Flying cars might actually happen! How car brands like Xpeng and Hyundai and even the Australian Government are planning for alternatives to your Toyota Camry

Once upon a time, flying cars were a little bit of a Jetsons-style pipe dream.

While they’re not exactly right around the corner, it’s starting to look like flying cars might be the ‘future transport’ tech that everyone wants to be the first to get right. Shame about the hoverboards from Back to the Future Part II.

And this isn’t just someone sticking wings on a Commodore or rotors on a Corolla. Start-ups and traditional automotive brands alike are putting huge resources into developing proper ‘flying cars’. Even the government has designs on using them for a few purposes.

It’s worth pointing out that ‘flying cars’ is somewhat misleading, as most existing prototypes or models are closer to passenger drones - kind of half way between a coupe and a helicopter.

That, and they’re almost exclusively electric. Because of the nature of their propulsion, they’re also referred to as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

Their designs vary, but for the most part they’re far from something that could be considered reasonable as private personal transport for the masses.

Instead, the plans from most businesses involved seem to revolve around special use cases, or as a network of landing hubs for small-volume commuting. Effectively, in many scenarios it appears they’ll take the roles of helicopters without the noise level or fuel use.

Australia has already seen some tangible movement towards eVTOL ‘flying cars’ here, with Chinese auto brand Xpeng having shown off its X2 ‘flying car’ in Melbourne last year.

Jason Clarke, CEO of TrueEV (Xpeng’s local importer) says the X2 is intended to "revolutionise transportation” with a “safe, efficient and eco-friendly solution for city travel” that’s “perfect for navigating urban environments”, thanks to a compact design.

Essentially, passenger transport in built-up areas.

Clarke told CarsGuide the X2 is far from just a promotional gimmick.

“Now, people say ‘what's the relevance of the X2 flying car? Is it just a gimmick?’ Well, no,” he said at the Electric SUV Expo in Melbourne.

“This showcases Xpeng’s brand — about low-altitude mobility, about the future of mobility — and what we have with the X2 is the relevance that it is registrable in Dubai.

“So it is being flown under registration and licence and it is being used and tested for taxi flights in China. I don’t think you’re going to be doing the school pick-up and drop-off anytime soon in Melbourne, as much as you want to, but you can see the relevance there.

“Maybe for emergency services, maybe for rural applications, maybe in other remote locations or across airports.”

Uber also has in the past outlined plans for aerial mobility via passenger eVTOLs, though its pre-pandemic plans to have ‘flying taxis’ in Melbourne from 2023 have - as is now evident - not panned out.

The company sold its ‘Elevate’ division to another Californian startup, Joby Aviation, which plans to essentially do the same in the US as Uber had planned for Melbourne.

But it’s not just startups on the eVTOL train, with Hyundai-owned company Supernal having recently revealed a five-person passenger eVTOL aircraft called the S-A2.

In the same way Uber had planned for a few years of development before it launched commercial flights, Supernal is aiming for commercial flights in 2028, but has the resources of Hyundai Motor Group’s automotive designers and manufacturing teams behind it.

“With our ‘right product, right market at the right time’ philosophy, S-A2 embodies critical work Supernal is conducting with fleet operators, suppliers, governments and Hyundai Motor Group to ensure AAM becomes a safe, economically viable and widespread mode of transportation in the coming decades,” Jaiwon Shin, president of Hyundai Motor Group and CEO of Supernal said in mid-2024.

So, will it happen?

Much like autonomous driving on our roads, promises of commercial passenger eVTOL flights in the near future aren’t guaranteed. But the big difference between previous attempts at ‘flying cars’ and this current push is that the Australian Government is genuinely interested - and investing.

The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts has an entire section of its Drones website dedicated to ‘Advanced Air Mobility’ (AAM), saying the emerging aviation sector will “utilise new aircraft types to transport people and goods”.

As well as having signed a memorandum of understanding with the Victorian Government in 2021 and gotten the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) on board, the Federal Government has outlined a few key areas in which it sees value in AAM: regional air mobility for “connecting regional and remote Australia”, urban air mobility to “reduce travel times and congestion”, drone cargo services to “drive productivity improvements across a range of industries” and "government applications" in “defence, aeromedical services and emergency management”.

While it’s certainly going to be longer than a couple of years until we see passenger eVTOLs in the sky over our cities and towns, the fact there are government policies and global brands with huge investments in tech means it’s no longer just a pipe dream.