By Team Terrafugia
Have you ever been stuck in traffic and thought why can’t this car fly?-Robert Bear, InventionStories.com
Our Ability
While our ability to communicate and access information is increasing dramatically, personal transportation has not improved significantly in the past 50 years. If anything, travel today is more of a hassle. While the airlines have an impressive safety record, commercial air travel is far from convenient. Cars let you set your own schedule, but they’re slow…and dangerous. The average commuter spends nearly five hours a week stuck in traffic! And globally, more than one million people die in car crashes each year.
We need…
We need the safety of commercial aviation, the convenience and flexibility of a car, and the freedom of the open sky. And we need a new industry that makes personal aviation safer, as simple as driving your car. And convenient for everyone. We need a practical flying car. Terrafugia intends to lead the creation of a new flying car industry that will help humanity achieve this new dimension of personal freedom.
Terrafugia (ter-ra-FOO-gee-ah) intends to catalyze a revolution in personal mobility. Our vehicles bring a new level of safety, convenience, and freedom to personal transportation.
We have been dreaming about flying cars since the turn of the 20th century. The Transition® street-legal airplane is the first step on the road to the practical flying car. Terrafugia’s vision for the future is the TF-X™: a bold concept intended to lead the creation of a new industry and bring personal aviation into the mainstream. We’re starting with proven technology and our product roadmap is designed to make personal aviation progressively safer. Our goal is to become more accessible to a broader segment of the population.
Terrafugia is derived from the Latin for “Escape the Earth”. We’re Driven to Fly.™
Terrafugia was founded in 2006 to combine driving and flying in a new and practical way. Our founding team of award-winning MIT-trained aerospace engineers and MBA’s are committed to making general aviation safer… more convenient, more fun, and more accessible.
We were one of three award winners in the MIT $100K Business Plan Competition in 2006. That summer, we launched the company publicly at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, WI where we met our first angel investors and received our first refundable deposits for the Transition®.
Terrafugia Transition
The Transition® is a two-place, fixed wing street legal aircraft that fits in a single car garage. It is designed to be flown in and out of general aviation airports. And it is designed to be easy and fun to fly and extremely simple to convert between flying and driving modes.
Component and vehicle prototyping began in earnest in 2007. The Proof of Concept Transition® was successfully flown for the first time in March, 2009. Moving to our current 19,000 square foot location in Woburn, MA in the fall of 2010, we accelerated prototyping and pre-production activities. In late 2011 the second generation Transition® prototype entered its testing program. This second generation prototype flew for the first time in March of 2012, and conducted a live flying-driving demonstration for the first time that fall.
Debut of Terrafugia
Terrafugia made our debut outside of the aviation world at the New York International Auto Show in April 2012. We flew for a crowd of over a million attendees and continues to attend EAA AirVenture annually.
Terrafugia was also a subcontractor on a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to do conceptual design and sub-scale system prototyping on the “Transformer X” program. This program was to develop a semi-autonomous dual-mode vehicle for the U.S. military from 2010 through mid-2012.
Proof of Process
The Transition® is a Proof of Process for the vision for the future of personal transportation that we shared during the spring of 2013. This was done by unveiling the TF-X™ concept. The TF-X™ is a four-place vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) hybrid electric vehicle that is designed to revolutionize personal travel as Terrafugia leads the creation of a new flying car industry.
By spring 2013, Terrafugia had grown from its initial founding team and three full time employees in 2007 to over twenty people on-site in Woburn, MA. We are dedicated to the development, testing, certification, and production of the Transition® and realization of Terrafugia’s vision. To learn more about joining Terrafugia in creating the future of personal transportation, explore our “Careers” and “Get Involved” sections, reserve a place in production for the Transition®, or visit our “Investor Relations” page.
Carl Dietrich
Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia’s CEO/CTO, received his BS, MS and Ph.D. from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shortly after being selected as the 2006 winner of the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Innovation. He was additionally recognized by the Aero/Astro Department at MIT as one of sixteen exceptional graduates under the age of 35. Carl has also received “40 Under 40” awards from the Boston Business Journal and Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. Carl has spoken internationally and is generally regarded as the leader of the emerging modern flying car industry. He has been a private pilot since the age of seventeen.
Carl’s Advice
InventionStories.com asked Carl what advice would he give to those interested in inventing?
Invention is about coming up with new solutions to problems that people have today. First find a problem, then brainstorm creative ways of solving that problem. Pick the best solution you can, and then invest the time needed to turn that idea into reality. That is the essence of making a useful invention. But coming up with the solution to the problem is not enough. In order for the invention to matter, it needs to get to the people with the problem. This is the process of commercializing your invention.
In my experience, it is often much harder for an inventor to commercialize an invention than it is to come up with the invention in the first place. But the second step is critical if you want your inventions to matter to other people. It helps to find a fantastic team of people that recognize the value of your invention and are willing to help you commercialize it. If you want to be a real innovator, you think through the process of commercialization in detail before you invest the time in the invention itself — that keeps your focus on only the inventions that will matter to others.
For more information, please visit www.terrafugia.com
