This flying car video looks like a bad animation, but it seems to be real

Ah, flying cars! Is there anything too disappointing in the automotive world that was so wonderfully consistent every time? No, it doesn't have it!

Flying cars have the absolute best track record when it comes to letting everyone down and never really passing what they have done again and again and about a magical combination of time and technical development are always and for about two years away. Now another company, Alef, has decided to pretend that this would actually happen in which flying cars actually happen. For everything that is worth, this looks more auto-like than most others.

Maybe I'm too hard. Perhaps The One will be the one who changes the game! Maybe we are ready now and all problems with weight and the dramatic increase in the complexity of the crossing are solved. Or as if something goes wrong, it is not really an option to be fair to be too fair that Alef has a parachute with a full plane, so that the residues would make much more manageable. But this time it will be different!

The company has recently made aware of videos like these lately, showing how a caricaturistic “car” slowly and strangely jump over an SUV. The whole thing looks surreal:

New: Alef Aeronautics publishes film material from her electric car on another car on a street in California.

The company claims that this is the “first test in the history of an automotive drive and a vertical start in a city”.

The company hopes to solve traffic by developing a car that … pic.twitter.com/fjrfdiblbk

– Collin Rugg (@Collinrugg) February 21, 2025

So what exactly is going on there? The cartoony car-shaped thing is the ALEF model A, and it is essentially a multi-rotor type of electrical flight machine with a central passenger capsule (with a specified capacity of £ 250, so I hope that you and your passenger is quite trim and relieves some kind of luggage). What looks like a hood and a trunk is actually a perforated cover over the rotors that are kept in place via a simple, light carbon fiber frame.

It is not clear where the batteries are stored?

Each of the four Skinny bikes has its own electric motor for soil movements, and the top speed is only 35 miles per hour, at least according to the company's first estimates. I wonder if it deliberately restricts the speed so that it is classified as an electric vehicle at low speed and is freed from actual crash tests and other real car problems. The range is said to be 200 miles on the floor and about 110 miles.

In the actual flight, not only SLO-MO car, model A turns to the side, while the passenger cabin of Gimbals remains upright because I suspect that most people do not like to sit while sitting.

It is a kind of strange, but it makes sense, at least from a perspective of rotor orientation. If the vehicle is aligned like a conventional car, it can take off vertically and perform the type of gentle hops via cars that we saw in the first video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk_waexprrk

Other promo videos for the company show that the car jumps over wrecks and traffic disabilities, which I suspect, although something strangely feels like a maneuver. And if there are many similar hopping cars, you only get another traffic jam of 20 feet above the floor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0aohzf7xsi

Alef says that you will have a production model Z that is sold for 35,000 US dollars and 400 miles on the floor and 200 in the air until 2030, and I trust this claim about as much as I trust that dental floss bears my weight when I are used as a zipline.

I think Alef is now attracting a little attention because her flying car looks like and because of the strange videos. Your concept has some real advantages – I don't want to appear like a complete Curmudgeon. For example, the lack of wings and Vtol skills is what that needs, and it looks like it could be hypothetically over to the ground.

[Mercedes’s note: I will also point out that it’s legally irrelevant if your “flying car” is an eVTOL. You will still need a pilot license and takeoffs and landings will need to happen at airports. The dream of getting stuck in traffic and then just taking off is entirely unrealistic. Consider that many major airports are located outside of city centers, so you won’t really beat traffic that much by flying your car. Certainly, it’s not something the average person is going to be able to do, either. – MS]

This means that this does not solve any of the main problems with regard to flying car driver/pilot training, air traffic problems, reach, durability of ease, limited capacity, all that-I am not really convinced that this is something other than another “constantly two years without a flight car with two years”.

What about the first real flying car in the world? I wonder which hyper -specific criteria you use to raise this claim. Maybe no removable or foldable wing? Because there have been “flying cars” of a kind or another since the 1940s.

Do you remember the Convair model 118 from 1947?

The Alef model A costs 299,999 US dollar (that's that expected Price) and you can pre-order a $ 150 or be in the “priority-queue” for $ 1,500. The company claims that around 2,800 pre -orders have and they expect the first cars to be built at the end of this year. I assume that this is very optimistic.

Whatever. Maybe this time is different! In any case, it is a bit of fun to see these videos. I would definitely be curious to try one of them, just for fun, but I probably killed this chance by writing this.

Well. I only buy one in two years!

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