A global electric car Grand Prix series is about to kick off, led by an Aussie company. Matt Pearson tells us how they did it
Matt Pearson dreamed big when musing on his next challenge. Now his company is about to launch a global electric flying car race series, and the world is watching.
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In his youth, like many children, a young Matt Pearson’s daydreams were filled with flying cars, rocket ships and the like.
Unlike, well, everyone else, Mr Pearson’s childhood dreams have manifested themselves in physical form, with the Adelaide-based entrepreneur the co-founder of a nano-satellite company, and perhaps the pinnacle of cool - the founder of a flying car Grand Prix series involving electric vehicles piloted at speeds of more than 190km/h at yet-to-be-announced locations around the globe.
It sounds far-fetched, as one of Mr Pearson’s team members found out to his detriment one night. Hot tip - if you back out of a date at the last minute with the excuse that you have urgent work to do on the “flying car”, people might think you’re full of it.
But the depth and breadth of partners, investors and elite technical staff Mr Pearson has been able to assemble in the two short years since launching Airspeeder and the associated Alauda Aeronautics indicates this is no pie in the sky idea, excuse the pun.
The Grand Prix fixture - the Airspeeder EXA Series - is being backed by luxury Swiss watch firm IWC Schaffhausen, global logistics firm DHL, and cloud computing outfit Acronis.
Engineers, designers and other staff have joined Alauda from Ferrari, Brabham, Rolls Royce and McLaren, while on the investment front Jelix Ventures, Rad Ventures and California-based Saltwater Capital are on board.
The first of the three races in the series, which will involve pilots from the fields of aviation, motorsport and even gaming, racing around augmented reality courses in three locations across the world, will be held later this year.
For Mr Pearson, it’s the fairly rapid culmination of his musings on how he could do something substantial, even world-changing, after finding himself in a comfortable financial position after a decade with Sydney-based Honcho - another business he co-founded.
“It kind of gave me the time and resources to think about what I wanted to do next with my life,” he said.
“As a kid, if you go back far enough in the boxes of old stuff there are all sorts of drawing books full of racing cars and rocket ships and all sorts of things.
“I had that moment of what to do next - something that has world-changing impact.’’
One of those ideas has taken shape in the form of Fleet Space technologies - a nanosatellite company based in Adelaide which has raised millions in venture capital backing and currently has six satellites orbiting the globe, with more to come early next year.
Another idea was to get involved in the rapidly developing electric aviation sector.
“There is this amazing industry that’s forming around electric aviation,’’ Mr Pearson said, with the industry, which has seemed 5-10 years away for almost the last century, finally making progress towards a genuine solution.
Mr Pearson said achieving the dream of a flying car, eventually even for consumers, was not at all similar to something like launching Tesla - where consumer behaviour is already embedded and it’s simply a new technical fix (no offence to Tesla) - but more akin to the leap from horse and cart to automobile.
READ MORE:Airspeeder to launch global flying car series
But how to get involved?
“I went back and looked at what happened over 100 years ago when the car was invented ... and I wanted to look for the common thread that all of the great manufacturers started with.
“Back then it was Daimler, Mercedes, Benz, Fiat and Ford. Those are the big houses that have stood the test of time, and the thing that they all had in common was racing.’’
Henry Ford famously struggled to attract investors to his own fledgling venture back in the day, and turned to racing to drum up the hype needed to get backers on board.
His 1901 victory, in a 10 lap sweepstakes race against the foremost racing driver at the time Henry Winton, “demonstrated his ability as an engineer and made him famous enough to receive financial backing’’, according to the Ford website.
“In 1903, eighteen months after the race, Henry founded the Ford Motor Company and put his dream of making a mass-produced automobile into action – something made possible by his one and only race, the 1901 Sweepstakes.’’
Other carmakers have a similar pedigree, and the reasons are commonsense - product development, with frequent iteration of automobile design, vastly speeds up the innovation cycle, allowing the technology to advance rapidly.
The proof of concept can also be tried out under controlled conditions on the track, and the marketing element - these days through a worldwide potential audience of billions - adds a solid financial plank to the venture.
“Racing is a great way to develop technologies, to showcase technologies in controlled environments and also go through multiple iterations of a vehicle very fast,’’ Mr Pearson said.
“You’re not trying to product-ise the very first vehicle you build. But I really believe that racing is probably an early path to commercialisation.
“I think it’s quite a pragmatic approach to industry development.’’
Mr Pearson is convinced that flying cars will eventually do much to reshape the built environment, as automobiles, the horse and cart, and even canals have done already.
But for now it’s all about fast, noisy, exciting racing.
The first practical step to get there, was to first figure out whether it was feasible financially to emulate a racing experience which had all the hallmarks of a Formula 1 competition.
And then they had to build a team which could produce the vehicle.
Developing the competition meant getting the engineering right, but also making sure the regulatory issues were in order with organisations such as Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority, and getting financial backers.
Mr Pearson said over the past 12 months or so the series’ high-profile brand supporters had embraced the vision, because as it became apparent that it was much more than a thought-bubble, the thinking became “Well, who’s not going to watch a flying car race?”
“It’s futuristic, it’s exciting and it appeals to so many different people,’’ Mr Pearson said.
“We built the vehicle first, we built proof. And then it was a very natural thing for brands to partner with us, and not just luxury partners like IWC but also technical partners that got involved to put more technology under the hood.’’
As well as brand and technology partners, Airspeeder has built a team including Judith Griggs, the former chief executive of Australian Grand Prix Corporation, who is leading rights management for the racing series in Australia.
Having access to a potential audience in the billions through streaming services able to deliver races in real time around the globe is also a huge boon.
And what they will experience promises to be amazing. The Alauda Aeronautics Mk3 EXA racecraft will be piloted around augmented reality circuits - think a digital circuit overlaid on a real environment - racing at phenomenal speeds in close proximity.
The craft are equipped with collision-avoidance technology and if they stray off course, will slow down until they rejoin the track proper.
Mr Pearson said potential racers were contacting them pretty much daily, and drivers from all sorts of walks of life, from military pilots to motorsport racers, would be able to bring their skills to bear.
“It’s fun seeing them start to get to grips with their training and spending a lot of time in the simulator,’’ he said.
Since the company announced the series in June, the hype has been building, Mr Pearson said.
“It’s taken everything up another level. People are really understanding ‘OK this is the wildly exciting idea of flying car racing’, but the potential for building an industry here in Adelaide and in Australia focused on performance electric vertical take off and landing vehicles and the electrification of aircraft in general is also really exciting.’’
Mr Pearson and his team are still keeping us hanging about where the three races in the Airspeeder EXA Series will be held, but with testing in Australia carried out in the South Australian outback, it has to be a strong contender.
In the meantime Mr Pearson is excited about the ability to do something with a real and lasting impact.
“We can do something super-important here and have a real global impact. It sounds too exciting to be true, (but) it’s real and it takes a really important place in the industry as a whole.’’
Originally published as A global electric car Grand Prix series is about to kick off, led by an Aussie company. Matt Pearson tells us how they did it
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