Hey, Larry Page, why so invested in a perpetually failing, 100-year-old idea?
Flying cars: From iconic symbol of the future, to rich man’s toy
by Colleen Killingsworth
Flying cars have passed through the imaginations of dreamers, creators, and thinkers for decades, but despite many admirable and bizarre tries, no nerd has yet to get it completely right. A new report from Bloomberg has revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page is the latest in a long series of hopefuls trying to change that.
In 2013, a small company named Zee.Aero (annoying punctuation theirs) popped up surprisingly close to Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. It’s proximity to the tech giant raised a lot of questions, but Page, who has been personally funding the startup since 2010, didn’t want anyone to know what he was up to.
The company’s employees didn’t even know that he was behind the project back then; they simply referred to him as GUS, the guy upstairs. Bloomberg reported, “Page once vowed to a colleague that if his involvement in the sector ever became public, he might pull support from the companies.”
So, why so secret? Maybe because flying cars have a long history of failure and impracticality.
As the Bloomberg article explains the fascination, “Lone-wolf inventors have tried to build them for decades, with little to show for their efforts besides disappointed investors and depleted bank accounts. Those failures have done little to lessen the yearning: In the nerd hierarchy of needs, the flying car is up there with downloadable brains and a working holodeck.”
According to New York Times bestselling author, Steven Kotler, the obsession was sparked back in 1917 when aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss took the first stab at making a car fly. His “forty-foot-long tri-winged beast made from aluminum” never flew. It did hop, however, and Kotler claims, “that hop was enough, inspiring almost a century of innovation.”
Then came the 6-cylinder, 100-horsepower Studebaker that Waldo Waterman modified for flight in 1937. Despite his best efforts for the next two decades, Waterman never received enough funding to build more than five of these “Aerobiles.”
Theodore P. Hall produced a spectacular failure in 1947 when he designed the ConVairCar Model 118. The photo below is from a demonstration flight in California that was the ConVairCar Model 118’s last: low fuel led to an emergency landing and subsequent crash that destroyed the vehicle.
The most promising attempt came in the form of the 1966 Aero-Car. Prototypes had been capable of reaching 60mph on the ground and 110mph in the sky, but amid the oil crisis of the 1970’s production was abandoned.
A few modern companies have managed to create functional models that are technically available for order today, but they’re mostly theoretical and none have actually been delivered to customers. This is probably due to the insane costs — Moller’s SkyCar M400, for example, has a $3.5 million reserve price.
Terrafugia’s model, Transition, offers an alternative for $196,000.
Undaunted, Page has funneled over $100 million into Zee.Aero since its inception in 2010, and it’s not his only foray into the realm of personal aviation. He’s also funding a separate but similar startup called Kitty Hawk.
He’s going to quite the extreme lengths “to build the future of his childhood dreams,” as Bloomberg put it.
Always a solid investment strategy.
