A gull-winged flying car concept designed to overshadow a Bugatti or Lamborghini

Flying cars were once considered a pipe dream, eventually moving into feasible territory. Now, after years of research and development by visionary minds, the distant dream is almost on the horizon, with prototypes and concepts in their final stages of fruition. Xpeng AeroHT eVTOL has been lurking in the shadows, ready to make the flying car dream a daily affair, Toyota is in hot pursuit with its eVTOL, and Fusion Flight is also in the mix with Axion.

As highways and freeways get even more congested, the idea of flying cars makes even more sense. Eventually, the buck will stop at how aesthetic your flying car is compared to your neighbour, and we are not talking about a very distant time when that’ll happen. Most eVTOL concepts and prototypes we’ve seen thus far are either too boxy or strikingly close to a helicopter design. That leaves no individual personality for a flying car to make itself heard.

Designer: Luigi Memola

This prompted Luigi to come up with a flying car that has its own unique persona to be confident about while being completely within the realms of practicality. Meet the VEKTOR dual-mode vehicle that is as good on the tarmac as it is when high up in the air. The vehicle looks inspired by the aerodynamic form of fighter jets while adapting a supercar element to keep the motorheads excited about the prospect. The front section of the car is sharp to provide the least resistance to the flow of air, and curves on the sides to provide lift for smooth takeoffs.

The single-seater flying car is built for adrenaline junkies who have got bored of showing off their exclusive supercars on roads. The next avenue for them is obviously the VEKTOR with its combination of raw power, ultra-manoeuvrability, and attractive looks. The car’s wide wingspan assists in very short take-off and landing, which is important for a smooth transition from riding the freeway tarmac and then taking off at will. The rear section of the flying vehicle has thrusters and exhaust, aided by the optimized spoiler design, which helps in staying airborne without burning too much fuel.

When airborne, the two rear wheels and the bigger front wheel retract back into the underbody to eliminate any drag. On the road, the vehicle’s wings retract sideways, just like the side skirts that go over a modified car. Everything seems like a part of the design, which speaks volumes about the concept iteration. Luigi has managed to complement the sporty performance of this flying vehicle with the beautiful aesthetics, draped in a pearl-finish crimson lake hue. Indeed, something anyone won’t mind paying a premium for in the near future, to be honest.

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Finally, Learning Robotics Doesn’t Cost a Five-Figure Lab

For most of the last decade, if you wanted to actually build and train a robot, you needed one of three things: a university lab, a five-figure budget, or a job at a tech company willing to foot the bill. The tools existed, but the entry price kept ordinary curious people locked out of the room. That gap between “I want to understand AI in the physical world” and “I can actually afford to try it” has been the quiet, unglamorous problem holding back a whole generation of hobbyist roboticists.

Microduck, the new pre-order from French robotics company Pollen Robotics and AI platform Hugging Face, closes that gap for $399. It is a 25-centimeter biped that walks, sits, crouches, picks small objects up with its beak, and gets back up on its own after a fall. It even roller-skates. Under a shell built with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor, and two IMUs, it runs on fully open-source software, which means you are not just buying a cute desk companion, you are buying a real, hackable platform for training reinforcement learning models on hardware you can hold in one hand.

Designer: Pollen Robotics

Pollen Robotics is not new to this space. Last year the team launched Reachy Mini, a small desktop robot built purely for face-to-face interaction, and more than 10,000 of them found homes with developers and tinkerers around the world. Microduck is what happened when that same team asked a different question: what if the robot did not stay on the desk at all, but actually moved through your house? That shift from stationary companion to mobile, fallible, get-back-up-and-try-again machine is, to me, the more honest representation of what learning robotics actually looks like. Real robots fall down. Good ones figure out how to stand back up.

I will admit the duck framing initially struck me as a marketing gimmick, the kind of cute mascot skin slapped onto serious tech to make it more shareable. But the more I read about the design choices, the articulated beak that doubles as a gripper, the roller-skate foot swap, the four soft colorways named Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky, the more it felt deliberate rather than decorative. A humanoid robot falling over looks like failure. A duck robot falling over and waddling back up looks like a duck being a duck. That emotional permission to fail without embarrassment might be the smartest design decision in the entire product, because it lowers the psychological barrier to experimentation just as much as the price tag lowers the financial one.

Weighing in under 800 grams and priced before taxes and shipping, Microduck ships to North America, Europe, and the UK before Christmas 2026. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called it part of an effort to “democratize physical AI and world models,” and whatever you think of Silicon Valley mission statements, the market response backed it up fast. Within roughly a day of pre-orders opening, demand reportedly pushed sales past the $26 million mark and the duck went to backorder. That is not a niche hobbyist purchase pattern. That is a signal that a lot of Americans, tech-curious but priced out of serious robotics until now, were simply waiting for an affordable, unintimidating way in.

There is a broader mood shift happening in how the country talks about AI right now, somewhere between exhausted and skeptical, tired of chatbots that talk in circles and promises that never quite land in the real world. Microduck feels like a small, tangible answer to that fatigue. You cannot hug a language model or watch it recover from a stumble. You can with this. For $399, families, students, and weekend tinkerers get a genuine on-ramp to physical AI, not a toy pretending to be smart, but a real machine willing to be clumsy in front of you while it learns.

Pollen Robotics has been upfront that Microduck will not solve robotics’ hardest problems, and it should not have to. What it offers instead is something rarer than a breakthrough: a starting point that is actually within reach.

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iPhone 18 Pro Max Final Design Leaks Early

iPhone 18 Pro Max Final Design Leaks Early 18 Pro Max Design

Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 18 Pro Max and the much-discussed folding iPhone have become focal points for tech enthusiasts and industry analysts. These devices are expected to showcase design innovations, innovative technology, and strategic advancements that could influence the smartphone market significantly. By examining the potential features, design challenges, and market implications, we can better understand […]

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Apple Quietly Preps a New Screen for the Center of Your Home

Apple Quietly Preps a New Screen for the Center of Your Home Apple Home Hub

Apple is reportedly preparing to unveil a dedicated smart home hub, codenamed J490, with a potential launch date of September 9th. This device is designed to act as the central control point for your smart home, offering a streamlined interface to manage connected devices, interact with Siri, and access essential information. Unlike an iPad, the […]

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