The Flying Car

This isn't envisioned as a good alternative vehicle, or as a means to bust foreign oil dependency... it does make for an eye-catching story, though. Read below or click the link.

Terrafugia's Transition is part-car, part-airplane and as of this month, a flight-worthy creation. The vehicle successfully completed its first test flight earlier this month, the company announced on Wednesday.

The flight was short -- just 37 seconds -- and right over the runway, but as Anna Mracek Dietrich, a Terrafugia co-founder and its chief operating officer, pointed out, flying wasn't the key goal.

[...]

Transition's aerial debut followed six months of road tests and years of design. The goal is to create an airplane that can be driven to and from a runway and parked in the family garage at night.

Transition runs on regular unleaded gasoline and can travel up to 500 miles on a single tank of gas. It takes less than 30 seconds for the vehicle's wings to fold up or extend to transform from plane to car or vice-versa.

[...]

Information from the test flight will be used to tweak the Transition's design for a second prototype. The company plans to begin selling the vehicles, which cost $194,000, in 2010, said Richard Gersh, Terrafugia's vice president of business development.

The company has taken deposits for 40 vehicles already, Deitrich said.

It will be a toy for the rich. Just remember, though, a century ago, the automobile was a lazy pleasure for the idle rich, or twenty-three years ago, only the affluent could afford cinder block cell phones.

- Brewskie