Flying cars - Coches voladores

Three years ago, Silicon Valley developed a fleeting infatuation with a startup called Zee.Aero. The company had set up shop right next to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which was curious, because Google tightly controls most of the land in the area. Then a reporter spotted patent filings showing Zee.Aero was working on a small, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.In the handful of news articles that ensued, all the startup would say was that it wasn’t affiliated with Google or any other technology company. Then it stopped answering media inquiries altogether. Employees say they were even given wallet-size cards with instructions on how to deflect questions from reporters. After that, the only information that trickled out came from amateur pilots, who occasionally posted pictures of a strange-looking plane taking off from a nearby airport.

Zee.Aero doesn’t belong to Google or its holding company, Alphabet. It belongs to Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Page has personally funded Zee.Aero since its launch in 2010 while demanding that his involvement stay hidden from the public, according to 10 people with intimate knowledge of the company. Zee.Aero, however, is just one part of Page’s plan to usher in an age of personalized air travel, free from gridlocked streets and the cramped indignities of modern flight. Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Page is using his personal fortune to build the future of his childhood dreams.The Zee.Aero headquarters, located at 2700 Broderick Way, is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building with an ugly, blocky design and an industrial feel. Page initially restricted the Zee.Aero crew to the first floor, retaining the second floor for a man cave worthy of a multibillionaire: bedroom, bathroom, expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s first rocket engines—a gift from his pal Musk. As part of the secrecy, Zee.Aero employees didn’t refer to Page by name; he was known as GUS, the guy upstairs. Soon enough, they needed the upstairs space, too, and engineers looked on in awe as GUS’s paintings, exercise gear, and rocket engine were hauled away.

What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible.

Flying cars, of course, are ridiculous. 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.

But better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have convinced a growing body of smart, wealthy, and apparently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and lands vertically—or at least a small, electric, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it appears, are the companies Page is quietly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the under­lying technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible.”

Northern California in particular has had a long fascination with flying cars. In 1927 a now mostly forgotten ­engineer named Alexander Weygers first began thinking up the design for a flying saucer that could zip between rooftops. In 1945 he received a patent for what he described as a “­discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine with room inside for passengers to walk around, cook, and sleep. He depicted smaller versions landing in pods atop buildings in downtown San Francisco. No discopters were built, though it’s believed that the U.S. Army, which paid visits to Weygers’s compound in Carmel Valley, Calif., tinkered with a prototype.

Today, the world’s premier ­flying-car enthusiast is Paul Moller, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis. Fifty years ago, when he was teaching mechanical and aeronautical engineering, he developed a specific vision: an aircraft you could park in your garage, drive a few blocks to a small runway, then take skyward. He tested his first prototype, the XM-2, in 1966. The XM-2 resembled a flying saucer with a seat at its center protected by a plastic bubble. It managed an altitude of 4 feet, while graduate students held it steady with ropes. “We were worried if the machine got out of control, we might kill a few people,” Moller says.

Self-flying aircraft is so much easier than what the auto companies are trying to do with self-driving cars

Carmakers invested in other areas, too, that are helpful for building small electric planes, particularly batteries and the semiconductors that control them. Self-driving systems, like the kind Google uses in its Koala cars, are perhaps a decade away from mainstream use on the roads, but they may already be good enough for the skies. “Self-flying aircraft is so much easier than what the auto companies are trying to do with self-driving cars,” Moore says.

Moore’s paper circulated, rekindling excitement. Sometime in 2009, a small group of engineers had begun meeting in Silicon Valley to discuss funding an electric-plane project. One of them was JoeBen Bevirt, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who had studied under Moller at UC Davis. Another was Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford. And another was Page. Although it initially looked as if they might all team up, Kroo and Page broke off to start Zee.Aero. Alone, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a company he hopes will beat Zee.Aero to market and prove that his efforts with Moller—and the older man’s life’s work—weren’t in vain.

Bevirt owns a 500-acre compound near Santa Cruz, Calif. To get there, you turn onto idyllic California State Route 1 and drive past the boardwalk, a few blocks of strip malls, and 15 miles of undeveloped, windswept coastal dunes. Then you turn onto a dirt road, pass a lake and a grove of towering redwoods, and walk through gardens overflowing with lavender and roses. It’s here that Bevirt has built a series of workshops, plus housing for about half of his 35 employees.

Bevirt grew up nearby on an electricity-free commune where his mom worked as a midwife and his father built custom homes. From a young age, he learned his way around toolboxes and construction sites, and was an avid reader. After consuming the sci-fi classic The Forever Formula in elementary school, he decided he wanted to build the kind of personal aircraft the book’s hero flew and persuaded a friend to help. “We built lots of prototypes, but they always crashed and burned,” he says. They shifted to custom bikes.

The flying-car dream stuck with Bevirt as he entered UC Davis in 1991 to study mechanical engineering, and he quickly found himself working for Moller, building one prototype after another. Bevirt eventually concluded their shared dream wouldn’t be feasible until battery and motor technology improved. He figured he’d need to wait 20 years. “Paul had been working on this for 30 years, and he was 50 years ahead of his time,” he says.

Bevirt got his bachelor’s, and then a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He worked in biotech after graduation, co-founding a company called Velocity11 that built robots to sequence DNA. His next company, called Joby (his childhood nickname), sold camera accessories such as flexible plastic tripods. Joby turned Bevirt into a multimillionaire. In 2008 he started Joby Energy, a maker of airborne wind turbines whose technology Google later acquired. The 20-year mark was approaching, so in 2009 he also used some of his wealth to buy the 500 acres and start Joby Aviation.

Its headquarters is an engineer’s fantasyland. The focal point is a large wooden building where two dozen workers sit at a few rows of desks jammed with computers. Aside from the clusters of large black monitors, the place feels more like a barn than an office. Aircraft prototypes hang from the ceiling, as does a thick climbing rope for exercise. In the open kitchen, abutting a long redwood dining table in one corner, a cook uses ingredients from the nearby gardens to prepare three meals a day. While the smell of a Malaysian curry fills the room, a banjo twangs from speakers overhead.

The manufacturing happens at a series of buildings about 100 yards downhill, past gardens and an outdoor clay pizza oven. One of the buildings is an airy warehouse with a giant oven inside—but this one isn’t for pizza. It’s used to cure the ­carbon-fiber bodies of the planes and looks like a Quonset hut. Former members of Oracle’s America’s Cup sailing team, some of the world’s leading materials experts, oversee the curing process, baking the carbon fiber at about 194F. In another building, engineers build ­cantaloupe-size electric motors; in a third, they test electronics; in a fourth, they put the finishing touches on wings and other parts. Out back, there’s a large truck with an extendible arm atop its trailer like a cherry picker, which hoists propellers high into the air so engineers can perform wind tests while driving down a road at high speed. Robotic prototypes buzz around.

Bevirt funded Joby Aviation by himself until last year, when he was joined by Paul Sciarra, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. Sciarra grew up in New Jersey, taught himself to code, hit it big with Pinterest, then went looking for something new to throw himself into. He, too, concluded that electric motors and batteries appeared to have applications well beyond the auto industry. “The goal is to build a product that impacts the lives of lots of people,” Sciarra says. “Not just folks that are amateur pilots or wealthy, but everyone.”

Sciarra and Bevirt hope to begin flying a human-scale prototype plane later this year. They won’t give the exact ­specifications but suggest that it could hold, say, a family of four and travel 100 miles or so on a full charge. The vehicle looks like a plane-helicopter hybrid packed with propellers, about eight mounted on the wings and tail. For takeoff and landing, the propellers hang horizontally like a helicopter’s and rotate for forward propulsion once in the air. Joby Aviation has already built smaller prototypes and has models of the plane’s body, wings, and propellers scattered about the manufacturing facilities. Bevirt and Sciarra see the vehicle taking off from parking garages, roofs, or areas alongside highways. They want to offer flights as an Uber-like service—summon a plane when you need it.

The Joby aircraft looks similar to other vehicles being built around the world. In May the German company E-volo conducted manned flights of its Volocopter, a two-seat aircraft powered by 18 propellers. Other flying-car startups include AeroMobil, Lilium Aviation, and Terrafugia. Even Airbus has built a two-seater prototype at its Silicon Valley labs, say two people familiar with the designs.