It’s all electric, has full vertical takeoff and landing capabilities and it recently had its first public flight.
The advent of the electric car has been predicted as the next big thing for so many decades that many have probably lost faith in the idea. But that doesn’t mean it has discouraged companies from trying to come up with such a vehicle, and this one by SkyDrive is about as believable as they get.
SkyDrive is a company based in Tokyo, Japan that expects there will be plenty of flying cars around the world by the year 2030. And it wants to play its own part in this upcoming revolution in personal transportation, which is why it created the SD-03 eVTOL, a fully functioning (and quite cool looking) manned flying machine.
One prototype recently performed what the company says is the first public flight demonstration, which took place at the Toyota Test Field, and it was completed without any issues. This is a big deal because there are dozens of flying car projects currently under development around the world, yet this one is one of the few to successfully fly with an actual human on board.
Technical details of the SD-03 are not yet available, but we do know it runs on electrons and can stay aloft for up to 10 minutes. Now that doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but SkyDrive believes that once they can increase that to 30 minutes, there may be a genuine business case to start selling the vehicle, not only in Japan, but also in places like China and other countries that have crowded, high-density urban centers.
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