No Joke: Flying Car Runs on Ethanol with 180 Mile Range

The flying car has been the inventor’s enigma since the dawn of motor vehicles, but using a simple fan and parachute combo, a British engineer has created the an ethanol-powered road-legal flying car with a range of 180-miles.

Best part? All you need is a one day course and a powered-parachute license to fly the Skycar.

“I started making a paramotor on wheels that you sit on and take off and it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Why not just have a car that does everything?’” said Gilo Cardozo, who owns a Wiltshire-based company called Parajet.

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Cardozo plans to fly the vehicle 3,700 miles from England to Timbuktu on January 14th to prove that the vehicle is a fully-functional flying machine.

“It will be a serious aircraft but also a proper road machine, with acceleration to match your average sports car,” said Cardozo. “I’m not going to sell millions of them but even if we sell 20 we’ll be laughing.”

Once it’s in the air, Cardozo says the vehicle can reach speeds of 80 mph. The car is equipped with a rocket-launched emergency parachute to use in the case of a malfunction or damage to the parachute-wing. While on land, the small buggy looks totally normal if you ignore the large fan strapped to the back.

“The fan’s static when you’re driving around,” says Cardozo. “The engineering challenge was getting a really reliable system that will switch power between wheels or fan.”

Photo Credit: Barmala on Flickr under Creative Commons license.

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