Flying cars may have lost their cutting-edge coolness to drones and electric aircraft, but New Hampshire still has a tiny piece of the action. And the action might actually become reality.
PAL-V, the Dutch firm that has been working for decades on a flying car held aloft by a helicopter-like rotor, has gotten a production license from the European aviation safety agency. So it can now begin building and selling the vehicles, says this Dutch News report
The Liberty, which folds its rotor blades away to drive on the road, costs between €299,000 and €499,000 (about $250,000 to $400,000). The first 250 are already sold, NOS reported, and the company has stopped taking orders because it can only build 100 per year.
Around half the buyers are fire brigades, police forces and the military, Dingemanse said. The rest are specialists who need to get somewhere fast, plus a handful of wealthy private owners. Apart from the Dutch fire brigade, almost all of them are foreign.
What’s the New Hampshire connection? State Rep. Keith Ammon, R-New Boston, has the PAL-V franchise here. He has been a flying car fan for a while and was part of a flying-car booster session in the House back in 2020.
I don’t expect to see one of the “roadable aircraft” (a preferred term although PAL-V has settled on FlyDrive) on I-93 any time soon, however. The business case for them is, shall we say, very specific.
Long-time readers will remember the many articles I wrote about Terrafugia, the MIT spinoff that worked on a flying car in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for years. The prototype looked like a Honda Civic with folding wings. It was bought in 2021 by a Chinese company, which scrapped the whole car and turned it into a passenger-carrying drone prototype that seems to have disappeared.
