AIR/WATER

Alef Aeronautics Begins Building the First Customer-Bound Flying Car

December 9, 2025

Alef Aeronautics has started manufacturing the first flying cars (Model A) in Silicon Valley, by hand, for early customers under controlled testing conditions.
The flying car is fully electric, road-legal as a low-speed vehicle, and also certified for limited flight by the U.S. regulatory authorities.
Alef has received thousands of pre-orders, amounting to roughly $1 billion in potential sales.

What if your daily commute could skip past traffic, ascend into the sky, and get you to your destination as a car… then a plane? Sounds crazy. Yet here we are. The California-based company Alef Aeronautics just began hand-crafting the first flying cars slated for customer use. Yes, actual production, with real people waiting for their turn.

For years, Alef has teased the concept, an electric, road-legal vehicle that can also take off and land vertically (an electric vertical takeoff and landing craft; eVTOL if you like acronyms). Their vehicle, the Alef Model A, is finally being built in Silicon Valley.

Alef Model A electric flying car Oct 19 2022 unveiling — _{Alef Model A electric flying car unveiling.}

The first units will take months of careful hand assembly. Robots and industrial machinery will help, but much of the work is human-done. Every component will undergo rigorous testing; then test flights will follow, to confirm that what works on paper works in the sky and on the street. Once these early units prove reliable, Alef hopes to ramp up manufacturing.

Alef is keeping things small for now. Only a tiny group at the front of the pre-order line will receive the first cars, and they will operate under very controlled conditions. They will go through training, and Alef will handle their maintenance.

Think of this early phase as a real world trial that helps bridge sci-fi ideas with something you can actually witness on the ground and in the air.

Jim Dukhovny, Alef’s CEO, said, “We are happy to report that production of the first flying car has started on schedule. The team worked hard to meet the timeline, because we know people are waiting. We’re finally able to get production off the ground.”

So what can Model A do? As a car, it navigates normal city roads and fits into regular parking spots. As a flying craft, it lifts off vertically and cruises through the air.

Alef explains that the car can cover close to 200 miles on the road, with roughly 110 miles available once you lift into the air. After takeoff, the structure shifts in a controlled way, since the cabin and the propulsion system rotate.

alef aeronautics receives faa certification to fly model a car

That rotation helps the car settle into flight mode smoothly and keeps the craft steady once you are airborne.

I’ll tell you how it hits me. This whole flying car moment feels like the future creeping into real life, and I’m fascinated by it. I also find myself raising an eyebrow, because there are plenty of hurdles here.

You have a vehicle that must satisfy two completely different sets of rules, one for public roads and one for actual flight. That is a tall order, and anyone pretending otherwise is skipping half the story.

Still, I cannot ignore what Alef is attempting. An electric vehicle that can roll through a neighborhood, then lift itself into the air, carries a certain symbolism that feels hard to shake. And those thousands of pre-orders tell me I’m far from the only one curious to see how this plays out.

I get why some people stay cautious. The original timelines felt a little tight to me too. Moving from handcrafted builds to true volume production rarely runs smoothly in any sector, let alone one blending aviation with automotive rules.

alef aeronautics receives faa certification to fly model a car in the mountains air — _{Alef Aeronautics received FAA certification to fly Model A car in the mountains air.}

The way I see it, this careful build-test-calibrate rhythm Alef follows will decide everything. Either this car ends up tucked into American garages, ready for someone to take it up for a quiet weekend lift into the sky, or it winds up becoming one of those quirky ideas we bring up years later with a little laugh and a “remember that?” kind of vibe.

Still, I cannot shake the feeling that we are standing near a doorway to something unusual and oddly exciting. Weird, yes. Wild, yes. Possible, absolutely. And maybe this is how people eventually rise above traffic altogether, wheels on the ground one minute, rising into open sky the next.