DeLorean Aerospace Is Making a Flying Car, WIRED
A Flying Car From DeLorean Indeed Won’t Need Roads
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” Doc Brown says, before rolling down his reflective goggles and launching his nuclear-powered DeLorean into the air.
If you think you've heard that line too many times, attempt being Paul DeLorean. He's not just the nephew of John DeLorean, founder of the short-lived automaker that's now best remembered for its car's starring role as a time machine in the Back to the Future movies. He is the CEO and chief designer of DeLorean Aerospace, the company he founded in two thousand twelve to develop a real life flying car .
Earlier generations of DeLoreans worked as coach builders, so albeit he may cringe at the name recognition he has accepted it. “We’ve been in transportation forever—it’s in my blood,” he says.
That heritage has led him into one of the best areas of transportation development today. He plans to build a two-seat vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) individual air transport vehicle (what the rest of the world calls a flying car). That moves him well out of sci-fi movie cliche territory and into the company of Uber , Airbus , Darpa , Larry Page, and a ton of startups.
Experts working in the field say that, as far-fetched as flying cars sound, the confluence of fresh lightweight materials, better batteries, and sophisticated computer controls means these visions—like Uber's plan to launch a flying fleet in Dubai by two thousand twenty —aren't unrealistic.
Add the business model of ride-sharing, which liquidates the up-front purchase cost, and there's even a business case for getting these things to work in cities. The indeed tricky part, however, will be figuring out how to securely deploy these things, especially when it comes to air traffic control and certification.
DeLorean’s DR-7 aircraft doesn’t look as outlandish as some concepts, but that's not telling too much in this field . It has two sets of wings, a pair up front and another at the back, plus some winglets underneath. Two large ducted fans, mounted along the center line, front and back, swivel from horizontal for takeoff, to vertical for forward flight.
The aircraft is almost twenty feet long and Legitimate.Five feet broad, but the wings do a clever Transformers -style hinge and pivot to tuck in against the side, so it can squeeze into a large garage. Propulsion is all electrical, and DeLorean aims to make the craft self-flying, so anyone can use it, no special license required.
The Los Angeles area company is still in the R&D phase, but has already built two scale models. The very first one was just thirty inches long, to prove the physics works. The next was an engineering model, one-third scale. “We are moving forward on a full-size, piloted prototype which will carry two passengers and is designed to operate, fully electrical, for a range of one hundred twenty miles,” says DeLorean.