Toyota-Sponsored "Flying Car" Slated to Light the 2020 Olympic Flame in Tokyo

The past has seen numerous ways the Olympic torch was lit. The best ones were during the 1992 Olympic Barcelona, where an archer shot a flaming arrow into the cauldron. Another was when Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic Flame in Atlanta in 1996; or where gymnast Li Ning seemed to float through the entire stadium during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Not surprisingly, Japan, the next country to host the Olympics, also wants to make its Olympic torch lighting as spectacular and memorable for everyone. And it is for this reason that the biggest Japanese carmaker Toyota has sponsored SkyDrive, a flying car set to light the torch for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

The brains behind SkyDrive is Cartivator, a group that's composed of 30+ young engineers from the aerospace and auto industries. They also teamed up with drone expert Masafumi Miwa from Tokushima University.

The group's long-term goal is to make flying cars accessible to everyone. “We aim to create a world where anyone can fly in the sky anytime by 2050,” explains Cartivator’s creators in their website. However,  their short-term goal is to launch a manned prototype by the end of 2018 and use it to light the Olympic flame during the opening of the Tokyo Games in 2020.

Japan's biggest carmaker, Toyota Group of Companies, has agreed to fund around 42 million yen ($370,000) to the Skydrive project. This was an anticipated move since Toyota announced its interest in upcoming technology and invested around 1.05 trillion yen ($9.3 billion) to help fund future technological innovations and inventions.

Taizo Sun, the founder of Japanese web game developer, GungHo Online Entertainment, also donated 2.5 million yen ($22,000) in Cartivator's Zenmono crowdfunding site.

https://youtu.be/6-rlA_M2yWo The 9.5 feet by 4.2 feet SkyDrive is touted as the "world's smallest" flying electric vehicle (EV) to date. It will have three wheels and four sets of propellers, with easy-to-use, intuitive controls. It is expected to reach a flying speed of 62 miles per hour and a land speed of around 93 miles per hour. This diminutive EV can hover at heights of up to 32.8 feet.

The prototype is said to be on its way, but the group is still performing minor tweaks and fine-tuning its weather, infrastructure, and safety features.

Flying cars have been gaining a lot of momentum recently. Now with better technology and infrastructure to make things possible, it didn't take long for countries to start a worldwide race to create the world's first flying vehicle. Presently, the most active countries in this race include Germany, U.S.A., and China.