AirCar inventor and designer Stefan Klein unveiled the production prototype to a crowd of industry leaders at the 2025 Living Legends of Aviation Gala Dinner in Beverly Hills, California.
The AirCar holds a Certificate of Airworthiness and has so far completed over 170 flight hours and more than 500 take-offs and landings.
AirCar first appeared in The Engineer in 2021 after it had undertaken a flight from Nitra Airport to Bratislava Airport.
Since then, Klein Vision has modified how AirCar is manufactured, upgraded to a more powerful engine configuration and added Garmin Avionics G3X avionics that introduce redundancy and autopilot.
AirCar co-founder Anton Zajac said the first prototype was as very stable propeller-driven aircraft and a good car, but manufacturing repeatability was hindered by the use of welded tubes.
“To create identical copies, we decided to create a monocoque construction,” he said. “The whole aircraft or air car is now made of several pieces that are that can be easily replicated. That's one key change in the in the production prototype, that if you want to do mass production, you need to be able to replicate the prototype.”
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The 2021 intercity flight used a modified 140hp motorcycle engine, which Zajac said had efficiency of 1hp per 9kg of aircraft ‘which is an extremely bad ratio for an aircraft’.
“Now the engine we have is 320hp… and that makes a big difference in terms of cruising speed, ground roll and overall performance,” he said. “Also, the climbing speed…of this new prototype is like a rocket compared to the previous prototype.”
There are also 80hp and 340hp twin turbo options available that are fed with high octane gasoline from AirCar’s 160l fuel supply, which is made up of two tanks on the side of AirCar and one in the centre.
Zajac added that the empty weight of AirCar is 800kg, making it lighter than a Porche 911 turbo.
A button on the steering wheel transfers functionality from car to aircraft and vice versa in under two minutes via its 24 programmable servos. Once in the air, the vehicle has a calculated range of around 1000km.
“We'll produce the AirCar in Slovakia, and we'll open a new facility in the United States, which is probably the biggest market in the world currently.”
By the end of September, Zajac envisions testing to be complete expects the production prototype to have acquired a certificate of air worthiness.
The company will then undertake a series of flights, starting with a journey from Vienna to Salzburg. They will then fly to the Friedrichshafen Air Show in April before heading to Paris and then onto London.
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