/diy/ - Do It Yourself

This is the Hoversurf Scorpion-3. it's probably the best commercially available Hoverbike/ rideable drone/ flying car on the market. it's $150,000, and it is, well, look at it; it's god-awful.

Considering how good drone tech has become over the past few years, how come nobody has done anything?

We need an entrepreneur, a bored eccentric with a spare cash. We'll call him Mr. Diy, and he enters our stage with a 1200cc motorcycle a second hand ceiling fan, a solenoid, and an angle grinder.

Mr. Diy hires a brilliant designer like Julien Clement (The guy behind the Ducati Scrambler) and a week later and he's looking at the blueprints of a machine that looks like something Tony Stark made.

So Mr. Diy hires an accountant, immediately sprouting grey hairs. He commissions a few aviation engineers, but they gasp at the designs. Unlike the designers, they can't see aesthetic beauty. Their special eyes can only see functional schematics. They point at the beautiful design and talk about the airfoil drag coefficient, and our poor Mr. Diy finds himself nodding when they tell him two Euclidean vectors are only orthogonal if they are perpendicular.

But our hero doesn't lose hope. He locks the whole team in a room and returns in a week to find they have reached a compromise between aesthetic beauty, cost analysis, and functionality.

Oh, what a joyous day. Mr. Diy makes a 5 year cash-flow forecast and his team build a range of eight models.

Armed with the best global sales statistics, he manufactures in Cambodia and takes the products to market. The initial one, the one-man Hoverbike, priced at $8,900, gives him a total net profit of $600 per vehicle but the skies around the world fill with tiny flying commuters, all skirting the law by claiming they are only flying 20ft above the ground.

When, /DIY, when? When will I fly to work on something fast, agile, reliable, affordable, easy to maneuver and looks amazing? I'm relying on you guys to make it happen.