Perhaps more so than its movie stars, California's city of angels is notorious for its unending, schedule-crushing gridlock.
The city's long-standing love of the automobile, though, has made it a favourite proving ground for auto makers experimenting with all manner of innovations, from electric cars to hydrogen fuel cells, autonomous technology and more.
Add to that list a slow-growing fleet of flying personal vehicles that, at first blush, looks like a bony mash-up of a stretched-out motorcycle and an anorexic whirlybird. To inventor Dezso Molnar, a middle-aged former rock star, these open-air contraptions are "flying cars". And for anyone who wants to be liberated from gridlock, he insists they are the future – even though they might not look like it.
"My objective was to make a vehicle that would make it easy to fly into a very congested area and be able to drive out of it," said Molnar, who has a colourful array of credentials on his resume, from building rockets to helping set land-speed racing records.
He explained this recently on a small stage set up inside a tent at the rear of the Los Angeles Auto Show, about as far as one could get from the gloss and glimmer of the main stage and still technically be on-site. Molnar, who wore leather-looking pants, aviator glasses and a flower-print button-down shirt, could not have appeared more counterculture. Nor could his invention, which costs less than $40 per hour to operate and is more efficient than a helicopter.
"[Flying cars] get maligned because they're not a person's perception of a big business," he said. "But the reality is that they have value and they have a future.
"Sometimes the right thing to do is have a tiny bird and sometimes the right thing is a jumbo jet. With this, I wanted to do something that would allow me to mimic the fastest way to get through downtown these days."
That is, some combination of a courier bike, motorcycle and a bird. For more than a dozen years, Molnar has been working towards this with the launch of the Molnar GT, a personal vehicle that is part motorcycle (roadworthy), part gyrocopter (for gliding to a safe landing in the event of engine failures) and part gyroplane (short takeoff distance and speed). Molnar refers to it as a 'gyrocycle'. It really doesn't matter to him what others call it – the point, he said, is that it is licensed and insured to be in the air and on the road in California.
You could have one, too, if you're a visionary willing to build it. Molnar's hope is that others will find his invention inspiring and join the cause by building their own flying machine. Patents for the Molnar GT recently expired; instead of renewing them, Molnar has made his designs public in a sort of open-source mission. "People can use the engineering drawings for a springboard," he said.
Key to the design, he said, is a mid-mounted propeller, which propels the aircraft forward. The rotary wing only spins during flight as it is powered by wind motion. When operating on the road, the rotary blades can be stored alongside the bike. Its maximum ground speed is 177 kilometres per hour; that shrinks to 112 in the air.
That relatively slow speed hasn't stopped Molnar from working to launch what he calls the Flying Car Racing league – another pillar of his strategy to popularize flying cars. He hopes to get the league off the ground (pun impossible to avoid) next year.
"I think the competition will create a lot of new ideas and development," Molnar said. Meanwhile, he'll focus on building the Streetwing, an open-source, flying electric car Molnar says he'll take from Alaska to Argentina. "It's a much better way to travel than with a typical car," he said.
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Jessica Leeder