When talking about the future, there is no better place to start than the flying car — the poster-child for “the future” for nearly every generation over the last 100 years. In February, seemingly out of nowhere and lost in the post-election news cycle, Alef Aeronautics shared their first official video of their flying car, Model Zero. Unlike some of the flying car concepts of the past, this actually looks like a car, and not a small plane with wheels.
The company has been developing flying cars for about a decade. After showing a prototype to Tim Draper in 2017, an early investor in Tesla and SpaceX, he backed Alef with $3 million in seed funding (an extremely small amount of capital for a product as complex and ambitious as a flying car). In 2022, they released their first prototype, the Model A, a 100% electric flying car can drive up to 220 miles with a 110-mile flight range. It became the first vehicle of its kind to obtain a Special Airworthiness Certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration, ostensibly becoming the first ever legal flying car. Now, 3 years later, they’ve released the “first-ever video in history of a car driving and vertically taking off.”
According to Alef, the first release has 3,300 pre-orders with MSRP expected to start at around $300,000 and deliveries to begin next year.