Take a look at the wildest vehicles designed by Kittyhawk, Google cofounder Larry Page's failed flying-car company

Flyer was Kittyhawk's first swing at a flying car designed for sale to the general public. The original model was cobbled together from a surfboard and drone parts in a weekend, according to former employees, but by 2018 the design had developed dramatically. In fact, the company was training amateurs to fly it with just an hour of training.

However, Flyer had severe limitations: it couldn't run for longer than 20 minutes at a time, it could be flown only over water at a maximum speed of 20 mph, and it lacked a wing. Insiders also say the Flyer was brittle and that the company lacked confidence it would hold together. In 2020, the company retired it.

Larry Page's original flying-car venture, Zee Aero, was founded in 2010. Zee was working on a promising flying car concept named Cora, which it continued to developed after Zee was merged into Kittyhawk. In 2019, Kittyhawk announced it would spin out Cora again – this time as a joint venture with Boeing named Wisk.

The goal is to one day turn Cora into a flying taxi that would be remotely piloted – and summed to the rider with an app. Progress is still ticking along: Boeing invested a further $450 million into the Wisk partnership in January 2022. More recently, it unveiled a four-seater version of the aircraft.

In 2019, Kittyhawk revealed it was pivoting to a new electric aircraft named Heaviside. It would be quieter than Flyer and, most importantly, autonomously piloted. H2 – the second Heaviside iteration – was arguably the most advanced eVTOL Kittyhawk built.

H2 had a single seat (although leaders debated putting two seats in a future model) and could travel more than 100 miles on a single charge. 

Toward the end of Kittyhawk's life, work was underway on H3, the third iteration of the company's Heaviside project. The new version was designed to have a longer range and svelter look. Several concept designs were shared internally, including one that would have dropped the nose-mounted wing, known as a canard, and a fixed wing. The design was similar to Cora, the flying car Kittyhawk spun out with Boeing.

During Kittyhawk's final summer, Larry Page asked his engineers to explore an idea he'd plucked from the mind of his personal muse, Nikola Tesla. The vehicle would have taken off and landed in a vertical position – requiring less parking space – but tilted to a horizontal position in the air. The concept is known as a tailsitter, but it became affection ally referred to by some staff as the "Larry Lozenge" or "The Egg." A model capable of holding a pilot was built, but it never flew.

Some Kittyhawk employees hated the name "Heaviside," which inspired images of something slow and cumbersome. There was a desire to name the next aircraft something entirely different. The K1 may have become the Heaviside successor, but the idea didn't make it far. "It was the first design that fully acknowledged there would be no pilot in the production vehicle," a former employee said. Instead, it would have been remotely piloted from the ground and – one day, hopefully – entirely autonomous.

Kittyhawk was also exploring ideas to reduce the cost of manufacturing eVTOLs, which could have included building more of the structure out of aluminum.