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Flying Cars Aren’t Here Yet, But This Company Wants to Race Them Anyway

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We have written a little bit about flying cars here on The News Wheel. Several companies such as Terrafugia and AeroMobil have boasted nearly finished or production-ready models. Others, like Uber, are even planning a future of airborne vehicles ferrying people to and fro.

However, no matter how fun the plan sounds, flying cars are clearly not anywhere close to taking off in the mass market. Despite that sad state of affairs, one Australian startup named Alauda has decided, “Eh, let’s race them anyway.”


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Now Alauda has announced it intends to host the first “flying car” race in the world in 2019, and also revealed a scaled-down prototype of its own racing car, a quadcopter racing car called the Alauda Mark 1 Airspeeder, to begin testing in 2018. Basically, the idea of the racing series seems to be the same as Formula E, drone racing, and robot fighting—turn a serious new technology into a sport to attract talent and encourage innovation.


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The first judge of Alauda’s prowess, obviously, will be the Mark 1 Airspeeder, which is a single seater that the company claims will travel at speeds of more than 200 km/hour (that’s about 124 mph to us in the States). Then again, looking at the Airspeeder, it seems to be missing something that is generally essential for automobiles: wheels. So, that somewhat throws some doubt on whether or not the “flying car” race would not simply end up as a “really big drone” race, instead.

News Source: The Verge