HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng, publicized a flying car on Sunday that it says can also drive on roads. The company says it plans a rollout in 2024. The car is not yet commercially available. And HT Aero said the final design might change. HT Aero’s vehicle will have a lightweight design and a rotor that folds away, the company said. That will allow the car to drive on roads and then fly once the rotors are expanded. The vehicle will have a number of safety features including parachutes, the company said.
HT Aero is backed by Xpeng and its founder He Xiaopeng and the company raised $500 million last week from a number of outside investors including high-profile venture capital firms. Flying cars — also called electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles — have garnered a lot of interest from automakers and start-ups.
However, there are a number of challenges for those vehicles to be used widely, including regulation and safety issues. HT Aero’s new land and air vehicle was introduced at Xpeng’s Tech Day where the company also took the wraps of the latest version of its advanced driver assistance system called Xpilot 4.0. During the event, HT Aero’s Founder and President Zhao Deli said that the brand’s next-generation model will feature a “fully integrated flying vehicle and automobile, designed for both low-altitude air travel and road driving.”
Other automotive brands like Lilium and Hyundai are also working on building their own flying cars. Xpeng is a prominent EV maker in China which is competing strongly with other automakers locally. As recent as in July, HT Aero launched its flying car, X2 that can carry passengers.
While the race to go to space between companies was getting stronger, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic won. Virgin Galactic was the first company to take civilians to space. Then there were Blue Origin’s and Space’s civilian spaceflights. While every launch was remarkable with drastic changes, the competition has briefly subsided.
Now, it is about flying cars as efforts are continuously being made by various companies. It is known that Stephen Fitzpatrick, the founder, and CEO of Britain’s Vertical Aerospace is getting close to finishing the design and making of a flying car. Vertical Aerospace is a US-listed company that has set a target of $394 million to raise in its funding round. According to Fitzpatrick, this could happen by the mid-2020s. Many experts agree that this is possible, but the question pins down on who will make this possible first.
