This week electronics giant NEC released a video of the successful first flight of a flying car it’s been developing. (We can’t wait for the video of the first drive!). The craft, actually an autonomously controlled passenger-carrying vehicle, is much more like a helicopter than a flying car. It’s really a quad-copter, and a pretty conventional looking one, by 2019 standards, anyway.
It is, in fact, like most of its rivals, not a car at all but merely a quad-copter that would presumably compete in the emerging urban mobility market, a market for which the likes of Airbus and Boeing and Uber have developed flying proof of concept vehicles, as well.
What makes NEC’s entry interesting is that it is a big, very influential Japanese company that is talking about using quad-copters for helping ease the mammoth congestion problems that Japan has with its current infrastructure. Regardless of the prospects for this craft or for the future of other such urban mobility vehicles, check out the video of this one flying. That alone is an impressive achievement.
