Unmanned flying car racing in high speed danger zones is the most efficient way to get flying cars into city skies.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Project MAXIMUM BOOST: Flying-Car Racing as the Regulatory, Certification, and Constitutional Pathway to Maximum Freedom in Advanced Air Mobility
SSRN · 6621460
The Takeaway
Traditional aviation safety rules require years of testing before any new vehicle can be certified for public use. This proposal suggests building a dangerous motorsport where AI controlled flying cars are pushed to their limits and intentionally crashed. The resulting data on how these vehicles fail would provide the edge case information needed to train safe navigation systems for everyone else. By making racing a legal proving ground, developers can bypass slow government bureaucracy and establish a constitutional right to air mobility. Crashing these cars on a race track is the fastest path to making them safe for the average commuter.
From the abstract
This paper argues that the fastest, lowest-cost, and most democratically legitimate path to scaled Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) in the United States is competitive, fully unmanned flying-car motorsportspecifically the X1Racing Project MAXIMUM BOOST framework, an $11.0 billion federal program executing over a seven-year expenditure timeline in which $2.2 billion is released up-front and $8.8 billion is matched dollar-for-dollar against corporate racing sponsorship beginning immediately. The argume