TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

LEO Coupe Flying Car. Fully electric jet lift system. Image: LeoFlight website . O f the things we were promised for the future by movies, the dream of real flying cars, is right up there for me with autonomous humanoid robots.  I've actually written several articles about the development of flying cars concluding, most notably, that most working prototypes, and proof of concept flying cars, are really just compact aeroplanes or oversized drones. They don't look anything like actual cars.  Which is understandable given that, so far, no one has developed any kind of anti-gravity engine capable of  lifting the weight of your average family car with the family, probably a couple of dogs, and a picnic lunch all on board.  Are We Any Closer to Flying Cars? While I haven't done a deep dive researching the full state of play, I did fall down the rabbit hole enough to see some promising projects, including one that may just be the front runner to a mass produced flying car ...

Jetsons Style Flying Car - Image by TET & Leonardo.ai Regular readers of this blog will know that flying cars have been a recurring subject over the years. I even collected all my posts into a book you can buy on Amazon Kindle called Where's My Flying Car? The development of a true flying car is a fanciful one, largely because we've yet to come up with anything that actually looks like a car that flies.  Most serious projects that even make it to a prototype are either small planes that compact into something you might drive from your home to an airport (if they don't have any vertical landing and take off (VTOL) capability) but you wouldn't drive to you local supermarket for the weekly groceries run, or they're some kind of drone/helicopter configuration with so many propellers you'll worry about shredding pedestrians who get too close. The dream is something that looks exactly like a car but can drive on a road, or hover (kind of like Luke Skywalker's ...

Ace eVTOL GT Slipstream Flying Car. I've been a little obsessed with flying cars of late and I thought I was done with the subject for now but then Google News put  flying car company, Ace Vtol , based out of Perth, Western Australia in front of me. How could I not take a look?  The GT Slipstream's next-generation Arc Reaction Engines. Images: Ace Vtol website. Especially when their flying car, the  Ace eVTOL GT Slipstream , kind of looks like a regular car (in terms of size and shape) and has engines that look like they're straight out of a sci-fi movie. Even more surprising is you can actually pre-order one of these vehicles . Ace Vtol has done a USD$250 million deal with Palm Beach, FL based Aeroauto , the leading retailer of eVTOL vehicles in the United States to sell the craft to future owners. The GT Slipstream is described on Ace Vtol's website as follows: The aircraft, named the GT Slipstream, is a two-seater flying “muscle” car that will reach spee...

Movie Flying Cars - Doc Brown's Delorean (top) S.H.I.E.L.D's Agent Colsen's 'Lola' (bottom). My idea (and probably your idea) of a flying car is something that looks like the cars we know today but with the ability to fly through some kind of 'magic' technology that has yet to be invented. Doc Brown's flying Delorean, time machine from Back to the Future or Agent Colsen's Lola from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are two good examples. Unfortunately anti-gravity vehicles have yet to be invented and attaching some kind of jet turbine thrusters that point downward seems like a lot of pedestrians could get burned when flying at low altitude on trip down the road to the shops. (Assuming that a downward pointing jet engine in each wheel would actually work).

Pegasus E Police Flying Car. When I see a headline like  ‘Not if, but when’: Australian flying car start-up sets sights on Dubai , readers of my blog will know I'm immediately interested. Not just because it's a story about flying cars but also it's about Australian flying cars (you knew I'm an Aussie, right?). Pegasus is an Australian flying car company making, what I would call, 'roadworthy' helicopters. At first glance their Pegasus E flying car looks like a mini, high performance helicopter with the chassis of a small formula one race car strapped to the bottom. Which makes sense since they're setting their sights on selling a version of the craft as a single seater flying police car in Dubai, a city that is really paving the way for flying car infrastructure. Many of which are basically helicopter style drones, with  no capacity to drive, or follow an actual road at street level at all. Again, at first glance, I would almost dismiss the Pegasus E as no...

Image by Paul Birman from Pixabay It's 2021 and, with the pace of technology, you're ready to upgrade to a second generation flying car. Unfortunately a trip to your local car dealer doesn't go as planned because flying cars in 2021 still aren't a thing. One wonders, if Elon Musk wasn't so focused on space travel, would we have flying Tesla cars by now? Hopefully that may be his next big push considering he's pretty close to fully self driving cars - technology that is probably essential if flying cars are to work in urban environments. When I last checked in on the state of flying car development in my post from 2017, Revisiting the 'Flying Car' - How Close Are We? the focus was very much on drone/quadcopter configurations, with nothing you could really call a 'car'. Unfortunately we haven't really progressed from there. The closest we have to a consumer model flying car is the Jetson One , which was launched in October of this year. Made ...

Mashable's blog this week asks Do People Really Want Self-Driving Cars?  which includes a video of several examples of how close this technology is getting to being a reality. Several commercially sold cars are already self parking. I say forget all this self-driving stuff, it's 2012 already, where's my flying car?! The self-driving car is just a way for drunks to get back in their vehicles and keep on drinking between venues on a Friday night. You just know those idiots are going to be so speech impaired by the end of a bender that the car's voice control won't understand them and they're just going to go "F. it, I'm switching to manual control!". The rest of us kind of enjoy driving... well I do anyway. Do you really need a self driving car in a traffic jam? Really? You know how you are in a traffic jam... "No way is that b**tard cutting in front of me!!" Can you imagine the frustration of watching your self-driving car being po...

Courtesy of Colouring the Past (which I believe is a Facebook Interest group for people who like restoring and coloring black and white images and film footage from history) this image of Ford's, 1959 Levacar Mach 1 concept vehicle came through my newsfeed and sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The Ford Levacar Mach 1 Concept Vehicle (1959) and the toy model kit the public could buy. Image source: Colouring the Past . Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my interest in the promise of 'flying cars' which, if the film Back to the Future II is to be believed (yes I know it's not a documentary), we should've had by 2015. It's at least fascinating to learn that Ford founder, Henry Ford, thought hovercars might be the next evolution of personal transport. Mark my words: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come. - Henry Ford 1940. How Ford's Levapads work. Image: Curbside.tv The Ford Levacar did actually wor...

Undefined Technologies Ion Propulsion Drone prototype 3D concept image. You may have heard of Ion engines or, more likely, Ion thrusters. NASA uses them on their spacecraft to help maintain a craft's position or to propel them through space.  Upon hearing that you might think they're big, powerful engines, but actually they are not. They work well in the vacuum of space but, once any kind of atmosphere and gravity is involved they'd be hard pressed to launch you off the ground if you strapped four of them to your lawn chair and yelled "up, up, and away!" I am no expert on Ion thrusters - they're basically magic that science has an explanation for. If you want to know the details, The Space Techie website has a layman's explanation .  Build Your Own Ion Thruster Earth based Ion Thrusters work a bit different to their  space based cousins by Ionizing the same air that we breathe to create thrust (an effect known as Ionic-wind ).  While they sound highly soph...

Darwin commercial pilot, James Greenberger,   has fulfilled a childhood dream by building his own hovercraft in his carport.  M ost people are familiar with the concept of a hovercraft. Usually it's a vehicle of some kind that sits on a pocket of air, held underneath it via some kind of 'skirt', allowing it to travel on land or water. Typically they're mostly used on water.  While I'm late to the party, recently an ABC news report from 2019 popped up in my YouTube feed of a hovercraft that actually looks like it hovers above the ground. Designed and built by Darwin man,  James Greenberger, the commercial pilot fulfilled a childhood dream by building his own hovercraft: a ground effect vehicle, built in his carport from plans purchased on the internet. The original report is embeded below. Darwin man stuns locals with a hovercraft built in his carport | ABC News Cut to a couple of years later, and James has upgraded his hovercraft to something looking a litt...

In the future when we look up will we see a traffic jam of drones instead of flying cars? Amazon released new and real footage of their proposed drone delivery service this week and it got me to thinking about how such a thing would scale up should it become a successful business model. What if other companies followed suit? What if local delivery of everything from pizza to... well anything you can send through the mail now becomes more efficient to deliver via drones?

The Dukes of Hazard is a movie that I wanted to see when it was released in 2005 but didn't because, well, I just didn't get around to it. Not only that but when I heard Johnny Knoxville and Jessica Simpson were in it my expectations were immediately lowered to "it's probably not going to be what I hoped it could be." Which is why I've never been pro-active about hiring the movie on DVD. Last night I saw it was being shown on free to air TV. I happened to have the time to watch, so I did. To sum up my experience... I didn't get fired up by the movie until I watched the 'bloopers' in the end credits. The Dukes of Hazard signature is the car. The General Lee flying through the air in some flat out impossible jumps. We know they're impossible jumps but they're just so cool you kind of want to believe the General Lee can do them. The point is, in the TV series, you never (or rarely) saw the General Lee not land safely and undamaged. Thus, seei...