New York--Move over George Jetson. A flying-car might be coming soon to an auto dealership near you.

Terrafugia, a start-up taken off the ground by five Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, is building a personal aircraft line that will also drive on roads. The company is targeting late next year to have its multi-use vehicle, Transition, in the air, and it says it already has a list of customers waiting in the wings.

“What we’re doing is designing an airplane that fits inside the existing airport infrastructure … that has the capability to drive,” said Carl Dietrich, chief executive and co-founder of the Woburn, Mass.-based start-up. “We predict we will have the first one delivered in late 2009.”
 
Terrafugia’s plane-and-car design includes wings that automatically fold up on command. With past iterations (the concept has been around since the first half of the 20th century), a pilot would have to manually fold and bolt the wings under the plane, which wasn’t very practical. Transition must be parked with the engine off for the wings to be either deployed or stored. The wing is locked in place when in the air.

Once the wings are folded, the plane will turn into a car the size of a small SUV, but will weigh less than one. The machine will run on super-unleaded gas, getting 30 to 40 miles a gallon and going as fast as 60 to 80 mph on highways.

But the ride won’t have many amenities.

“It’s a two-seater and won't have the features a lot of people are used to seeing in cars today,’’ said Dietrich.

There won't likely be a fancy climate-control system, nor power windows or locks. Operators will get heat and an option for air conditioning, but not all the bells and whistles found in most cars because of weight limitations. And forget about power steering. The lightweight nature of the vehicle means you’ll feel bumps and wind gusts.

“The typical person will likely use this on the weekend,’’ said Dietrich, envisioning pilots flying somewhere and then using the car to visit a friend or have lunch. If there’s bad weather, the pilot won’t have to choose between waiting it out or taking the risk of flying. All he or she would have to do is drive home.

According to Dietrich, new rules making it easier to get a pilot's license to operate a sport light aircraft will drive market adoption for the Transition, which has a preliminary customer list of mostly pilots. The kicker, said Dietrich, is that the company anticipates charging $148,000, which, according to Dietrich, is half the price of a new single piston aircraft.

Terrafugia isn’t the first and won’t be the last company that tries to develop a flying car. People’s love affair with the notion of a flying car has been going on for decades.

Industry experts are skeptical that Terrafugia or any other manufacture of a flying car will have success. Experts say the market for this will likely be limited, even if the idea makes a lot of sense.

“There’s so many regulatory and training hurdles to making this a practical reality,’’ said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at Teal Group, the aerospace and defense market research firm. “If it ever does succeed in getting over the hurdles, there’s probably a small but wealthy market for these types of things. They might sell 30 or 40 a year."