Meet the Ambassador Hover car!

Most of you would have guessed it instantly – these are not real hovering/flying Hindustan Ambassador cars. These are digital renders created by our artist who edited photos of actual Ambassadors on Indian roads.

If you were a kid who grew up watching Back to The Future movies (that means you are an uncle now), or Harry Potter (you are of marriageable age, right?) you would have come across flying cars. A lot of us, when we were kids, wished they would become real some day. However, we are pretty sure most of us never thought about a flying Hindustan Ambassador!

The flying car in Harry Potter movies may have required some serious magic, but the Amby flying car requires only the magic of Photoshop. Take a look at these three photos of hovering Ambassador cars below.

The interesting thing is hover cars are finally becoming real. Not in India, perhaps, but they are getting more and more viable with each passing day.

Anti-gravity technology – which seems to be what powers our Ambassador Hover cars – is obviously a very long way away. That is still in the realm of science fiction.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Moller International received a lot of press attention for their VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) aircraft. They looked futuristic, and achieved lift through the use of ducted fans. However, apart from some tethered test flights, none of them ever made an untethered flight, as far as we know.

Flying cars are nothing new. As far back as the early 1990s, people tried to make cars fly. The first one was the Curtiss Autoplane (which never took off) and the Arrowbile (another failure). The Airphibian (1946) was the first one to get a certification as an aircraft.

Recent attempts to fly include Moller International’s high-profile failures, the Terrafugia Transition, the PAL-V, and ATVs strung up below paraglider wings.

The eHang UAV, already being tested in Dubai for short hops, is more like an air taxi built using tech derived from remote-controlled drones. They look really impressive, and could become the first real flying personal vehicles. But no, they have nothing to do with cars – if anything, they are alternatives to cars. The KittyHawk is another promising project, from Google’s Larry Page, that looks like a cross between a plastic F1 car and a boat.

So will we ever see a flying Ambassador? Well, it IS possible for a determined DIYer, we think. People have managed to use multiple high-powered drone motors to make a lot of things hover. An Ambassador is too heavy for all that, but a lightweight Ambassador replica (fiberglass, perhaps) with a single seat inside, propelled by multiple drone motors can do the job. Who wants to try?