By Road or Air La Moto Volante Will Get You There
Have you ever been riding along and got stuck behind a lot of traffic? That’s where a flying motorcycle would come in handy. Well, now there’s the Lazareth LMV 496 La Moto Volante, which is “the flying motorcycle” in French. It’s a bike that can transform from a motorcycle into a flying vehicle.
Unlike Jetpack Aviation’s Speeder we recently reported on La Moto Volante uses 96,000-rpm JetCat jet turbine in each wheel hub. This allows the wheels to act as the mechanism that propels the vehicle into the sky. The wheels have to move from their upright orientation to a horizontal one in a slow-mo Transformer-ish way. Watch the video below to get an idea of what I mean.
The jets need about 60 seconds to heat up before launch. At the moment the bike only gets a few feet off the ground. The company doesn’t have a completely functioning machine as of yet. They just recently did a test run that allowed the bike to hover at one meter (3.3 feet) above a platform. Lazareth tethered down the machine for safety.
With that said, it definitely works. Now, all Lazareth has to do is fine tune the machine to make it into the vehicle that people have been seeking for decades. According to New Atlas, the company plans to start accepting pre-orders after a showcase of the product in October of this year. Pre-orders won’t go cheap. The company plans to ask for about $560,000. Only the super rich will be able to afford La Moto Volante.
However, this could be the start of a very cool movement in the motorcycle industry. This is the second flying motorcycle concept we’ve seen recently with the Jetpack Aviations Speeder being the first. Both seem to show the technology is finally here. Now it’s just a matter of making it actually usable, affordable, and legal.