Flying Car Racing Is Real — and Here's the Serious Tech Behind It

Yes — flying cars race each other now. A series called Airspeeder bills itself as the world's first flying-car racing league: teams race electric vertical-takeoff craft called "speeders," built by an Australian company, Alauda Aeronautics. So far the racing is remote-piloted (nobody's on board), a crewed version is in testing, and the real story for the rest of us is the mountain of computing it takes to build one. Let me break it down in plain English.

A customer of mine forwarded me a Dell write-up on this last week, half-joking, "Is this real, or is it a video game?" Fair question. It's real — but like most cutting-edge tech, the truth is a lot more grounded than the hype reel. Here's what's actually happening, what's still just a goal, and the one part of this that genuinely matters for a small business in South Georgia.

So flying cars are… racing each other now?

More or less, yes. Airspeeder is the racing series; Alauda Aeronautics designs and builds the craft. The company's roots are in Australia (the speeders are built in Adelaide, South Australia, and the races have all been held there), and it grew out of a prototype founder Matt Pearson first flew back in December 2017.

The racing you've actually been able to watch is the remote-piloted EXA Series. Pilots fly uncrewed speeders from control stations on the ground, racing around a digital "sky-track" — a course of GPS-positioned virtual gates laid over the real sky. The first proper circuit race happened in May 2022 out on the pink salt flats at Lake Lochiel near Adelaide, on a roughly one-kilometer course. A pilot named Zephatali Walsh took the inaugural championship. There've been a handful of races since, including a three-craft head-to-head at the end of 2023.

Pearson's pitch for why racing comes first is actually a good one. As he put it: "Car makers didn't focus on ride-sharing. They focused on racing. Henry Ford, Marcel Renault, Rolls Royce, even Tesla. They all started in motorsports." The idea is that a race is a brutal, fast way to shake the bugs out of a new kind of vehicle — the same way the car in your driveway inherited disc brakes and better tires from decades of racing.

How fast do they actually go?

Here's where I'll save you from the marketing numbers, because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets exaggerated. There are two very different machines, and two very different sets of numbers — the ones that have been demonstrated, and the ones that are still a target.

The Mk3 is the remote-piloted racer that's actually flown in competition. It's a roughly 220-pound (100 kg) carbon-fiber craft with eight rotors and a 96-kilowatt electric powertrain, and it swaps its battery with a "slide and lock" pack for quick pit stops. Under real pilot control, it's been clocked around 63 mph (about 102 km/h). Quick, nimble, genuinely impressive to watch — but not the triple-digit speeds you might expect from a hype video.

The Mk4 is the new, crewed machine — the one meant to eventually carry a human pilot. It's a hydrogen-electric craft with a claimed design target of 360 km/h (225 mph), reached in about 30 seconds from a standstill. That speed is a manufacturer goal, not a proven race result, so I'd file it under "impressive if they pull it off." What's genuinely clever is how it's powered: a 1,000-kilowatt (1,340-horsepower) green-hydrogen turbogenerator — Alauda calls it "Thunderstrike" — that acts like a range extender, charging a battery that drives the motors. Its combustor is 3D-printed using techniques borrowed from rocket engines to burn cleaner.

Wait — is anyone actually flying in these yet?

No, and this is the honest caveat the flashy videos skip. As of 2026, every Airspeeder race that's happened has been remotely piloted. Nobody has raced one with a person on board yet. Crewed racing was first floated for 2024, and it's since slipped.

That said, the crewed program did clear a real, independent milestone. In September 2025 the Mk4 earned an experimental flight certification from Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) — billed as a world-first for a racing eVTOL — which clears it to do crewed flight testing. Alauda has reported building 10 aircraft, training seven pilots, and logging more than 400 test flights, with the first crewed races now reported as slated for 2026. So it's further along than a stunt, but "flying cars racing with people in them" is still a promise, not a highlight reel. I'd rather tell you that straight than sell you the sizzle.

Where does Dell — and all the computing — come in?

This is the part that actually caught my eye as an IT guy. Building a machine like this is maybe 10% wrenches and 90% data. Per Dell's own customer story, Airspeeder runs on two Dell product lines: Dell Pro Max high-performance PCs for the heavy engineering work, and Dell PowerEdge XR-Series servers — rugged little "edge" servers built to run out at a dusty race site, not just in a clean data center.

What are they crunching? Advanced simulations and digital twins (a live virtual copy of the craft you can test against), real-time telemetry streaming off the vehicle, and AI-assisted design. One of Dell's engineers, Said Tabet, put it memorably: "You can think of an Airspeeder as a flying AI PC." Airspeeder's co-founder Jack Withinshaw credits the partnership plainly — "Dell and Intel have been integral in helping build the infrastructure for Airspeeder" — and Intel supplies the processors as the series' intelligence partner.

Now, about the eye-popping results Dell advertises: it credits the setup with making design cycles "5x" faster and, using generative AI design, producing components "75% lighter and 2x stronger" — with that specific figure tied to a redesigned landing gear. I want to be square with you: those are Dell and Airspeeder's own marketing numbers, not independently audited results. Take them as the vendor's claim. But the underlying technique — generative design — is very real, and that's where this stops being a novelty and starts being useful.

Here's the part that actually matters for your business

You're not going to 3D-print a hydrogen race craft in a shop off Norman Drive. But strip away the flying cars and the idea underneath is the exact shift I help local businesses make every week: let AI and good hardware do the heavy number-crunching so a small team can punch way above its weight.

"Generative design" sounds like sci-fi, but it just means you tell the software your goal — hold this load, weigh as little as possible, fit in this space — and it proposes optimized shapes a human might never draw. It's not just aerospace, either. Years ago Airbus and Autodesk used it to generatively design a cabin partition for the A320 that came out about 45% lighter (roughly 30 kg) than the conventional part. That's the same family of tool Airspeeder is using on landing gear — and it now ships inside mainstream software like Autodesk Fusion and SOLIDWORKS that a small engineering shop can actually afford.

For most of my customers, the takeaway isn't "buy a supercomputer." It's simpler: the powerful, AI-assisted tools that used to belong only to companies with a NASA-sized budget keep trickling down to normal businesses — and the ones who learn to use them early get an edge. That's the whole reason I added AI setup and training and done-for-you AI workflows to what I do. I wrote more about that shift in where AI is taking everyday work, and you can see the same "racing pushes the tech forward" pattern in how Tesla's self-driving got good. The flying cars are the fun headline. The real story is that this kind of computing power isn't exotic anymore — it's a tool, and tools are meant to be used.

Frequently Asked Questions