New video surfaced this week of Alef Aeronautics new Model Zero A “flying car” taking off, hovering over a Chevrolet Suburban, and touching down again on the other side. While the non-car media is hailing this as a “world’s first” flying car, I hesitate to actually call this thing a flying car because it barely flies, it’s barely a car and flying cars aren’t a thing.
Alef CEO and co-founder Jim Dukhovny has been endeavoring for an entire decade to build this half-assed contraption, and says it will reach production later this year, you know, if nothing goes wrong. “If everything goes right, if we have enough funds, if the legislation does not get worse, we plan to start production of the first one by the end of 2025,” is what Dukhovny told a CNBC reporter back in April. Everything about this machine seems supremely sketchy. Judging from how loud it is, to how floaty and uncontrolled it looks in the air to how small and narrow the wheels are, it is a high level of bad idea to sign up for by getting in one of these.
At the car-hopping test Dukhovny told a reporter from the Independent “…this drive and flight test represents an important proof of technology in a real-world city environment. We hope it will be a moment similar to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk video, proving to humanity that new transportation is possible.” In fairness, the Model Zero A looks about as stable and capable as the Wright Flyer was 112 years ago. This video (below) is less a demonstration of human ingenuity and more what seems to be a Silicon Valley grift to raise more funds for Alef to keep working on this flimsy vaporware piece of crap.
The Model Zero A is a very small and lightweight pod for one person with a quartet of really big, really loud drone propellers under the bodywork. The drone rotors can’t lift a ton of weight, so passenger capacity is limited to just 250 pounds. The company says it has over 3,000 pre-orders for the $300,000 electric drone with vaguely car-shaped bodywork. As a car the Model Zero A can allegedly do 198 miles on a full battery, but as an aircraft you can cut that figure in half. The company will begin working on a more fiscally responsible version in the coming years, which it calls Model Z, allegedly for just $35,000. I’ll believe that when I see it.
The car that can jump traffic
The Model Zero A prototype owes its questionably automobile-shaped aesthetics to its ability to “fly.” Each of the Model Zero’s rotors are hidden under the car’s mesh-and-skirts bodywork, which allows for air to pass through the upper structure of the car, and the solid vertical surfaces acting as a shroud for the rotors. Alef says that the car is designed to be driven most of the time, then operate as an eVTOL when you need to jump over a traffic jam. “We’re building the solution to the issues of modern congestion,” claims the Alef website. The car is sized to drive in a regular lane and park in a regular parking space or garage. How that plastic skirting along the bottom is supposed to hold up under doing regular car things is anyone’s guess. I’m a big fan of automakers trying to figure out how to build more efficient and super-lightweight commuter electric vehicles with 200 miles of range, but when they added the fans to make the car fly, they lost me.
The whole idea of eVTOLs scares the crap out of me, and Alef doesn’t do anything different enough to alleviate my fears. Not only do I not want a car that can fly, I don’t want other people to have them either. The amount of poorly trained drivers on the road is already too high, you’re going to give them the power of flight, too? The idea that a thousand pounds of spinning blades and carbon fiber can just drop out of the sky while I’m minding my own business sitting in traffic sounds like a nightmare. And on top of that, the thing sounds like a swarm of angry bees when you fire up the rotors. Don’t give Americans access to this kind of machine, it will only end in death.
