Make no mistake, Terrafugia's outlandish airplane / motorcar hybrid has been on the drawing board for years, but it looks like the rubber is about to hit the proverbial road (or take to the skies, whichever) this July. A team of ten is working feverishly to ready the Transition for its debut at this year's AirVenture, where it hopes to catch more than a few eyes with its zany "roadable aircraft." As you can likely guess, this thing is meant to both fly and drive, and yes, that means it'll have to pass safety regulations from both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If all goes well, the startup expects to deliver its first vehicle to a customer in 2009, while mass production isn't scheduled to happen until 2012. We're no experts in the field, but it seems like it'll take a Christmas miracle for either of those feats to actually be accomplished.
[Via
Slashdot]
posted May 10th 2008 9:35AM
More like a Festivus Miracle.
Yeah I would love one but like Steffen said reality is a long way off on this. However check out the flying motor cycle which is street legal and is short take off and land on your street...thebutterflyllc.com
I went and looked at it at their factory its pretty cool, but a gyrocraft. Again not gonna be coming to everyone's garage anytime soon.
http://blog.what2fly.com
9/11 made easy.
Stupidest comment yet. -10 points
For God's sake, when are they gonna start manufacturing the Spinners from Blade Runner. We've got 11 years until 2019, we don't want to prove Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott wrong now, do we?
Although as someone else said, this one looks quite a bit like the Raptors from BSG.
Our story about Terrafugia's roadable aircraft inspired hundreds of comments on our site and on Slashdot, many of them highly critical. We took some of the most common criticisms back to Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich, and today we've published his responses here: http://www.xconomy.com/2008/05/13/in-defense-of-the-drivable-airplane-terrafugia-ceo-responds-to-legions-of-doubters/.