That relatively slow speed hasn't stopped Molnar from working to launch what he calls the Flying Car Racing league – another pillar of his strategy to popularize flying cars. Its maximum ground speed is 177 kilometres per hour that shrinks to 112 in the air. When operating on the road, the rotary blades can be stored alongside the bike. The rotary wing only spins during flight as it is powered by wind motion. Key to the design, he said, is a mid-mounted propeller, which propels the aircraft forward. "People can use the engineering drawings for a springboard," he said. Patents for the Molnar GT recently expired instead of renewing them, Molnar has made his designs public in a sort of open-source mission. Molnar's hope is that others will find his invention inspiring and join the cause by building their own flying machine. You could have one, too, if you're a visionary willing to build it. It really doesn't matter to him what others call it – the point, he said, is that it is licensed and insured to be in the air and on the road in California. For more than a dozen years, Molnar has been working towards this with the launch of the Molnar GT, a personal vehicle that is part motorcycle (roadworthy), part gyrocopter (for gliding to a safe landing in the event of engine failures) and part gyroplane (short takeoff distance and speed). That is, some combination of a courier bike, motorcycle and a bird. With this, I wanted to do something that would allow me to mimic the fastest way to get through downtown these days." "Sometimes the right thing to do is have a tiny bird and sometimes the right thing is a jumbo jet. "But the reality is that they have value and they have a future. " get maligned because they're not a person's perception of a big business," he said. Nor could his invention, which costs less than $40 per hour to operate and is more efficient than a helicopter. Molnar, who wore leather-looking pants, aviator glasses and a flower-print button-down shirt, could not have appeared more counterculture. He explained this recently on a small stage set up inside a tent at the rear of the Los Angeles Auto Show, about as far as one could get from the gloss and glimmer of the main stage and still technically be on-site. "My objective was to make a vehicle that would make it easy to fly into a very congested area and be able to drive out of it," said Molnar, who has a colourful array of credentials on his resume, from building rockets to helping set land-speed racing records.
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