Inventor Designs "Mona Lisa" of Flying Cars in Mojave Desert

For Dezso Molnar, the Los Angeles traffic was just too much. So he did what most people sick of the daily grind would do. He decided to build a flying car.

“To say that we’re gonna spend 40 billion hours a year in the United States sitting in traffic, saying that we’re never gonna have one of these [flying cars]…I don’t care if that’s the party line!” Molnar told Bloomberg in a video published Tuesday.

Molnar wants to start a flying car racing league in the nearby Mojave Desert. “You can make something that will allow you to escape this ridiculous ant line of eternity,” he said.

A former Air Force pilot, Molnar spends his time building rockets and rocket power cars. Oh, and he’s also been in a few bands. It’s fair to say he has a lot of interests and projects on the go, but he’s not interested in making his flying car project into a mass market design.

“I don’t have the objective about creating ubiquity,” Molnar said. “Da Vinci did one copy of the Mona Lisa, and it wasn’t for everybody, and it wasn’t like he had to make 500 of them, but it still has value. I see a lot of the machines that have been made as art pieces.”

Molnar wouldn’t be the first guy to try and make flying cars happen. Just last month, it was revealed that the Terrafugia Transition may become the first legal flying car after the Federal Aviation Administration granted a weight exemption to the machine. The SkyRunner dune buggy also received FAA approval last month.

One of the big pushes towards the flying car future may come from Google co-founder Larry Page. Last month, Page was revealed to have links to Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, two startups aimed at building a commercially viable flying car.

There’s disagreement over how flying cars may look. Zee.Aero, for example, filed a patent for a car that looks something like a small, 10-propellor airplane with wheels on either side.

Molnar’s design will be based around merging a traditional ground-based vehicle with a gyrocopter, a popular flying machine that’s been in use since the 1920s. The gyrocopter protects against failures: if the engine cuts, the plane will just float down, which could be useful if we don’t want to have broken-down flying cars dropping out of the sky all over the place.

Molnar hopes his racing car league will inspire others to take on similar projects and inspire big new ideas. “Those are the freaks that matter to me, are the ones that wanna take their 300mph jet car out there on a Saturday afternoon,” he said.