With the dream of making everyone a pilot, the team behind the Jetson ONE is on a mission to create a commercially available personal electric flying “sports car.”
The development of the Jetson ONE prototype has taken co-creators Peter Ternström and Tomasz Patan five years. The two came together in 2017 to produce the dream of a real-life Speeder, like something straight out of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
“It almost sounded like a joke. At that time, we didn’t believe that it was even possible,” Patan says of the early days of the Jetson project.
With the desire to test the limits of what many thought was possible, the pair began to experiment. Their goal was to build a drone that could take off and land vertically but was powerful enough to bear the weight of an adult — a challenging proposition.
But by January of 2018, they had a working prototype and, a month later, they completed their first manned flight over Italy’s Tuscan countryside.
“I don’t remember how it happened or what happened, I just remember it was an amazing feeling of your body becoming weightless,” Patan recalls.
After the success of their first flight, the two decided to try and make that prototype a commercially available vehicle that would allow anyone to live the same dream they achieved and turn backyards around the world into private airports.
The result is the Jetson ONE, a personal flying “sports car” whose design is inspired by the aluminum and carbon fiber frames of race cars. The Jetson ONE is powered by eight motors, which the team describes as a feat of engineering.
The short documentary video above features multiple shots of the flying “sports car” as captured by the Insta360 ONE X2, a pocket-sized 5.7K resolution 360-degree camera that was launched in October of 2020.
The Jetson ONE is currently in production for a limited list of customers, and according to the company’s website it has sold out of all units it can deliver in 2022. The 12 units it can deliver this year are reserved for clients ranging from Irvine, California, to Djursholm, Sweden, to Puebla, Mexico.
The company’s 2023 production capabilities appear much stronger with a total of 182 units able to be pre-ordered, of which only three remain available. The Jetsone ONE requires a $22,000 down payment to pre-order a unit and a final payment of $70,000 is due when the unit is ready to ship.
Image credits: Insta360
Author: Jaron Schneider
Source: Petapixel
