When I think of some of my favourite movies, sci-fi often tops the list. And when I look at what makes the aesthetic of these modern, cyberpunk worlds so great, it’s often the towering cities and the flying cars weaving between them. Think Deckard’s spinner in Blade Runner, or Korben Dallas’s cab in The Fifth Element. But are flying cars even that far away? Not as far as you’d think, because prop-based flying cars are not only coming, they’re already rolling off a production line.
The one leading the charge is XPeng, the Chinese EV maker, through its flying car arm Aridge, until recently known as Aeroht. Its Land Aircraft Carrier is a six-wheeled electric van with a two-seat electric aircraft folded into the boot. It has racked up around 7,000 orders at a price in the region of $300,000, and deliveries in China are due to start around the end of this year. I sat in a room in Munich this week listening to the company lay out its plans, and I came away convinced flying cars are properly happening. Just not necessarily here, and I’ll get to that.
The mother ship with an aircraft in the boot
I was at XPeng’s brand day workshops in Munich, where Wang Tan, co-founder of Aridge and the man heading up the flying car programme, walked us through it. Aridge claims to be the largest flying car company in Asia, with 1,800 employees, and its first product is a genuine new species of vehicle. The Land Aircraft Carrier is a 5.5 metre, six-wheeled range extender EV with over 1,000 km of driving range. In the boot sits a two-seat eVTOL, an electric aircraft that takes off and lands vertically, so no runway needed. One button releases it, and the van can recharge the aircraft six times over. Wang Tan’s line was that this is the first vehicle that can put an aircraft in its boot, and it’s hard to argue.
His pitch for why it exists was refreshingly personal. He’s a helicopter pilot, and the four things that annoy him are hangars, fuel, the 40 hours it takes to learn to fly, and trailering an aircraft anywhere. The mother ship approach answers all four. Store it in the boot, charge it from the van, learn it in minutes, drive it wherever you fancy flying.
This isn’t vapourware either. Aridge has built what it calls the world’s first mass production flying car factory, with capacity for 10,000 units a year. Mass production is due to start around the end of 2026, with customer deliveries following into 2027. There’s a second act coming too, a tilt-rotor hybrid flying car with over 500 km of range and a top speed above 360 km/h.
Is Europe actually getting it?
Sooner than anyone expected, and I heard it announced in Munich myself. XPeng revealed at its brand day that it has European approval to start bringing in their flying vehicle. I’ll be honest, this one caught the room off guard, and at the time of writing it has barely been reported anywhere.
Some context on why that matters. Until this week, the roadmap was China first, where the government has thrown its weight behind what it calls the low altitude economy, all the commercial activity in airspace below 1,000 metres, then the Middle East, where 600 orders have already been placed in the Gulf and Aridge holds a special flight permit from the UAE’s aviation authority. Europe looked years away, since EASA only recently published the world’s first dedicated airworthiness technical specifications for eVTOLs. That said, an approval is not the same as one of these landing in your local GAA pitch. Full certification, airspace rules and national regulators all still stand between an announcement in Munich and an aircraft over your house.
A three minute lesson and off you go
XPeng’s boldest claim isn’t about the hardware at all. The company reckons that if you can drive a car, or even just play video games, you can learn to fly this thing with a joystick in three to five minutes. In China you’ll still need a pilot licence, but the flying itself is deliberately dumbed down, with intelligent flight navigation, automatic landing and geofenced no-fly zones doing the heavy lifting. Aridge is also planning over 200 flying camps across China, approved sites where the airspace paperwork is already handled, so owners just turn up and fly.
For me, it’s a foolhardy approach, but I understand why they’re trying to keep it simple. Nobody buys a $300,000 toy that demands 40 hours of flight school. To be fair to XPeng, the safety engineering underneath sounds serious, with redundant batteries, propulsion and flight control systems, so if one fails a backup takes over. Wang Tan also told us that XPeng’s founder makes every senior executive fly the thing themselves, borrowing the wartime logic of making the parachute factory boss jump first. He’s flown it a couple of times himself.
Could you imagine this in Ireland?
It’s hard to. This very week, the Taoiseach said he’s leaning towards a full ban on electric scooters, and the Garda Commissioner would “absolutely” support one. We’ve also just watched Manna, an Irish drone delivery success story, pause its Irish operations over the lack of a clear national framework, after residents complained about noise from drones flying at around 60 metres. Even though XPeng is proposing ordinary punters piloting themselves around the airspace below 1,000 metres – so they will be quieter – I still think the Oireachtas transport committee would need a defibrillator.
Being totally transparent, I don’t see it working in Irish urban areas at all. But I do see the attraction of one of these for flying around picturesque rural Ireland. A machine you drive to the west coast, release from the boot and fly over a landscape with nobody underneath to annoy sounds far more plausible than a Blade Runner commute over Dublin.
The rest of the field
The wider category is a story of Chinese momentum and Western attrition. EHang, another Chinese firm, is already flying paying tourists on autonomous sightseeing hops, and remains one of only two companies in the world with full certification, both Chinese. Joby Aviation is closest in the West and expects to carry its first paying passengers in Dubai this year, while FAA certification in the US isn’t expected before 2027. Europe’s home-grown hopes have largely collapsed, with Lilium being scrapped after two insolvencies and Volocopter rescued by Chinese money. The pattern is that flying car startups without a deep-pocketed industrial parent don’t survive, which is exactly why an EV giant like XPeng treating this as a side project might be the ones to crack it.
The Goosed verdict
Flying cars are real, funded and in production, and that still feels mad to type. What they aren’t is the sci-fi dream of replacing your car, and XPeng knows it, which is why the first product is a leisure machine for wealthy enthusiasts rather than an air taxi. The gap now isn’t technology, it’s regulation and public patience, and if Ireland’s week of e-scooter panic tells us anything, we’ll be watching this one from the ground for a good while yet.
The Land Aircraft Carrier costs around $300,000, with Chinese deliveries due from late 2026 into 2027 and no European launch date.
