Toyota Backs Flying Car Project Skydrive
Toyota is joining the list of companies trying to develop flying cars. The Japanese company is financing the flying car project Skydrive, led by a group called Cartivator, Nikkei reported.
Thirty of Toyota’s young employees have been working on the project for free since project leader Tsubasa Nakamura won a business contest in 2012.
Read: Uber Flying Cars: Uber Wants Airborne Vehicles By 2020
Toyota and its group companies will invest about 40 million yen ($352,982) in Cartivator. Until now the group has relied mostly on online crowdfunding and other financing methods.
Cartivator plans to develop a prototype for a manned test flight as soon as the end of next year. The team is looking to commercialize a flying car in 2020, the year Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics. Cartivator says on its site it wants the flying car to light the Tokyo Olympic flame stand.
Read: Startup Lilium Runs Successful Tests Of All-Electric Flying Car In Germany [VIDEO]
Cartivator has received some help for the project from Masafumi Miwa, a drone expert and Tokushima University associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Taizo Son, founder of GungHo Online Entertainment, a Japanese online video game developer, the report said.
Toyota has been wary of backing the flying car project, the report said. However, the company decided in November 2015 to create a fund to invest in tech startups, including a research and development center opened in the U.S. last year dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Here are other flying car projects:
Google’s Kitty Hawk Project
It was previously reported Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page was working on a flying car. Last month, Kitty Hawk Corp. tweeted a video of its fully-electric Kitty Hawk Flyer prototype. The Flyer looks like a jet ski with a web around it and fans that propel it upwards, however, the company said the final version will look different from the prototype.
Uber’s Flying Car Project
Uber announced last month plans to develop and test cars that are capable of vertically taking off and landing by 2020. The company has partnered with city officials in Dubai and Dallas for the project, which reportedly is called Uber Elevate.
Airbus Pop.Up Concept
Airbus and Italdesign unveiled the new modular transport system concept, Pop.Up, at the Geneva International Motor Show in March. The concept includes a car that connects to a drone propelled by eight counter-rotating rotors, which then lifts it into the air to fly over traffic. The ground modules and the capsule autonomously return to their recharge stations to wait for the next riders.
Lilium Jet
Munich startup Lilium beat Uber, Google and Airbus when it announced in April it had tested its all-electric flying car, Lilium Jet, in Germany. The two-seater prototype was controlled remotely by a pilot and underwent a successful in-flight transition from hover mode to wing-borne forward flight. Lilium is now working on a five-seat model of the Jet for on-demand air taxi and ride-hailing services.
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