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An Unusual Take on the Flying Car: Two Separate Parts

The GOVE concept, by GAC

By Rain Noe - August 14

in Cars

In recent years people have slowed down on expecting flying cars, as it seems that segment of the mobility industry is moving towards VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) vehicles that don't have wheels.

Chinese automaker GAC, however, has a novel concept that is sort of a flying car. Their GOVE concept looks incredibly ungainly:

The strange form makes a little more sense once the concept is explained. The idea is that you're driving down the road, and can spontaneously do this:

The thinking is that after you lift off, the autonomous chassis drives itself to a charging station to top off, then reunites with you further down the road.

It's a super strange concept that raises all sorts of practical issues, but it is nice to see a major Chinese manufacturer—GAC is one of that country's largest—demonstrating outside-of-the-box thinking in the concept space, rather than following trends. (In contrast, the ground-based models the company currently sells are pretty derivative.)

Full concept video below.

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Alan Nomoto

4 months ago

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I wish they’d stop with the vertical flight & flying car non-sense. It’s a woefully inefficient form of mobility of dubious safety. In event of a power plant failure, airplanes can glide, helicopters can autorotate. These things look like they turn into excavators. They’ve been trying since1949; Molt Taylor’s “Aerocar”. Production of 6 vehicles.

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- Ryan Cee
  
  Alan Nomoto
  
  4 months ago
  
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  Gotta give credit to AI spam, it's sure made "the flying car is the future!" cycle a lot shorter.
  
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- Dee An
  
  Alan Nomoto
  
  4 months ago
  
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  >" In event of a power plant failure, airplanes can glide, helicopters can autorotate"
  Helicopters have several single points of failure. Drones and aircraft with multiple rotors don't have a single point of failure. There is no reason these can't be built with multiple batteries for redundancy.
  
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