Volvo owner Geely, China’s bestselling carmaker, is selling drones and building flying cars
- Geely is China’s largest private carmaker and the bestselling domestic car brand last year
- The carmaker’s new heavy-lift civilian drone can deliver packages and fly for hours
Most carmakers today are keeping their eyes on the road, but not Geely. The Chinese manufacturer’s latest vehicle is an electric drone.
Geely’s new product hasn’t gone that far yet. Rather than chauffeuring passengers, the heavy-lift drone is designed to carry a payload of up to 6kg. Like most consumer drones, it runs entirely on electricity.
Even more remarkable, though, is the flight time. The winged aircraft needs just 1.5 hours to charge the battery and supports up to 6 hours of travel. That’s significantly longer than the flight time of many lighter civilian drones, which typically rely on rotors powered by smaller batteries, lasting less than 30 minutes in the air.
While the drone’s wingspan is longer than 5 metres, the vehicle can be dismantled into smaller parts that fit inside a box. During a launch event on Tuesday, Aerofugia representatives were able to put together the drone piece-by-piece in just over a minute using only their hands.
