have a stable amount of water to get downstream. If the volume status the same, higher pressure = higher speed, roughly.)
So, by Bernoulli's principle, the slower air on bottom has more potential energy than the air on top -- and that results in more outward pressure by the air, i.e., it pushes up on the wing harder than the air on top pushes down (which has more kinetic energy and less potential, due to the higher speed). Because the wing is not creating energy, the air is merely converting to and from kinetic/potential.
However, that's not the entire story of lift!
Wings are also angled, with their trailing edge down as compared to the leading edge. This angle is defined as the "angle of attack". Think about it like this: when you stick your hand out of the window of your car while driving down the freeway at high speed, you can tilt your hand up and "take off". The wind hitting your hand pushes it up because of the angle. This seems kind of straightforward, right?
If you continue tilting your hand closer and closer to the vertical, at some point it falls back down. You have "stalled" and are no longer generating enough lift to fly. Airplanes do the same thing, so they have to balance the lift they generate with the other factors.
Airplanes fly mainly through the combination of these two things: lift generated by the relative difference in airspeed above and below the wing, plus lift generated by the angle of attack.
I hope that is explanatory, and if I'm wrong on anything, someone else will come correct me!
The speed difference being due to asymmetry is wrong. Symmetric wings still generate lift by having air flow over the top faster than the bottom. Symmetric wings flying upside down also still generate lift that way. Asymmetry helps, but is not necessary.
The important thing to understand about aerodynamic lift, and that few people do understand, is that the Bernoulli's principle action and the air deflection action are the same thing. They are not two different mechanisms which act in concert. They are two different ways of looking at a single phenomenon.
If you deflect air downwards, you will generate a speed and pressure differential between the top and bottom of your wing. The pressure differential will produce an upward force on the wing that is precisely equal to the downward force on the air. Likewise, if you generate a pressure differential between the top and bottom of the wing, you will deflect air downwards. They're two different results of the same action.
To truly understand why wings generate lift (which is the same thing as why wings generate a faster airflow over the top than the bottom, or why wings generate a lower pressure on top than on the bottom, or why wings deflect air downwards), you need to understand the Kutta condition.
A wing moving through air has two stagnation points, which where the airflow splits. There's a stagnation point at the front of the wing. Any air above that point goes over the top, and any air below that point goes underneath. At the back of the wing, the stagnation point is the point where the air from the top and bottom meet again.
The location of the front stagnation point depends on the angle of attack. If the wing is flat, the front stagnation point will be right at the leading edge. As you tilt the wing upwards, the front stagnation point moves toward the underside of the wing.
The Kutta condition says, in short, that air won't go around a sharp corner. Thus, the rear stagnation point is always at the trailing edge of the wing. This is why wings are shaped like a teardrop, and that sharp edge at the back keeps the rear stagnation point from moving around.
With the front stagnation point mobile, and the rear stagnation point fixed, you have an asymmetry that causes circulation. This is a rotational component to the airflow around the wing which causes air to flow over the top faster than the bottom, such that the stagnation point is at the trailing edge. This circulation causes the air to be deflected downward, and causes lift.
In summary, wings generate lift by deflecting air downwards, which is equivalent to saying they generate a pressure difference between top and bottom, which is equivalent to saying they generate a speed difference between top and bottom. Wings accomplish this by having a sharp trailing edge, which causes circulation that deflects the air. Wings are shaped the way they are not because the asymmetry is necessary to generate lift, but merely because it's more efficient that way, by changing where the front stagnation point occurs, or by generating less turbulence in the air.
Lift, on the other hand, requires forward motion through the fluid and produces a downward force. A floating boat will rise even higher in the water as it begins to move because its hull produces lift. An airplane is not buoyant (well, technically it is, but not for any practical purpose), so it requires forward motion in order to stay airborne.
Lift is anything but free energy. Remove the airplane's energy source and it won't be in the air for long!
So the plane doesn't have enough power to counter-act its weight. There's something about the air that's actually supporting the plane. And no one knows what it is yet.
Forget the plane, let's look at something a bit simpler that's basically the same principle.
I have a driveway that's maybe 10 feet high from end to end. At max thrust, my legs can (or used to be able to) lift around 350lbs straight up. But yet I can push a 500lb+ machine up the driveway without much trouble. Does that mean I'm producing free energy?
Hint: google "wedge"
Many people seem to think "flying car" == "I can just launch and avoid all the rush hour traffic, and then land in my driveway". The reality of course is far different, you have to drive this to/from an airport.
I'm curious what problem this is intended to solve.
We (staff of the Museum of Flight) said the same thing about Moulton Taylor's Aerocar [0]. It doesn't do either thing very well, and that's a big reason there hasn't been a hugely successful product in the space yet.
That said, it does solve a specific problem: it cuts significant time off for those who regularly make trips in the hundreds of miles, particularly between semi-remote locations.
Imagine you lived in central Kansas, and had radio transmitters, oil fields, or clients spread all across the state. You could fly from small airport to small airport [1] in considerably less time than it would take to drive, and then have a car available to drive out to your destination.
One of the advantages this variant has over other past attempts is that it's classified under the (new) "Light Sport Aircraft" category [2]. It's much easier to get a LSA license than a normal pilots license, among other things.
[0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/taylor-aerocar-iii
[1] http://www.filmkansas.com/pages/airports - map of KS airports
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-sport_aircraft
Setting your own schedule would certainly be beneficial, but it would take a long time to justify that cost.
BTW, do you still have the B-17 out front?
Of course. Most aircraft are significant investments; you don't drop that kind of money unless you've got really good reason.
That said, if you're one of the few for whom this particular use case is relevant, I can't think of a viable substitute. If you try to use a traditional aircraft, you're left needing ground transportation at various remote sites that may not have taxis. If you drive from site to site, you might end up spending an extra 3-5 hours on the road every day. So if you're running a high-revenue business that requires a high amount of travel, this (or some other flying car) might be a game-changer.
> "do you still have the B-17 out front?"
I stopped working there when my son was born, and left the state a year and a half ago. This is the first I've heard of the B-17 being out of its hangar, but apparently it's open for summer tours:
http://www.museumofflight.org/b-17-boeing-bee-bomber-tour
There's less variety of engines than airplanes, so the engines are produced in greater volume, but even after years of mass production their prices are still high - a new 150-200 HP engine will set you back more than a nice luxury sedan.
This plane offers several important advantages. First, no hangar fees. You land and drive home.
It runs on AUTOMOTIVE GAS. This is a huge advantage.
Finally: weather avoidance. If the weather turns bad, you land and continue your trip on the ground. When it clears up, you go to the nearest airport and take to the air again. This is probably the greatest thing about a roadworthy plane.
The critical part of all this is SAVING OUR AIRPORTS. We have been robbed of thousands of airports over the last few decades by corruption, greed, and stupidity. It goes all the way up from the people who move next door to an airport and then start bitching about it (ahem Santa Monica) to the politicians who pander to them while taking handouts from developers; to those developers who goad all of them on so they can move in for the land grab.
Stand up for your local airport. They are an irreplaceable part of our national transportation infrastructure. Without them, advances like the Terrafugia and electric planes will die because there will be no market.
Take a flying lesson! That's a unique opportunity that the rest of the world has squandered. Just ask Europe, where user fees have essentially destroyed general aviation. And the Obama administration has been trying to do the same thing here year after year after year.
Owning a Cessna means you have to pay for a tiedown or a hangar at an airport. With this, you can hangar it in your garage. The added expense doesn't really make sense, but it certainly makes it more convenient.
The same with premium laptops, people like myself don't mind paying an extra $1000 for a MacBook knowing its an easier, smoother experience. Likewise, a wealthy pilot might prefer this to a Cessna because it makes things simpler.
I am buying stock.
Vertical take off and landing should be priority number one.