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This reminds me of the Moller M400 Skycar. Although the inventor behind it was likely years ahead of his time, after 50 years he is still trying to get it off t
by matheweis 8y ago
This reminds me of the Moller M400 Skycar. Although the inventor behind it was likely years ahead of his time, after 50 years he is still trying to get it off the ground. Sadly at this point the company is characterized as “no longer believable enough to gain investors”.
One interesting thing I see in common between the two is a great deal of effort spent quite early on retaining IP (patents, etc), vs successful companies who seem to rely more on execution velocity and first mover advantages until they’re much more mature.
- scarejunba 8y agoI looked it up and interestingly the Moller skycar received $100 million in funding. I think it was just never a working product.
- matheweis 8y agoAs the many drone-like flying vehicle prototypes have shown, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a vtol aircraft. Knowing what we do today about modern rotorcraft theory, it’s likely that the disc loading of the Moller prototypes was too high for the design to be practically efficient. It’s also likely that the Wankels didn’t perform anywhere near expectations for this reason... I don’t believe either of these to have insurmountable problems. Rather, it seems likely that a disproportionate amount of effort was sunk into the software for the flight controller before software development practices had advanced enough to make it practical; if I recall correctly there was something like 10’s or 100’s of millions of lines of assembly code involved... Just an idea that was ahead of its time, plagued by corporate missteps.