Terrafugia delivers flying car in 2015, as Back To The Future foretold

In a case of life imitating art, Terrafugia says it’s launching its TF-X flying car in the year 2015, just as depicted in the Back To The Future movie franchise. The real life flying car is more of a small airplane which converts into a drivable vehicle, whereas the movie version was a classic Delorean car converted so it could fly. The price tag of the TF-X will be a little more than a quarter million dollars, placing it out of the hands of all but the wealthy and those with incredibly impressive credit scores. But the parallels are striking nonetheless.

Back To The Future depicted everyone having a flying car in 2015, with the vehicles so commonplace that entire highways in the air were mapped out to manage the traffic. In the real world such commonplace flying vehicles will be further off. Products based on new technologies tend to arrive in limited supply with primitive capabilities for high prices aimed at early adopters. But as the technology involved advances and the revenue derived from the early adopters allows more money to be invested into research and development, the prices come down, the products get better, and they become household items.

Terrafugia is basing its TF-X not on anything invented by Doc Brown but instead on technologies employed by military planes which take off an land vertically like a helicopter.


stableytimes.com