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Two “flying cars” collided on Tuesday during an air show rehearsal in China, injuring one of the pilots, according to a report from CNN.
The incident happened at the Changchun Air Show in Jilin, China, where two XPeng AeroHT aircraft collided midair, forcing one of them to the ground. The other vehicle was able to land safely, according to Electrek, and the cause of the crash is under investigation.
The company told CNN that the crash was the result of “insufficient spacing” and one of the flying vehicles “sustained fuselage damage and caught fire upon landing.” The condition of the injured pilot is unknown and XPeng didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed Wednesday.
Videos posted to social media appear to show one of the vehicles on fire as emergency crews work to put out the blaze.
Xpeng is a large electric vehicle company in China that has been trying to develop flying vehicles over recent years, with AeroHT becoming a subsidiary in 2020, according to Bloomberg.
XPeng AeroHT has a few different models of flying vehicles and it’s not immediately clear which model was being flown in this case. Electrek suggests it was the X2, first developed in 2021, though Gizmodo couldn’t independently confirm that info.
The X2 aircraft is sometimes referred to as a “flying car,” though it doesn’t have wheels and can’t drive on the ground before taking flight. It’s more accurately described as an electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, abbreviated as eVTOL.
Humanity has been waiting for the flying car for over a century, but it’s never quite panned out. Inventing a flying car isn’t the hard part. We’ve had roadable aircraft since the 1950s, built by inventive tinkerers who got impatient for the future to arrive. But all of the other details that actually go along with bringing a flying car to market are complicated. Piloting them obviously comes with risks, and there are many regulatory hurdles since sane governments don’t want these things just falling out of the sky.
The flying car always seems about two years away, if you believe the headlines. Even when prognosticators push out the timeline, we’re still bound to be disappointed. For instance, the New York Times promised readers in 2021 that U.S.-based Joby Aviation would have flying cars “in service by 2024,” noting that it would depend on regulatory approval.
We’re here in 2025, and we’re still waiting on flying cars to go mainstream. Because it’s not just regulatory approval. These kinds of flying vehicles can run into problems, just like people at the Changchun Air Show saw on Tuesday; sometimes it’s technical issues, other times it’s human error. And we just don’t know what caused the crash on Tuesday yet.
Elon Musk recently floated the idea on X of developing a flying Cybertruck. But we’ve heard that one before, too. Remember when the billionaire said he wanted to build a flying car back in 2014? The newspaper that was interviewing him at the time said you shouldn’t bet against Musk because he “has a reputation for saying things that sound too good to be true – and then making them happen.”
Well, we’re still waiting.
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Matt Novak
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