On March 25, Xiaopeng announced that its Xiaopeng Huitian has completed several test flights of its latest intelligent flying car, the X2, and has arrived in the Netherlands for the first time on March 10, preparing to make an appearance in Europe.
In addition, Xiaopeng Automobile also exposed another patent for the design of a flying car: the new product looks more like a car, and the top propeller is a foldable design, or it may become a new solution to meet the actual traffic conditions of land and air.
Xiaopeng Huitian, which received the largest single financing of $500 million last October, is on the fast track. Globally, the process of capitalization of the flying automotive industry is extremely rapid, with a total of five flying car companies going public through SPAC in 2021. They are the American flying car company Archer and Joby, the German flying car company Lilium, the British flying car company Vetic, and embraer's flying car company Eve. Flying cars, a completely new field, from behind the scenes to the front of the stage, there must be a large number of technology and patent reserves in the early stage, in order to be able to have such a hot now.
According to the Japan Patent Office (JPO) survey report on technology trends in flying vehicles released in April 2021, 584 patents related to flying cars were filed in the United States, 574 patents were filed in China, 307 patents were filed in Europe, and then Japan and South Korea. There are also large differences at the corporate level between China and the United States, where the total number of patents is not equal. Shenzhen DJI Technology and Foshan Shenfeng Aviation Technology Co., Ltd. ranked first and third in the global list of flying car applications with a large number of related patents; the remaining eight were occupied by American companies.
Unlike fixed wings, which are popular in the aircraft field, enterprises prefer the research and development of rotary wings in the field of flying automobiles. Although the rotating wing has a smaller payload, it does not require a take-off and landing runway, and the vertical take-off and landing of the multi-rotor is obviously more in line with the use scenarios of flying cars. Then when choosing a powertrain, more companies are in line with modern car companies - manufacturing pure electric flying cars. From the data point of view, there are only 69 patents on gasoline-electric hybrid flying vehicles in China and the United States, but there are 616 patents on pure electricity, which is almost ten times the gap; the total number of patents related to rechargeable batteries in China and the United States has reached 479, far more than fuel cells and generators. Technology and patents will make products from scratch, but whether they can be truly applied still needs policies and markets to boost.
In February, Klein Vision's AirCar received the world's first airworthiness certificate for flying cars. But in sharp contrast to the two previous outstanding advantages of the United States and China in terms of patents, this is a product of a flying car company from Slovakia. The AirCar uses BMW's 160 hp hybrid engine as the power source and has a range of up to 1,000 kilometers.
What is the significance of an airworthiness certificate? In the host country, only aircraft with airworthiness certificates are considered safe and available and can be put into operation or sold. However, for the mainland, in the past, the issuance of airworthiness certificates was for a single aircraft, that is to say, each aircraft must obtain its own airworthiness certificate, which is obviously inappropriate for flying cars. But this dilemma was also resolved just last month.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued the "Special Conditions for EHang EH216-S Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System", which is the world's first special condition for the model qualification verification project of unmanned aerial vehicle system, providing a basis for the compliance and safety of EHang Intelligent EH216-S model. This special condition not only solves the problem of unified model identification, but also proposes a special standard for safety for unmanned aerial vehicles around the world. But from this point of view, China has clearly surpassed the civil aviation power and completed the role change from follower to leader.
In the longer term, getting an airworthiness certificate is also the first step in the long march. For example, driverless cars must also go from closed roads to open traffic, from security officers to really unmanned, and the road of flying cars will not be better than cars. Therefore, at present, how to find a balance between maintaining the safety of flying cars and the development of technology within the industry will be the key to determining how long the flying car will "help run".
The author of this article is kicking car gang Xiao Yu