RELATED: Uber Wants You to Ride in a Flying Car But it’s powered by an all-electric engine, whereas competitors are largely moving toward larger aircraft that use a hybrid gas-plus-electric design. The Lilium is different in several key aspects. Uber's Elevate initiative, also still on the drawing board, proposes semi-autonomous passenger drones that can be hailed from rooftops and helipads in urban settings. The Airbus Pop.Up system, still in the concept phase, imagines a fleet of modular passenger cabins that attach to a wheeled chassis when driving and a rotor array during flight. The influx of cash is a huge vote of confidence for the small German company, which is going head-to-head with heavy hitters like Airbus and Uber, each of which is also aggressively developing flying car systems. “This is the next stage in our rapid evolution from an idea to the production of a commercially successful aircraft that will revolutionize the way we travel in and around the world’s cities,” Lilium co-founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand said in a statement announcing the new financing. This week, Lilium Aviation announced that it has raised $90 million in a new round of financing. The test flight was unmanned, but the proof-of-concept demonstration was impressive enough, apparently. In April of 2017, a full-size prototype of the Lilium, dubbed Eagle, made its maiden voyage above an airfield outside Munich. Scaled down for civilian use, the Lilium is basically a two-seat electric jet for the discerning 21st-century commuter.
The Lilium design expands on existing Vertical Take Off and Landing technology, which powers military aircraft like the Harrier Jump Jet. Germany's Lilium Jet, backed in part by the European Space Agency, is a decidedly space-age looking vehicle and is probably the closest thing we have to the popular depictions of a flying car. These aircraft incorporate all manner of promising technologies, but they don't look anything like the flying cars from those old pulp magazine. But real-world incarnations of the idea have traditionally been rather underwhelming.ĭepending on how you define your terms, we already have several flying cars in the skies right now, from straightforward hybrids like the Terrafugia Transition - basically a small private plane with fold-up wings - to passenger drones like the recently unveiled Kitty Hawk, backed by Google's Larry Page.
The concept of the flying car has been a staple of gee-whiz tomorrowland-style science fiction since the 1950s.