Not a an innovation from Citroën (unfortunately), but worth mentioning….
Just hours after Hyundai announced last week that it was making “very significant investments” in “urban air mobility”, a flying car built by a small Slovakian company called Klein Vision, took-off from an airport in the city of Nitra and after a 35-minute flight landed at an airport in Bratislava.
Its wings and tail were then retracted – an automated process that takes less than three minutes – before it was driven into the centre of the city by the company’s founder, Professor Stefan Klein.
The AirCar is powered by a 160bhp BMW engine and to-date has completed over 40 hours of test flights and 142 successful landings. Unlike other drone-like recent aviation efforts that permit vertical take-offs, the AirCar is more of a conventional aircraft design, (if you can call it that) and needs a runway. But its retractable aircraft aspects allow it to be transformed to the form factor of an exotic super-car — and ready for road use.
Aeronautical performance is impressive. It can fly at up to 8,200ft and cruise at 118mph. The next prototype will use a 300bhp engine and should be able to cruise for over 600 miles at 186mph. Pricing has not been disclosed, but as far as a marriage between an automobile and a plane goes, the AirCar certainly looks like the most successful result to date!
See it fly here: