Chapter 57
Looking like a flying saucer from “The Jetsons,” Ford Motor Co.’s single-seat, fiberglass-bodied Levacar Mach 1 (sometimes called the Levascooter) could theoretically accelerate to 500 miles per hour, nearly 80 percent of the top speed of a Boeing 747. Displayed at Amsterdam’s 43rd International Motor Show in 1961, the concept car traveled around a circular glass track, tethered to an arm, propelled by blasts of compressed air that flowed out of its underside. Its pilot that day was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
The idea of a flying car took off almost immediately after the first airplane itself. In 1917 the American designer Glenn Curtiss almost bankrupted himself developing the two-seater “Curtiss Autoplane,” which was little more than three-tiered aluminum wings and a tiny propeller bolted to a Ford Model T. Thirty years later, Robert Fulton’s 1946 “Airphibian” was the first flying car to be officially approved by the Civil Aviation Committee, but it never surged skyward due to inadequate financing. Part of the reason Curtiss’s and Fulton’s aviating autos never achieved lift-off was a hole in their efforts large enough that an Airbus could comfortably glide on through: Basically the American paradigm of the gadfly inventors bucking the odds to struggle through temporary defeat and win eventual validation, they lacked a Fortune 100 company’s deep coffers and vast phalanxes of engineers.
The Levacar, however, was designed under the direction of Dr. Andrew Kucher, vice-president of engineering and research at Ford. Kucher, who had taught aerodynamic theory at City College in New York prior to working at Ford, once stated that “Trains and cars that operated on a levitation system could be commonplace by the year 2000.” His vision of an above-ground future was quoted from the New York Times to Mechanix Illustrated.
Kucher’s wasn’t just another best-of-all-possible-worlds naive voice in the wilderness of mavericks. Ford spent in excess of a $1 million on the Levacar, producing the full-size version, the Levacar Mach I, which measured 46.72 inches high, 93.56 inches long, and 53.50 inches wide and weighed 252 pounds. Made of aluminum and fiberglass, it came in a red and cream color combination.
In 1958, the company placed the Levacar on display at the Ford Rotunda in an exhibition it called “New Adventures on the American Road.” Originally constructed as Ford’s pavilion for the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, the Rotunda was designed by Albert Kahn, “The Architect of Detroit.” Dismantled at the fair’s close and rebuilt at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the Rotunda was as round as Mae West and rose twelve stories into the air. Nine thousand recessed floodlights suffused the building in a palette of colors rivaling Matisse and Crayola. In 1953, Ford placed an 18,000-pound geodesic dome over the building’s courtyard. Designed by Buckminster Fuller, it was the earliest application of his lightweight dome structures, which would go on to became a weapon in the Cold War, thwarting the Soviets at exhibitions as far-flung as Afghanistan, Moscow, and Montreal.
With the addition of the dome, the Rotunda became by some accounts the fifth-most popular tourist attraction in the United States, drawing 1.5 million visitors annually, more, even, than the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. Ford’s placing the Levacar in the Rotunda suggested a corporate policy that, expressed poetically, might be summed up by Walt Whitman: “O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!”
The Image Works, Inc.
Ford demonstrated the air-powered vehicle for the press in that 1958 introduction, and, one day later, put it through its paces again at its annual shareholders meeting. Afterwards, the exhibit was opened to the public for last few years of the 1950s in the Rotunda, where Ford handed out thousands of promotional models of Levacar to visitors. The Levacar even shared exhibition space—and status—with a scale-model Nucleon. Looking like Batman’s pickup truck, the never-built Nucleon would purportedly travel 5,000 miles between recharges of the pint-size atomic fission reactor located in the trunk. (Decades later, the Nucleon inspired the atom-powered autos in the “Fallout” video games.)
But in 1962, a workman inside the Rotunda knocked over either a firepot or a heater on the building’s tar roof. In minutes the 114,000 square feet of Indiana limestone burned like a heated diamond. In choosing not to rebuild the twentieth-century landmark of past achievement and future vision, Ford also chose not to pursue any more dreams of shaking off the shackles of gravity. The Levacar became just another concept car glimpsed in time’s rear-view mirror. We could no more leave the rough surface of asphalt and concrete and gravel than the first Model T.
The dream of flying cars stayed aloft but was defined by defeat. Accordingly, Henry Smolinski’s AVE Mizar was the Titanic and Hindenburg of flying cars. Smolinski, who founded Advanced Vehicle Engineers in Van Nuys, California, in 1971, fused a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto. The idea was simple: Once the flying car landed it could detach the wings and drive away. But in 1973, Smolinski and a copilot took the AVE Mizar into the sky, whereupon a wing folded inward, pieces snapped off, and the hybrid car-plane plummeted into a pickup truck parked in the street down below.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” said Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and cofounder of PayPal Holdings, Inc., lamenting the way we abdicated the air and grabbed at the mundane distraction of Twitter instead. News of flying cars popped up over the years—for example, Krossblade Aerospace Systems LLC’s vertical take-off and landing vehicle—but certain problems remained intractable: how could drivers, racking up 32,166 fatal motor vehicle crashes in 2015, manage in the air where, as Doc Brown put it in Back to the Future, “we don’t need roads.” Flying cars would only ensure a regular surplus of Darwin Award candidates.
The answer may have been unveiled at the 2016 International Consumer Electronics Show, which in the last several years has become the preferred stage for high-tech car debuts. Ehang Inc. solved the human problem by taking most of the human element out of it. The “pilot” on its electric-powered Ehang 184 sets a flight plan via touchscreen, and then needs to give only either of two commands—“take off” and “land.” (An instruction set for competent aviating preferable to Douglas Adams’s: “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”) A mash-up of drone and helicopter, the Ehang 184 can be fully charged in two hours, carry up to 220 pounds, and stay aloft for twenty-three minutes.
Recently, Airbus Group SE made public its intention of producing airborne drones that would ferry cargo first and in time passengers, while Dubai’s Roads & Transportation Agency announced at the 2017 World Government Summit it would have a drone service, using the Ehang 184, operating by the end of the year. AeroMobil s.r.o. and PAL-V International B.V. premiered their street- and sky-legal models at the 2017 luxury trade show, Top Marques Monaco. And Uber Technologies Inc.’s Elevate division plans to pick up and whisk groups of passengers (pooling them will ostensibly keep riders’ cost down) to their destinations with a fleet of 1,200 airborne autos within a decade. Soon, we will finally navigate the unclouded sky as easily as we do the azure sea.