SAN JOSE, Calif. — When the lights lowered and thumping bass music filled a Silicon Valley event space this October, Jim Dukhovny was in his element. He is a former events promoter and musician dubbed “DjWizard” who is accustomed to hyping up rooms filled with revelers.
But he was not there to play techno, Dukhovny was there to sell the world on a product that so far is relegated to fantasy novels: flying cars.
“Almost all science fiction worlds have one thing in common. Almost every vision of the future came up with exactly the same thing – a flying car,” Dukhovny told a crowd of supporters and media. “Back to Future, Jetsons, Bladerunner, science-fiction is no longer fiction. The future is now.”
Along with three other founders, Dukhovny is behind Alef Aeronautics. By 2025 they say Alef will deliver the world’s first true flying car at a price tag of $300,000.
After unveiling the model flying car this month, Dukhovny sat with The Mercury News to talk about finding inspiration from his Ukrainian father, and the connections between DJ’ing, science fiction, and the future of flying cars. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How will your flying car work?
A: There is a reason we don’t have flying cars today – because it’s impossible. Why? laws of physics. There’s nothing that can make a car-shaped object like this fly for more than 10 miles, by the laws of physics it’s impossible.
But we did not break the rules of physics, we fooled them. We turn the car into a biplane or circular wing plane by rotating the car and flipping on its side around the driver after takeoff. The whole car becomes a wing.
We also took out the engine and instead put four small engines inside each wheel. In the open space left by the motor, we put an electric propulsion system of eight motor controller propeller systems for flying. And we allow the air to come through by building a carbon fiber frame that sits on top of this allowing air to come through.
Q: How did you come to be a flying car CEO?
A: My father Joseph (Leonid) Dukhovny was actually one of the most famous folk singers in Ukraine, he was a genius organizer and entrepreneur, and he was one of the big engineers who worked on the materials used in Soviet spaceships. All these components, and especially the fact that he loved science fiction, I got it from him.
He loved Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris). And this is where I got the idea for a flying car, because reading them that was a common theme. My father Joseph gave up everything to get me an education. I eventually went to UC Berkeley and received a computer science master’s degree from Santa Clara University. I went on to work for Microsoft, Yahoo, and Nortel (Networks).
So I’ve had this entrepreneurship, education, and in parallel I love music. I met one of my co-founders, Pavel Markin, as part of a rock band.
In 2015 I hosted a series of science-fiction lectures at Stanford University. As I was doing those lectures, I thought that the easiest component to (turn into reality) was flying cars – that was a horrible mistake. I thought this was a low-hanging fruit because everything was there including the drone technology and micro-components.
So I gathered my co-founders – Constantine Kisly, Pavel Markin, Oleg Petrov – at the Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, which I picked obviously because a lot of start-ups were founded in that cafe, and I pitched to them my vision. I asked how long it would take to build it. They said ‘six months.’ Obviously, that was a huge underestimation.
Q: You have been involved in DJ’ing and event organizing for years in the Bay Area. How does it feel to make the transition to tech executive?
A: I DJ’d for 10 years – if you remember Supper Club, The Factory. Then I went into “intellectual” events. I created one of the largest intellectual game shows, What, When, Where, in Silicon Valley and that’s where I tapped into a lot of smart people. That’s where I met co-founder Constantine Kisly (PhD materials science).
With DJ’ing you have to know technology, you have to know how to connect everything in 15 minutes and start playing. But secondly, you have to read the crowd. This is similar to reading the consumer, right?
You can’t understand how many times potential investors have tried to make us a company that does the transportation of goods or which does something very specific – putting us in a different direction instead of a flying car. Even in the nightclub, it’s not the manager, it’s not the security, it’s not the person who hired you – it is people who dictate what you’re going to play.
Q: Considering regulatory and safety issues, is 2025 a realistic goal for a flying car capable of taking off from the street and flying over traffic jams? (Alef has yet to conduct a human test flight and with a small staff of six relies heavily on college interns).
A: That date is the start of production and we will maybe make the first delivery. This won’t be mass-produced, but we’re actually pretty close to making it in-house. The biggest barrier is legal. The legal aspect might not be realistic (by 2025) in the U.S. We want to make sure it’s completely legal, we want to make sure it’s safe.
Mark Tapperning, the co-founder of Tesla, has advised us to initially certify the vehicle as a “low-speed vehicle” to get the vehicle to drivers quicker due to fewer regulatory hurdles. (According to federal regulations a low-speed vehicle can reach speeds no higher than 25 mph, similar to a golf cart.)
The idea is you can it drive it on city streets. You can’t go on the freeway. But you don’t need to because you can fly. That’s where the advantage is.
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