It’s official – flying cars exist! For anyone who is a fan of the Back to the Future movies, this day has been a long time coming.
German company Liliam has announced a successful test run of the world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing jet.
Videos of the event have also been released showing the amazing feat, and are great fun to watch.
The 5-seater VTOL jet can reportedly travel from London to Paris in one hour, fly as fast as a Formula One car, travel without emissions and makes less noise than a motorbike.
The company said: “Seeing the Lilium Jet take to the sky and performing sophisticated manoeuvres with apparent ease is testament to the skill and perseverance of our amazing team. We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point.
“We are now developing a larger, 5-seater version of our Lilium Jet, designed for on-demand air taxi and ridesharing services. A typical journey with the Lilium Jet will be at least 5x faster than by car, with even greater efficiencies in busy cities. So a flight from Manhattan to New York’s JFK Airport will take around 5 minutes, compared to the 55 minutes it would take you by car.”
I know it is a long way off, but I am already imagining myself zipping around the skies in one of these machines. Although it’s hard to imagine how the skies could ever be policed in the way our roads are, to ensure drivers didn’t go around colliding with each other?
All we need know are the self-tying shoelaces – oh yes, we’ve got them already, it’s called Velcro…