By Matthew DeBord of The Big Money
What a difference getting airborne makes. Until this month, flying cars were the stuff of Blade Runner, postmillennial defeatist humor about how far we haven’t come since the Futurama era, and, of course, TV spots. “Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!” declaimed actor Avery Books in a 2000 ad for IBM that concluded we really don’t need them because we have the Internet. Ah, 2000. We were so innocent then.
Everything changed on March 5, when the Terrafugia Transition took to the skies. You can watch it taxi along a runway in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and achieve liftoff here. Yet this isn’t your father’s flying car. The Transition is a departure from the gee-whiz, futuristic air chariots of yore. In fact, it really isn’t a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft,” a plane that drives rather than a car that flies. And it comes complete with a viable business plan, which is unsurprising, given that it was developed by a 32-year-old MIT wunderkind engineer and some tech-savvy MBAs and has so far attracted several rounds of investment. Although the Transition still has to undergo plenty of testing to satisfy various safety requirements, Terrafugia is taking deposits.
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