Self-driving cars, while a cool idea, are still a long way off. Flying cars are another thing the future promised us and the Airspeeder M3, a craft created by an Australian company called Alauda Racing, might bring us a little closer to that goal. On the airborne track, that is.
You see, the the aircraft (and it is an aircraft) takes a little something from drones and from Formula One cars in order to create the M3, a rather dangerous-looking piece of equipment that will apparently form the basis for a new race series called EXA.
Earth to Airspeeder M3
Which, look, will probably be amazing to watch. But it’s not quite as dangerous as you might expect, since the race series basically consists of supersized FPV drones — the Airspeeder M3 will be remotely piloted. Because it’s still in development, naturally. There will be ten of them racing at a time so there will be collisions and explosions (probably).
But the aim is to eventually get a human pilot inside these things. Which doesn’t seem like a terribly hard thing to do, though you’ll need a brass set of something-or-other (for balance, obviously) in order to get into the cockpit for this 100kg, 120km/h VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing). The craft’s batteries will support flight times of 15 minutes and races (which are remotely piloted, remember) will last for 45 minutes. So there are two pitstops planned, with F1-style battery swaps, to get to the end of the race.
Once Airspeeder’s remote pilots (called ‘telebotic avatars’ or ‘Aviators’) have proved whether or not its safe (relatively) for a human pilot to get inside, that’ll apparently happen. If your concern with Formula One is that the crashes aren’t dangerous enough, it could be that the EXA series is for you. There are set to be three races before the end of this year, but dates for them haven’t been set yet. One thing’s for sure — we’ll be watching Australia’s Next Top Podracer as soon as the series kicks off.