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Everybody's doing flying cars, so why aren't we soaring over traffic already?

"Where's my flying car?" has been the meme for impending technology that never materializes since before there were memes. And the trough of disillusionment for vehicles that can take to sky continues to nosedive, despite a nonstop fascination with flying cars and a recent rash of announcements about the technology, particularly from traditional automakers. Earlier this month, Toyota applied for an eye-popping patent for a flying car that has wheels with spring-loaded pop-out helicopter rotors. The patent filing says the wheels/rotors would be electrically powered, while in on-land mode the vehicle would have differential steering like tracked vehicles such as tanks and bulldozers. At an airshow in July, Aston Martin unveiled its Volante Vision Concept, an autonomous hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle it developed with Rolls-Royce. Aston says the Volante can fly at top speeds of around 200 mph and bills it as a luxury car for the skies. Audi used the Geneva Motor Show in March to unveil a flying car concept called the Pop.Up Next it developed with Airbus and Italdesign. If the Pop.Up Next, an electric and autonomous quadcopter/city car combo, gets stuck in traffic, an app can be used to summon an Airbus-developed drone to pick up the passenger compartment pod, leaving the chassis behind. Audi said that the Pop.Up Next is a "flexible on-demand concept that could open up mobility in the third dimension to people in cities." But Audi also acknowledged that at this point it has no plans to develop it. The cash-stoked, skies-the-limit Silicon Valley tech crowd is also bullish on flying cars. The startup Kitty Hawk that's backed by Google co-founder Larry Page announced in June that it's taking pre-orders for its single-seat electric Flyer that's powered by 10 propellers and is capable of vertical takeoffs and landings. The current version can only fly up to 20 mph and 10 feet in the air and has a flight time of just 12 to 20 minutes on a full charge. The Flyer is considered a recreational vehicle, so doesn't require a pilot's license. Uber says it plans to launch its more ambitious Elevate program and UberAIR service in 2023. "Uber customers will be able to push a button and get a flight on-demand with uberAIR in Dallas, Los Angeles and a third international market," Uber Elevate promises on its website.

Audi Nanuk Quattro Concept is a wild surprise ahead of Frankfurt

Volkswagen Group Night ahead of the Frankfurt Motor Show always has some surprises, the first of which this year is the Audi Nanuk Quattro Concept. The all-wheel-drive, turbo-diesel-powered supercar is similar to the Giugiaro Parcour Concept that was unveiled earlier this summer. In fact, the Parcour's creator, Italdesign Giugiaro, penned the Nanuk, and we suspect much of the former found its way into the latter - with some changes, of course.
The diesel engine, a departure from the Parcour, is a twin-turbocharged 5.0-liter V10 TDI unit that develops 544 horsepower and a hole-digging 738 pound-feet of torque, which make the 4,189-pound all-road vehicle able to dispatch 0-62 miles per hour in 3.8 seconds and go on to a 190-mph top speed. Fuel consumption is a relatively low 30 miles per gallon for a car with this much performance.
The Nanuk showcases Audi's Quattro, though it uses a specially designed version of the all-wheel-drive system to get the job done. Audi's next generation of adaptive air suspension is featured as well, which fits the crossover nature of the Nanuk. Drivers are given a range of 2.76 inches of height adjustment, though Audi doesn't mention the car's minimum or maximum ground clearance.

2015 Audi S3 Sedan

For the last few years, Audi has been publicly toying with building a successor to its Ur-Quattro, a model still glowing in a gritty patina of motorsports glory decades after it left the scene. If anything, the rally car's halo has burned brighter as Audi has matured into a world luxury superpower. Since 2010, the German automaker has shown two different concept cars that attempted to re-bottle the legend's lightning, and it's still trying to figure out whether to market a production model. Despite that conundrum (and not to take anything away from the seminal Ur-Quattro), it's easy to argue that there are two other cars much more important to Audi's rise from its '80s ashes: the original TT and the B5-generation A4 and its high-performance variants.
The TT thrust Audi into the vanguard of automotive styling while firmly establishing the Volkswagen Group as masters of platform development (the same basic architecture and powertrain guts were employed in a dizzying array of models, from the Golf, Jetta and New Beetle to a number of Škoda products). This unprecedented, flexible building-block approach to new model development has since become the standard of the industry.
In the case of its B5 cars, the A4, S4 and RS4 put Audi back on the radar of rival German automakers, and more importantly, they grew the Four Rings' sales by leaps and bounds while reminding the world that all-wheel drive needn't only benefit hardcore performance cars and utility vehicles. Fast-forward to today, and the A4 has established itself as the bedrock of Audi's lineup, but it's also grown over its four generations to become substantially larger, heavier and costlier than the model that debuted back in 1996 America. That's created a vacuum at the bottom of the range that the company has inadequately addressed - until now.