Flying car dreams kept alive in Japan

Japanese companies keep the world's dreams of a flying car alive. And flying cars which land and take off vertically, could be a possibility from as soon as 2023.

Japanese company SkyDive are hoping to sell 100 vehicles by 2028 at the cost of an "expensive car". The Japanese government is pouring money into the development of flying cars with aims of commercializing the futuristic mode of transportation as soon as 2023, according to Japan Times.

Different companies around the world, including Airbus, Boeing and Uber, are working on a number of flying car concepts.

Japan’s SkyDrive, one of the country’s newest flying car startups, recently revealed the SD-XX, a sleek two-person eVTOL aircraft, about the size of a car, with a range of several tens of kilometers at 100 kmh (62 mph).

Test flight

SkyDrive is hoping to complete its first flight test this summer, according to the Japan Times.

“We’re considering launching an air taxi service in big cities, either Osaka or Tokyo, with initial flights over the sea as it would be too risky to fly over many people all of a sudden,” SkyDrive CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa, a former engineer at Toyota, told the newspaper.

Taking off vertically He also noted that development has been “accelerating rapidly with the rise in the number of personnel in the venture.” The startup is planning to start with round trips around various resorts, including Universal Studios Japan.

“The initial model will fly basically on auto pilot, but it’s not 100 percent autonomous because a pilot would need to maneuver it in case of an emergency, for example,” Fukuzawa said. The goal of the startup is to sell at least 100 vehicles by 2028, each for the cost of an “expensive car,” according to the CEO.

Drone-like machine

Earlier this month, in Abiko, Japan, electronics maker NEC Corp. has shown a "flying car," a large drone-like machine with four propellers that hovered steadily for about a minute.

The test flight Monday reaching 3 meters (10 feet) high was held in a gigantic cage, as a safety precaution, at an NEC facility in a Tokyo suburb.

The Japanese government is behind flying cars with the goal of having people zipping around in them by the 2030s.

Similar projects are popping up around world, such as Uber Air of the U.S.

A flying car by Japanese startup Cartivator crashed quickly in a 2017 demonstration. Cartivator Chief Executive Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who was at Monday's demonstration, said their machines were also flying longer lately.

NEC is among the more than 80 sponsor companies for Cartivator's flying car.