A large carmaker successfully entering the Light GA aircraft market would be fantastic. GA aircraft are generally lacking the superior ergonomics, design, quality control and efficiency that cars need to survive in the market.
A mass produced GA aircraft could be built at much lower cost – new – than current designs, using industrial production concepts from the automotive industry.
The failure of the TAA-1 does show, unfortunately, that despite considerable resources, car makers do not automatically succeed in this market.
Car makers imagine they can design light aircraft and aircraft components, but when they try they find out they can’t. Weight is generally the issue, as it was for this Toyota development, as it was for the Porsche engine.
The closest I’ve seen to a successful design was Honda’s prototype engine developed for sale by Continental. I think in that case it really was business issues that stopped the project, not engineering problems. But Honda is not just a car maker, they do all kinds of stuff, including their jet.
Mitsubishi was in that business for a long time. From the Zero to the MU2 and so on.
As was Fuji (Subaru) in the past but as with Mitsubishi and Honda its a company does a lot more than just design cars.
The Japanese get into a market only if they believe that they can do a very good job.
No potential newcomer could think they can do that today, in the gradually shrinking market and with gradually ageing demographic. Cirrus was the last one; they did OK with standard technology and the chute. Very hard to see what can be done new, without massive R&D which would never be recovered. For example Toyota spent 400M developing a V8 engine for the Lexus cars.
One of the Rutan projects was to develop a Lexus V8 into an aircraft engine.
Joe_90 wrote:
One of the Rutan projects was to develop a Lexus V8 into an aircraft engine.
Here’s a photo of the Toyota V8 engine in early testing on a Piper Aztec.
The engine itself was apparently developed by Toyota with some involvement by Hamilton Standard, about ten years before the Toyota TAA-1 prototype. The airframe for the V8 engine was developed by Scaled Composites (Rutan) and called the Model 191. It is also shown in the article, with more details available here.
A decade later the TAA-1 was flown but not with the Toyota engine, more details here , including a note that 40 Toyota engineers worked on the project for a four year period! The FAA registration of the TAA-1 prototype was eventually cancelled in 2011.
It looks like Toyota first hired Scaled under contract to design/build a prototype airframe to test the V8 engine that Toyota did not carry forward, then ten years later they used a certified Lycoming engine to test an in-house developed airframe, which they also did not carry forward.
