Two “flying cars” collide during air performance rehearsals in China

According to a CNN report, two “flying cars” collided on Tuesday during a rehearsal in China, injuring one of the drivers.

The incident occurred at the Changchun Air Show in Jilin, China, where two Xpeng Aeroht planes collided in the middle of the air, forcing one of them on the ground. The other vehicle was able to land safely, according to Electk, and the cause of the accident is under investigation.

The company told CNN that the accident was the result of “insufficient spacing” and one of the flying vehicles “suffered fuselage damage and caught fire to landing”. The state of the injured pilot is unknown and Xpeng did not immediately answer the questions sent on Wednesday.

Videos published on social networks seem to show one of the fire vehicles while the emergency teams work to extinguish the fire.

Xpeng is a large electric vehicle company in China that has attempted to develop flying vehicles in recent years, Aeroht becoming a subsidiary in 2020, according to Bloomberg.

Xpeng Aeroht has some different models of flying vehicles and it is not immediately clear which model was piloted in this case. Electk suggests that it was the X2, developed for the first time in 2021, although Gizmodo cannot independently confirm the information.

The X2 plane is sometimes called “flying car”, although it has no wheels and cannot drive on the ground before taking off. It is more precisely described as a vertical-takeoff-et-landing electric vehicle, abbreviated as Evtol.

Humanity has been waiting for the flying car for over a century, but it has never been completely turned. Inventing a flying car is not the difficult part. We have had routible aircraft since the 1950s, built by inventive odds and ends that have been impatient for the future to arrive. But all the other details that really accompany the marketing of a flying car are complicated. Piloting them are obviously accompanied by risks, and there are many regulatory obstacles because healthy governments do not want these things to fall from heaven.

The flying car still seems to be about two years old, if you believe the headlines. Even when prognosticators push the chronology, we are always disappointed. For example, the New York Times promised readers in 2021 that Joby Aviation based in the United States would have flying cars “in service by 2024”, noting that it would depend on regulatory approval.

We are here in 2025, and we are still waiting for flying cars to go running. Because it is not only regulatory approval. These types of flying vehicles can encounter problems, as are Changchun Air Show people saw Tuesday; Sometimes these are technical problems, other times, it is a human error. And we just don’t know what caused the accident again on Tuesday.

Elon Musk recently launched X’s idea of ​​developing a flying cybertruck. But we have heard it already. Remember when the billionaire said he wanted to build a flying car in 2014? The newspaper which interviewed him at the time said that you should not bet against Musk because he “has the reputation of saying things that seem too beautiful to be true – then make them happen”.

Well, we are still waiting.