What's special about the vaporware above? Correct. Nothing. What it is though is an attempt by the firm that practically invented popular motoring to break into a field it thought was about to replace it. Which to make you feel better, just shows how the brightest minds are as dim as yours or mine.
Okay, mine. But when I flew on contract in Shanghai, beside pilots or the teachers of English those I most met were consultants from the auto-industry teaching China how to build cars at scale. In fact VW had the largest manufacturing plant of any of them. Although by the time they came up with what you see above ~ ten seconds of work on ChatGPT nowadays ~ sales of VWs to a burgeoning middle class in China were collapsing.
It happens time and again with legacy industries, having the rug pulled from under their feet. One reason is that essentially all they know about is cars (or negatives in the case of Kodak) and thus are unable to see the true potential of anything else. A substantial secondary point of failure that the West is most prone to however is the status quo viz. the primary concern of people running the likes of Kodak or VW is to hold out until such time as the pension bears fruit... and the best way to do that is to venture nothing, and spend the minimum.
What spending the minimum meant for VW was asking people pioneering eVTOLs in China to come up with a 'me-too' model of their own. This was a model pursued by Audi and Porsche, incidentally, beside VW. All of these models failed because they did not work at all well as aeroplanes, even in digital modelling of how they might perform in terms of range, endurance and returns on investment.
For at the end of the day, you have to have lived both cars and aircraft as I've done and continue to do: but then fuck, what do I know? There are specific end-uses for flying cars, like the doctor who flies a Pivotal personal air vehicle because (a) he is rich and (b) lives in the middle of nowhere, but the majority of us live in cities and it is in such places that cars have evolved to a level of supreme practicality.
Crewed aircraft by and large, and especially in cities, are not really practical at all. Where they are practical is in isolated environments that can be tightly regulated, like Manchester Airport along the road here or military airbases in whichever part of the world. Elsewhere, should your car have been vandalised or appear to have been dented by one of the neighbours, you get in and go to work. Doing that in a 'flying car' within the urban landscape has got death written all over it.
What most impresses me is the almost messianic faith in people developing eVTOLs in how they have eliminated what were once considered to be the risks involved in taking flight, and as PAVs develop you will see that air-crashes become as routine as car-crashes, and equally entertaining on YouTube.
The mistake VW made was not, instead of seeing flying cars replacing what we have now, seeing how electric vehicles would do that instead.
Two differences between the East and the West. Firstly they have governments that know what they want technically whether in Japan, Korea and China and promote it to the max until they dominate the market. Whereas we're good at law and advertising and buying what they produce... BYD already being the market leader here in the UK.
Secondly, Europe's obsession with saving the planet has handed the EV market on a plate to China, by destroying what we currently have as fast as possible without the know-how or investment to provide for any alternative.
The UK produces just 1% of the world's carbon emissions, thus we're the passenger on the Titanic baling it out with a bucket instead of accepting fate and enjoying the music while it lasts.
