Tech

PICTURES: The flying cars Google's cofounder has spent $100 million building

Rob Price

2016-06-09T11:46:07Z

Google cofounder Larry Page has secretly spent more than $100 million of his own money building flying cars, according to a bombshell new report from Bloomberg.

The billionaire CEO of Google parent company Alphabet has funnelled cash into two different companies working on the space-age technology — while working so hard to keep his involvement a secret that employees of one of the companies wouldn't even say his name.

One of the companies, Zee.Aero, was launched back in 2010. It is based in Mountain View, near Google's offices, and has nearly 150 employees. It even has two prototype vehicles that it tests regularly.

Thanks to a series of patent filings, we can see the kind of flying car designs that the Zee.Aero has experimented with. Bloomberg reports that it is moving away from these towards a "simpler, more conventional-looking design" — but the diagrams still give a glimpse at what's inside the incredibly secretive project.

First, here's an old patent that was granted in January 2016.

It has propellers and plane-like wings.

Its side profile looks a lot like a conventional small aircraft.

USPTO/Zee.Aero

Bloomberg says the company worked on this design — patent no. 9,242,738 — for several years, but none of the prototypes they built were large enough for a human pilot.

Here's a slightly different, more streamlined one.

The propellers allow the aircraft to take off and land vertically.

The end goal of "flying cars" is a light aircraft that can be used in commuter-style situations. It will primarily fly — though the diagrams do show wheels for taxiing around.

Bloomberg's report also says the vehicles might be autonomous — that is, they may fly themselves, like self-driving cars do.

This patent even suggests it will be able to fold up when not flying to save space ...

... so it could be left in car parking spaces.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

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