This company says it's ready to build a real flying car — here's how it works

Flying cars are not just the stuff of "Back to the Future" anymore — a company called Terrafugia says it has the technology to complete one by 2025.

Terrafugia

Although the tech may be ready to give us a flying car in less than 10 years, seeing one will depend on the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) rules on flying unmanned aerial vehicles — which have yet to be released.

Here's a closer look at how the flying car works and what Terrafugia has to say about its vision becoming a reality:

View As: One Page Slides
Source: This company says it's ready to build a real flying car — here's how it works

Silicon Valley’s New Private Jet of Choice Just Secured $50 Million in Pre-Orders

View gallery

.

If you're not familiar with Cobalt or its drop-dead-gorgeous Co50 Valkyrie personal jet, you're about to be. The company just secured $50 million in pre-orders, meaning the skies are about to get a whole lot prettier.

Cobalt started off as a pet project for founder and CEO David Loury. An aerospace engineer-turned-entrepreneur and designer, the French-born CEO hopes Cobalt can change the pace for personal aircrafts. The Co50 Valkyrie was designed to do just that.

RELATED: Toyota Patents a Flying Car, But Don't Get Your Hopes Up

View gallery

.

The $50 million in pre-orders were acquired in just 90 days following the aircraft's launch on November 12, 2015. Along with this massive influx of cash from interested buyers, Cobalt also brought aboard former Delta pilot James Schwartz to command the test program for FAA certification.

"The Cobalt Valkyrie is a magnificent airplane and it has created a tremendous amount of much-deserved interest," said Schwartz. "It's a beautiful design, profoundly enjoyable to fly, and it will outperform anything in its class."

RELATED: Terrafugia TF-X Flying Car Closer to Reality Than Ever Before

View gallery

.

Cobalt claims that among the many interested buyers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs from both Google and Apple were among the first to order, as well as top-level executives from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and around the globe.

The plane itself starts off at a respectable $595,000 (dropping significantly from $700,000 at launch), and features a cruise range of 1,050 nautical miles. Cobalt is hoping to begin delivering planes to customers early-to-mid 2017.

RELATED: Like This Flying Car? You Could Win a 3D-Printed Version

Follow @notaboatcaptain

Business

Source: Silicon Valley's New Private Jet of Choice Just Secured $50 Million in Pre-Orders

Nissan’s Smart Chairs Use Self-Driving Car Tech To Park Themselves When You Clap Your Hands

Nissan has just unveiled the self-parking chair. It's cool, but this is really all about Nissan's self-driving cars.(Photo : Nissan)

Who says cars and drones are the only inanimate objects worthy of the gift of autonomy? Nissan has breathed autonomy into the fibers of office furniture, enabling what it calls Intelligent Parking Chairs to propel themselves back into place after being disturbed by humans.

The way the chairs work is they rely on WiFi and room sensing cameras mounted in the corners of rooms to direct the chairs back to where they belong.

It's akin to the "Clap on, clap off" lights that made people in the 1980s think flying cars, flying robots, teleportation, self-driving cars and virtual reality where just around the corner – turns out, some of those were.

With just a clap of the hands, Nissan's Intelligent Parking Chairs will sort themselves from whatever mess they were left in and will return to their original positions in an orderly fashion – imagine the productivity gains to be had by no longer having to push a chair back in after a meeting!

For those concerned trolls who would, with the clap of their hands, want to send a room full of seated people back to order, a la Magneto, the chairs will only respond to claps when they're empty. Well, that's unless they've been hacked.

So this is a novelty, but it's proof that autonomous vehicle technology has implications far beyond the automotive field. That's true, even if we still haven't found any many compelling reasons to give other objects autonomy – and that's not to say self-parking chairs are uncool.

Scaling the technology up a bit, it could have more practical use in state-of-the-art auditoriums and cafeterias where the next engagement is oftentimes more important to people than straightening chairs.

But alas, this is more about selling cars than chairs. Nissan's autonomous cars were still described as a "white knuckle affair" last month by Re/code, but the automaker plans to get all of that sorted in a few years. It's already started testing its prototype in Japan, and by 2020, Nissan hopes to have its self-driving cars shuttling the consumers along public roads.

For now, check out Nissan's Intelligent Parking Chairs in the video below:

© 2016 Tech Times, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Source: Nissan's Smart Chairs Use Self-Driving Car Tech To Park Themselves When You Clap Your Hands

Are These the Flying Cars We’ve Been Waiting For?

This innovative company received FAA permission to test flying cars

As humans, it seems we are never satisfied with our incredible inventions. No sooner do we develop the automobile than we are looking for ways to make it fly.

In1940, Henry Ford himself proclaimed, "a combination of airplane and motorcar is coming." In 1964, Ian Fleming created perhaps the most famous flying car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Chinese drone manufacturer Ehang unveiled a one-seater, autonomous octo-copter. None of these, though, resembles the vision of automotive flight as closely as the Terrafugia TF-X, which recently won FAA approval to perform model test flights.

While they are undisputably awesome in theory, what makes flying cars any more feasible today than in the past? "The technological and regulatory change that is being driven by the UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) industry is laying the groundwork for flying car technologies to make their way to market," says Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia CEO/CTO. "From every angle, personal transportation is gearing up for massive change," including worldwide traffic congestion, autonomous vehicle control, and new regulations.

The tests authorized by the FAA allow Terrafugia to fly smaller models of their proposed hybrid-electric four-seater. Using models, they can "test the hovering capabilities of a one-tenth scale TF-X™ vehicle and gather flight characteristics data that will drive future design choices." The TF-X is currently under development and is not expected to be released for the next eight to twelve years, but design specifications include four-person capacity, five hundred mile range, vertical take-off and landing, and autonomous flight capability.

Terrafugia also produced the Transition, an airplane that folds in moments to become a street-legal car, but the vehicle requires pilot training and license to operate.

Terrafugia TF-X

Source: Are These the Flying Cars We've Been Waiting For?

A Leading Mechanical Watch Connoisseur is Hooked on Apple Watch for Providing a Quality Alternative Experience

If you're a visitor to this site, please try back a bit later.

If you are the owner of this site, please visit Typepad Status for network updates or open a ticket from within your account. If you are unable to open a ticket, please contact us via support@typepad.com.

Source: A Leading Mechanical Watch Connoisseur is Hooked on Apple Watch for Providing a Quality Alternative Experience

The Difference Between Marginal Revenue and Marginal Benefits

Marginal revenue and marginal benefits can help companies determine how much of a product to produce in order to maximize profits. Marginal benefit is a measure of a consumer's benefit of purchasing an additional unit of a good or service, while marginal revenue is a measure of how much money a company earns by producing a unit of a good or service.

Marginal benefit Marginal benefit measures the incremental increase in benefit to a consumer achieved by consuming one additional unit of a good or service. Another way to think of marginal benefit is the maximum amount a consumer is willing to pay in order to consume that additional unit. In a typical situation, marginal benefit will decline as the consumption of a good or service increases.

Let's say a consumer wishes to purchase an additional pair of shoes. If that consumer is willing to pay $50 for that additional pair, then the marginal benefit of that purchase is $50. However, the more pairs of shoes that consumer has, the less he or she will want to pay for the next one. This is because the benefit of owning an extra pair of shoes decreases as the consumer accumulates more and more shoes.

Marginal revenue Marginal revenue is the increase in revenue generated from selling one additional unit of a good or service. Marginal revenue is calculated by dividing the change in total revenue by the change in quantity sold. The change in total revenue is calculated by subtracting the revenue before the last unit was sold from the total revenue after the last unit was sold.

Let's say a company manufactures space heaters and brings in $20 in revenue by producing its first heater. In this case, its marginal revenue would be $20 ($20 in revenue/1 unit). Now let's say that company produces a second heater and brings in $15 in revenue. The marginal revenue gained by producing that additional unit is $15 ($35-$20 = $15 change in revenue/1 additional unit).

While marginal revenue can remain steady over a certain level of output, it tends to diminish as a company produces more units of a given product. Companies can maximize their profits by making sure that the cost of producing an additional unit does not exceed the additional revenue gained by selling that unit.

Marginal revenue and monopolies In a competitive market, marginal revenue may not be all that remarkable. In a monopoly, on the other hand, the marginal revenue a company gains from selling an additional unit will always be less than the price that unit is sold for. In a monopoly, one company is able to control overall production for a given product. However, to sell an additional unit, the company that has the monopoly must decrease the price for all units sold and thus lose out on revenue.

Let's say there's a single company that produces flying cars and sells them for $500,000 apiece, and that this company sells one car in its first week of operation and brings in $500,000 in revenue. In this case, its marginal revenue would be $500,000 ($500,000 in revenue/1 unit).

Now let's say that same company reduces the price of the flying car to $400,000 to sell more units, and is able to sell one more unit immediately. The marginal revenue for the additional unit is $400,000 ($900,000-$500,000 = $400,000 change in revenue/1 additional unit). If the $400,000 price point compels more consumers to purchase flying cars, as the company sells more units for $400,000, its marginal revenue will decrease from when it sold its first flying car.

The $15,978 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlookIf you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. In fact, one MarketWatch reporter argues that if more Americans knew about this, the government would have to shell out an extra $10 billion annually. For example: one easy, 17-minute trick could pay you as much as $15,978 more... each year! Once you learn how to take advantage of all these loopholes, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after. Simply click here to discover how you can take advantage of these strategies.

This article is part of The Motley Fool's Knowledge Center, which was created based on the collected wisdom of a fantastic community of investors based in the Foolsaurus . Pop on over there to learn more about our Wiki and how you can be involved in helping the world invest, better! If you see any issues with this page, please email us at knowledgecenter@fool.com . Thanks -- and Fool on!

The article The Difference Between Marginal Revenue and Marginal Benefits originally appeared on Fool.com.

Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days . We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy .

Copyright © 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy .

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Source: The Difference Between Marginal Revenue and Marginal Benefits

Are These the Flying Cars We’ve Been Waiting For?

This innovative company received FAA permission to test flying cars

As humans, it seems we are never satisfied with our incredible inventions. No sooner do we develop the automobile than we are looking for ways to make it fly.

In1940, Henry Ford himself proclaimed, "a combination of airplane and motorcar is coming." In 1964, Ian Fleming created perhaps the most famous flying car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Chinese drone manufacturer Ehang unveiled a one-seater, autonomous octo-copter. None of these, though, resembles the vision of automotive flight as closely as the Terrafugia TF-X, which recently won FAA approval to perform model test flights.

While they are undisputably awesome in theory, what makes flying cars any more feasible today than in the past? "The technological and regulatory change that is being driven by the UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) industry is laying the groundwork for flying car technologies to make their way to market," says Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia CEO/CTO. "From every angle, personal transportation is gearing up for massive change," including worldwide traffic congestion, autonomous vehicle control, and new regulations.

The tests authorized by the FAA allow Terrafugia to fly smaller models of their proposed hybrid-electric four-seater. Using models, they can "test the hovering capabilities of a one-tenth scale TF-X™ vehicle and gather flight characteristics data that will drive future design choices." The TF-X is currently under development and is not expected to be released for the next eight to twelve years, but design specifications include four-person capacity, five hundred mile range, vertical take-off and landing, and autonomous flight capability.

Terrafugia also produced the Transition, an airplane that folds in moments to become a street-legal car, but the vehicle requires pilot training and license to operate.

Terrafugia TF-X

Source: Are These the Flying Cars We've Been Waiting For?