Time to Move onto Flying Cars, Tesla Investor Tells Big Auto Companies

What the heck do perpetual motion devices and “flying cars or something” have in common?

Flying cars or roadable aircraft, with folding wings like birds, are indeed ineligible as successors of the motorcar — simply because folding wings are too clumsy on the road, especially in town, except for rotary wings. However, rotary wing designs with fold-back rotor blades, as the Dutch three-wheeled motorbike / giroplane, are bad performers in the air, though fairly good on the road. Alas, like the chopper, gyroplanes suffer a number of redhibitory vices mainly due to wildly asymmetric gyroscopic hover inertia and cruising aerodynamics.

The long known solution of leaving the airframe behind at the airport has yet to be updated to become eligible as a popular mass-product, since small-to-medium towns have typically one airport only, thus fatally limiting parking space.

Now, is this anymore a problem today?

Not so with UL tiltrotor airframes, as the whole plane can land anywhere at the urban periphery, not even needing ground space when docking to a perch and winching the wheeled cockpit to the ground…

Personal ultra-light electric tilt-rotor aircraft replacing the motorcar will leave the ultra-light electric mini-city-car as the only survivor of the automobile era for individual intercity mobility, making it easy to convert all level-crossings to roundabouts, and all city streets to one-way roads, which is mandatory for ultra-light cars as passive safety measures.

This is no abstruse vision of an idealist — it is indeed the only practicable solution to avoid disaster when Russia, China and India will have to decide whether or not they really want to go full steam for the motorcar — not to mention Africa.

But by then, Africa will be able to profit from our personal aircraft technology to ensure individual mobility without covering the continent with tens of thousands of miles of motorways — exactly as it is profiting right now from our personal telephones for the mobility of informations without covering the whole continent with tens of thousands of miles of copper wires…

Again, landing anywhere at the urban periphery with a personal VERTOL aircraft and driving downtown with its cockpit changes the game.

Yet the only eligible concept known to date is the military V22 Osprey — alas, known to be unable to auto-rotate (which is mandatory for civil certification). Its civil version, the BA-609, launched in 2002 and transferred to Europe years later, is still grounded in Italy after Bell recently sold it to it’s former partner Agusta-Westland under an agreement preventing any new military developments of being transferred to the civil prototype, now called the AW-609

This agreement clearly denotes that the intent of the US tenants of power is to keep it grounded — by fear that the civil society might take possession of the global airspace with myriads of personal aircraft — thus threatening the US Air Force’s absolute control of the global airspace, based on supersonic fighter-bombers and, increasingly, on an unknown number of drones of unknown types (don’t trust officially available information — it’s top classified geostrategic stuff).

The curtailing of the civil tilt-rotor version by the US tenants of power (as precluded since the military project was launched in the eighties) has left the AW-609 with its redhibitory vice called “inability to safely land in the auto-rotation emergency mode” (as is mandatory for civil certification — yet which has already caused the death of 30 military personnel). This safety problem has indeed not been addressed by the military until most recently when the US Army issued a call for submissions to private US companies for the development of a variable/reversible twist rotor blade, after claiming that they want to use the aircraft for other purposes than the high risk combat missions assigned to it exclusively to date by the Navy and Air Force.

The imminent solution (although probably classified under oath — yet bound to leak sooner or later into the public domain) is deemed to wake up a sleeping giant called “massively popularized airborne individual intercity mobility” based on personal tilt-rotor aircraft with a separable cockpit usable as an electric mini-car for individual urban mobility.

And fully automated flight is long-standing state-of-the-art! Personal electronic highways projected into the airspace will be followed by personal fully automatic pilots as safely as fully automatic trains are already following their hardened steel rails, thus enabling personal fast-cruising ultra-light electric tilt-rotor aircraft to dramatically enhance individual freedom of movement!

Car manufacturers typically spend over a billion dollars to bring a new car model to market. Tesla certainly didn’t have a billion dollars to spend bringing first their Roadster and then the S to the road.