Not that electric motors fail often, but the consequences here will be dire unless you're flying high enough for the built-in ballistic chute to do its thing. What's more, a two-rotor system gives you basically zero propulsion redundancy. The energy requirements for half-decent flight endurance in a vehicle like this will be pretty brutal if HT's little manned multicopter will only fly for 35 minutes weighing in at just 560 kg (1,235 lb), then you're not going to be flying real far in something much larger and possibly four times the weight, with a road-going electric powertrain, braking, steering and suspension systems, airbags, crumple zones and everything else you need to certify a car for street use. That's OK, because cars don't need to lift themselves off the ground. Tesla's Model 3 is around 300 kg (660 lb) heavier than, say, a Toyota Corolla sedan, because lithium batteries simply weigh a lot.
Let's not forget: electric street cars are already heavy. As our good buddy Dezso Molnar has vigorously argued, the fancier these kinds of machines get, the worse they work, the more expensive they become and the smaller the market becomes.
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Indeed, such large-diameter fans will deliver more efficient vertical lift than most small-rotor designs – which will be critical since there's no winged cruise mode to take a load off the props, and this thing will need to carry all the weight of an auto-folding eVTOL plus all the additional weight of a street-legal electric car.Īnd herein of course lies the problem.
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Yes, this is a viable propulsion arrangement, as evidenced by the military Osprey aircraft, and with those two contra-rotating rotors able to tilt independently, you can achieve full control over pitch, roll and yaw. When it's time to take to the air, the props come out of the oversized tail at the touch of a button, then spin up and lift the car off the ground. It's a very basic-looking eight-rotor coaxial quadcopter design that can carry two passengers at speeds up to 130 km/h (80 mph) for up to 35 minutes. There must be some serious plans going on behind the scenes here, since HT's current fifth-gen X2 aircraft doesn't look all that impressive on paper. Large biscuits indeed – more than three times the cash eHang is allegedly working with. According to the AAM Reality Index, this staggering figure would make HT the fifth best-funded eVTOL company in the world. Last week, its "affiliate" eVTOL company HT Aero announced it had raised more than half a billion US dollars in a single funding round. It's also getting serious about urban air mobility. It's investing heavily in autonomy and charging infrastructure, while rolling out cars like the P7 that offer more range than Tesla's Model 3, at a cheaper price.
Xpeng is a seven-year-old Chinese electric car company that's growing fast, pulling in somewhere around US$2 billion in revenue this year and shipping somewhere around 50,000 cars. XPeng affiliate HT Aero has unveiled an outrageous flying car design that it claims is "planned for roll-out in 2024." It looks like an electric Bugatti hypercar with a pair of huge, auto-folding props in the style of the Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey.