AeroMobil has been around for five years, pursuing the dream of building a functional and (somewhat) practical flying car. Its third-gen prototype was revealed last October, and today at SXSW, AeroMobil CEO Juraj Vaculik revealed a bit more about the company's past and future and the challenges that remain to go from prototypes to fully fledged consumer vehicles - which the company plans to accomplish in 2017.
Vaculik and his co-founder Stefan Klein's dream of building flying cars wasn't simply a result of wishing to free their cars from the bonds of earth. As natives of what is the present-day Slovak Republic, they were motivated by a desire to escape the oppression of the then-communist government of Czechoslovakia. Of course, the Iron Curtain fell in that country 25 years ago, but the dream of driving and flying in the same vehicle remained.