![]() ![]() So why, other than convenience, does the Alef make sense? The Alef is designed to fit in a regular parking space or garage. Do the ground part in a pure car, and the air part in a pure plane. Brad TempletonĪs such, most e-VTOL companies plan to land at special landing spots and vertiports, and passengers will just take a taxi (ideally a robotaxi) for the land part of their journey. Inside one of Alef's flying prototypes with basic mesh on top of rotors. If you use a liquid fuel power train, you can get the spare power to carry that weight, but in an e-VTOL that capacity is precious. ![]() The wheels and other components used in driving all all dead weight while flying. As such, most teams don’t want to put anything in their vehicle that they don’t need to. In fact, right now the physics are barely there. Most teams have not made true drive/fly flying cars because for e-VTOL, weight is everything. Being able to drive to those places also solves the major noise problem of e-VTOLs - I have said that I would love to have an e-VTOL and take off from my driveway, but I refuse to let my neighbor do so. The Alef is likely to be a fairly sucky car, but it will be good enough to get you to and from the places you take off and land. A short-hop flying car might mostly drive on the roads but hop over traffic jams, rivers or other short distances. Today, the only vehicles which do that are those like the Osprey and some naval VTOL jets, and these require extraordinary piloting skills in the current regime. This might also be used before regulatory approval is given to a vehicle which does the multirotor to fixed-wing transition. The Alef can also do short hops without a transition to fixed-wing flight, but with much shorter range. The Alef’s trick is that the passenger compartment rotates, so that the driver faces forward in car mode, but is tilted as the vehicle tilts to continue to face forward when becoming a pilot. Tim Draper, the primary funder of Alef, in front of one of the working prototypes Brad Templeton ![]()
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