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For decades, the flying car has been a punchline. A future that was always five years away, usually followed by a shrug and a traffic jam. In February this year, that joke wobbled slightly when a road-legal vehicle lifted clean off the ground in a California field. Now, nine months later, the company behind it says production has officially begun on the world’s first flying car.
Alef Aeronautics‘ Model A is not a concept render or a tethered prototype. It has driven on public roads, taken off vertically, and returned safely to the ground. More importantly, it has moved from demonstration to manufacturing, a step that has stopped plenty of ambitious transport projects before they ever left the lab.
It drives. It flies. And we want desperately to give it a spin.
A World First Test Flight
On 19 February 2025, Alef released footage of its flying car completing a vertical take-off test in San Mateo, California. The vehicle rose from a closed roadway, cleared another car beneath it, and landed without incident. It was the first publicly documented video of a car that drives and flies without external tethers.
Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny described it on LinkedIn as the first “verifiable flight of a flying car,” stressing that it was an actual road-going vehicle rather than an aircraft dressed up as one. The clip aired on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, instantly pushing the story beyond niche tech circles and into the mainstream. Dukhovny addressed that directly in the post, writing, “We’ve been asked all the time, ‘Why don’t you ever show the video of your car in action?’ Well, there you go.”
The company had claimed flight capability for several years but held back footage until it was confident in safety and intellectual property. Dukhovny wrote on LinkedIn, “You have only one chance to make the first impression,” drawing a comparison to the Wright brothers’ first documented flight.
The test flight was conducted using an ultralight version of the Alef Model Zero, a research platform designed to inform the production Model A. Weighing around 250 pounds, the Model Zero can fly with a pilot on board or be controlled remotely from the ground.
During flight, a remote pilot in command receives real-time data on battery levels, temperature, vibration, and system performance, with the ability to cut propulsion via an onboard kill switch if needed. If communications are lost, automated fail-safes engage, while a backup glider system provides an additional layer of redundancy in emergency scenarios.
Those safeguards are carried through into the production vehicle. Fully electric and road-legal, Alef claims the Model A has a driving range of around 200 miles and a flight range of approximately 110 miles. A gimballed cabin keeps the interior level during flight, while an elevon system manages vertical and horizontal control. Safety systems include obstacle detection, glide landing capability, a ballistic parachute, and multiple layers of redundancy across critical components.
Crucially, Alef has already received an FAA Special Airworthiness Certificate, making it the first vehicle of its kind cleared to fly in the United States.
Now, manufacturing of the Model A Ultralight has officially begun at its California facility. The first vehicles will be hand-assembled in Silicon Valley using a mix of robotic processes and manual assembly, with each unit expected to take several months to complete.
But don’t expect to see the Model A flooding the streets or flying above traffic. Only a small number of these flying cars will go to carefully selected early customers, primarily to test the vehicles in tightly controlled real-world conditions. Alef has said they will oversee training, compliance, maintenance, and flight operations, using the data to refine production before scaling toward automation.
Dukhovny says the goal is to optimise manufacturing before moving to broader deliveries. Alef reports more than 3,500 pre-orders, valued at roughly US$1 billion, though timelines beyond early testing remain cautious.
The Wright brothers flew for seconds in 1903. Sixty-six years later, humans had reached the Moon. Flying cars may still be in their infancy, but history suggests the longest wait is usually before takeoff.
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