Terrafugia Achieves Maiden Flight - Live Blogging from the Boston Museum of Science | Hacker News Reader

Terrafugia Achieves Maiden Flight - Live Blogging from the Boston Museum of Science

xconomy.com

7 pointsrfreierman4 comments

Sigh...here we go again with the "flying cars"

I don't understand what the market for this thing would be. Do they really think the only thing holding most people back from flying more is that they can't drive their airplane home after flying?

Aside from all the complexities and engineering challenges that trying to do something like this requires, do you really want your $200k aircraft driving around on the street and sitting in your garage? On top of all that, it's incredibly ugly.

Their entire selling point seems to be that now you don't have to worry about ground transportation on either end of your flight, but $200k buys you a lot of cessna + cab fare :)

Also, the estimated delivery date and price are 2011 and $194k, so it'll probably be more like 2013-2014 and $250k - 300k.

The thing is, a lot of places you might want to go have a small airport and roads, but not cab service. You have to be a decent sized city to have cab service. One of the cool things about flying around in small airplanes is that you can visit some of these out of the way places. The current way people deal with this is usually folding bikes, and now there are some folding electric bikes, which are a reasonable alternative to the terrafugia.

The real problem with the Terafugia of course is that it's not a very good airplane or a very good car. On the airplane side, it has very poor payload -- you can't even fill the tanks, and put two average sized people in it with no luggage. Also, even with full tanks, it has a practical range of only about 250 miles. If you're willing to make short hops, theoretically you could get somewhere further, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with (leaded) aviation gasoline. If not, then you have to land, drive to a gas station, drive back to the airport, and take off every 2.5 hours. At that point, from a speed standpoint, you're better off driving.

Still, this is a good start, and if they can improve the pertinent specs by about 20%, I think they will have a real winner.

It looks to me like it spent the entire time in ground effect.

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