Ilon Musk thinks about an airplane with an electric motor and a vertical takeoff

Everyone already knows Ilona Mask as the king of electric cars. But his plans are not limited to this. He also wants to make electric motors and batteries for electric airplanes. The executive director of Tesla Motors and SpaceX told about their plans to the participants of the competition Hyperloop Pod Competition , which ended last week.

In the nomination for the best design of capsules, the team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won, their work is shown below.


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The competition was attended by more than 115 engineering teams from 27 universities in the United States and 20 foreign teams. Only 22 teams advanced to the next round of competition in California, where they will have to actually build and test their design capsules this summer.

Returning to the planes. Ilon Musk said he imagines "an electric plane with vertical takeoff and landing." He said that in his view they have something close to this concept. “It’s pretty tempting for me to do something in this direction,” he added.

Ilon Musk doesn’t mention electric airplanes for the first time, journalists recall . He spoke about them in 2009 ( video ), and also reflected on the idea several more times, including this autumn . Although this is only a fantasy, but given the frequency with which Musk speaks about them, there is a possibility of translating plans into reality that such a project will really begin.

In general, they tried to use electricity for the movement of airplanes from the 70s, but this power source turned out to be much more expensive than ordinary kerosene, and the batteries were too imperfect. But even now, some planes use batteries as an auxiliary power source for a hybrid engine, for example, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. But Musk wants to create not a hybrid, but an all-electric plane.

If someone in the world is capable of such, then this is Ilon Musk. When his factory Gigafactory earns at full capacity, he will get in a huge amount of lithium-ion batteries at a low price, which, probably, can be used in airplanes ... someday.