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Japan’s most recent project for a suitable flying car was established in May 2017 with the aim of providing a vehicle that will light the Olympic flame during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. The event was postponed until 2021 due to the global coronavirus pandemic, which basically means that the team has an additional year to finalize the project. The good news is that the first test run of the machine finally took place in Japan last week.
In an official press release, Toyota’s engineering team calling itself SkyDrive informs us that it conducted a demonstration flight of its SD-03 vehicle on August 25 at Toyota’s 10,000-square-meter proving ground ( approximately 2.5 acres). . This is the first public demonstration of a flying vehicle in Japanese history.
“We are very excited to have achieved the first manned flight of a flying car in Japan in the two years since we founded SkyDrive in 2018 with the goal of commercializing such aircraft,” said Tomohiro Fukuzawa, CEO of SkyDrive. “Our goal is to take our social experiment to the next level in 2023, and to that end, we will accelerate our technological development and our business development.”
According to information released by the firm, the flying machine circled the area for approximately four minutes and was controlled by an operator who was assisted by a computer control system. SkyDrive says that “the aircraft has been designed to be the world’s smallest electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL)” and to us, this description pretty much directly says that this is not really a car but rather a small aircraft.
The construction of the machine includes eight electric motors that drive rotors deployed in four positions. SkyDrive says that more test flights are planned for later this year and that the company even plans to make the first flights out of the test area by the end of 2020.
