Thursday, August 30, 2007

This cool but awkward "flying saucer" is apparently the precursor to the Moller skycar I've been waiting for for far too long.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uh, Mac, the BBC News technology link you provide under "This cool but awkward "flying saucer" is apparently the precursor to the Moller skycar I've been waiting for for far too long" is actually _Moller's_ M200x model you've mentioned before. Review the video.

The M200x is the $90,000 (base cost) model that is only allowed to (or physically can) fly a max of 10 feet above the ground ("without a pilot's license").

Realistically, people should know the M200x, employing 8 fixed turbo-fans, has never flown independent of a crane-based tether, I believe in large part due to its inherent instability and great difficulty in flying in any practical manner.

The M200x, I believe, is a prior design experiment that Moller is trying to commerialize in order to raise additional capital to actually finance what might turn out to be far more viable and practical, what he now calls his "Skycar", and which is _still_ in development, and was previously called the M400x, x for experimental.

I see the M200 as a stillborn failure, predict it will not sell as it's nearly unflyable, and that Moller will even have a great deal of difficulty making the "Skycar/M400" a real or viable vehicle for the forseeable future.

It will also cost over a quarter of a million dollars, and, unless you go through extensive flight training, would be a very unstable and dangerous thing to try to "fly".

[I live an hour away from Moller's company in the city of Davis, California. They have free tours every Tuesday afternoon, for those curious.]

Sorry, Mac, but the real skycar is going to come from somewhere else, I would submit, not Moller, and not anytime soon, and when something real is available, it will cost upwards of half a million dollars.

4:17 AM
Anonymous said...

BTW, the production version of the M200x (which has been in intermittant development for almost 40 years!) will be called the M200G Skycar ($90K up to $450K for the deluxe model). There is only one M400, although another is being built.

After the second is finished, they will begin untethered test flights over a shallow lake. Supposedly within the next year. Or two.

Moller _will_ take your $100,000 to be one of the first 25 people "in line" (purchase position placement) to buy the future M400 Skycar, which will be sold for close to $1 million, at first. After 25 to 50 have sold, factors of production scale will allow a reduction in single unit price down to $400K to $500K. Such a bargain!

These damn things are also noisier than hell! And _still_ haven't flown off a tether.

Go see:
www.moller.com/ for further info.

Also: YouTube has a number of tethered demo flights, etc. avail.

I really think Moller will be beaten to the actual market by craft being developed in Europe and Japan. Moller is under-financed to do what it has been promising for decades, now.

5:30 AM

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