FORMULA 1 IN THE SKIES: COULD FLYING CARS SOON BE A REALITY?

Powered by a hydrogen-cell electric turbo engine that delivers 1,300 horsepower, it is billed as the fastest VTOL aircraft ever built, capable of reaching speeds of 360 kilometres per hour (223 miles per hour) within 30 seconds.

Starting next year, the model is set to be used in Airspeeder team races that will be broadcast globally by Fox Sports Australia.

“Right now, the Mk4 costs millions of dollars each,” Pearson said “But we don’t see why eventually they can’t be the same price as a Tesla. The expensive thing is not making them. It’s the engineering.”

The Ford Model T is widely recognised as the first affordable car [File: Robert Galbraith/Reuters]

Sonya Brown, an aerospace design expert at the University of New South Wales, said Alauda’s business model has merit.

“If we look at Formula One, a lot of technology that came from there has found its way into passenger vehicles,” Brown told Al Jazeera.

Ride-hailing giant Uber pioneered the air-taxi concept in 2017 with the launch of Elevate, a joint venture with Bell Helicopters that aimed to create a network of flying taxis accessible via smartphone.

“It’s an exciting opportunity,” Bell Helicopter chief executive Mitch Snyder said at the time, promising to launch flying taxis in Los Angeles by 2023.

Germany’s Volocopter made an even more ambitious promise in 2017 after the maiden test flight of an autonomous two-seat electric-powered VTOL aircraft in Dubai that the company said would begin services in the city by 2022.

The promise was repeated in Dubai again last month when Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced via Twitter that the world’s first flying taxi service would be up and running in the city by 2026.

Last month, former US President Donald Trump called for massive investment in VTOL aircraft as part of his “Quantum Leap” proposals to improve living standards in the US.

Alauda has been racing VTOL aircraft in the South Australian desert for two years already. Until now, though, the races have attracted scant attention as the vehicles have been flown remotely by pilots on the ground, much like drones.

The Mk4 is aiming to take racing to the next level by putting pilots in the cockpit, opening up new sponsorship and media opportunities that Alauda’s Pearson is banking on to drive innovation in flying cars.

Putting human-piloted flying vehicles in the air, however, raises a host of safety and other practical concerns, according to experts.

“For this technology to reach its full potential, we need hundreds flying in the air at the same time and that creates a whole bunch of risks with the potential for air collisions and breakdowns,” said Brown, the aerospace design expert at the University of New South Wales.

“If a car breaks down, it is unlikely to cause an accident, but a breakdown in the air has a lot more implications. That demands significantly more automation and it will also require some kind of traffic control as well as air corridors. And as we can’t put traffic signals in the sky, VTOLs will need very good collision-avoidance systems.”

Alauda Aeronautics has been carrying out races with unnamed VTOL aircraft in the Australian desert for the last two years [File: Alauda Aeronautics]
Andrew Morris, an expert in transport safety at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, concurs.

“There’s nothing wrong with using motorsports to drive innovation. But motorsports like Formula One are tightly regulated and safety considerations are foremost. It works only because everyone in Formula One abides by it,” Morris told Al Jazeera.

Morris said an effective “free-for-all”, such as that exists with regular cars today, could be potentially disastrous.

“Imagine people being free to buy a flying car in the morning and then take it up in the sky that afternoon,” he said. “The consequences would be catastrophic and this could effectively stop the industry in its tracks.”

Pearson, who exudes the indefatigable energy of an entrepreneur on the cusp of greatness, is not phased by such concerns.

“Humans are pretty good at driving in between lines, whether on the ground or sky, it won’t make much difference,” he said. “We already have instruments on the screens of our flying cars that show the pilot where the race track is.