Japanese car manufacturing giant, Toyota, is now setting its eyes on the future. The company is now looking into the possibility of flying cars as another form of transportation.
According to CardandDriver, the subject of flying cars is now placed in the spotlight as Toyota introduced its recent Aerocar patent. The company solve the major challenge of stackable wings in flying car designs. The company developed a stack of multiple wings on top of the vehicle making it fit on our current conventional roads. Application 20150246720 is the patent of the design published in the database of the U.S Patent and Trademark Office.
John Brown, project manager at Carplane, a German company developing its own flying car said that the design is incredibly inefficient, he has to see the results when it is placed in a wind tunnel as reported by IBtimes. Toyota, however, has pointed out that it is not working on full pledged flying car, but rather leaning into a prospect much like the hovercraft. Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, one of the company's official clarified that Toyota is exploring ways on how to get cars a little bit away from the road. This design aims to reduce the friction created by conventional ones. There is still zero prototypes of the cars in sight and like other patent designs, it may or may not be built.
Autonews said that since the 19th century, ideas of flying cars have been around. It was published in 1904 through books like "Terror", "Master of the World" by writer Jules Verne. While the technology is readily available to build these cars, certain challenges persist. Unlike its future brother, the autonomous driving car, the flying car needs ample runway to take off and land not to mention the change in infrastructure to accommodate the vehicle's needs. Practical problems like vehicle safety standard are an issue since aircraft by nature are designed to be light weight. And this prototypes may not meet the basic crash safety standard, which leaves designers with a huge task in hand.
Experts, however, are not seeing consumers embracing the idea just yet. Although infrastructures would be available but the cost and price point of these machines will keep it from flying anytime soon.
