One reason that I'm convinced there's a market for an inexpensive single-piloted helicopter of the sort I'm pioneering: the Honda 50 Cub. It's well turned sixty, effectively unchanged, and still in production after sales of 100 million units plus.
"Best-selling cars" don't come close, and in fact the term "Best-selling name-badge" is better applied to the likes of the Golf and Corolla. Accordingly the closest you come to continuous production is the VW Beetle (and even that changed moreso than the above in appearance), and that has been outsold by a factor of four by the unpretentious Cub.
Reasons for its original popularity include the Japanese love of the miniature, a condensed road matrix and a love of home-delivered noodles (which is why it could be ridden with one hand as well as with two).
Above all, however, for a society transitioning from foot or rickshaw to bicycle and beyond in terms of mass-manoeuvrability, it has always been the affordable choice.
(China might be considered the only society to have skipped the phase and transitioned from pedal-power to automotive, but that was only possible because of an oven-ready manufacturing previously established elsewhere, along with a global network of trade).
Accordingly, as movement in three dimensions becomes a possibility, it will neither be confined to the multi-million pound models littering the eVTOL databases, and nor will these types be among the best-selling.
I would be more than happy to be looked down upon as among the lowest form of aviation, so long as I am out-selling every other in unit terms... In this venture, money (along with physics) talks.
There are jet aircraft out there too that have seen service for nearly seventy years beside steam locomotives that saw out a century ~ in view of which a month's lockdown for a pandemic is not necessarily an impediment to the development of iconic types. Or that's the hope, anyway.
And my own first means of motorisation, all those years ago?
Honda P50 and PC50 mopeds... followed by the self-same 50 step-through motorcycle.
