The man building the future of transportation — a car with over a billion dollars worth of preorders and more than a million views on YouTube — lives in a small, low-slung duplex in a small housing development behind a Jack in the Box in suburban Los Altos. When I meet him there on a drizzly day in March, Jim Dukhovny is walking with a limp; he sprained his ankle sometime over the last few weeks of nonstop presentations to reporters, investors, and school groups.
It’s been a dizzying time for Dukhovny and his San Mateo company, Alef Aeronautics, the makers of what maybe, could be, the world’s first flying car. On March 2, HBO’s John Oliver did a segment on the company, calling its flagship car “something that looks like Lightning McQueen got canceled and rebounded by starting his own energy drink company.” TMZ called Dukhovny last week to tell him the demo video Alef recently released was the most viral video of the day. (He did not expect TMZ to be involved in all this, he admits.)
For the last decade, Dukhovny, a former software engineer, DJ, and nightclub promoter, has been trying to build the car of his science fiction fantasies. He kept the project so secretive that his father, the man who inspired him to build the car in the first place, didn’t know what his son was working on when he died in 2022. Three weeks ago, thanks to the demo video, the world saw what Dukhovny has been working on: a $300,000, ultra-lightweight, almost spectral-looking vehicle that can drive at low speeds and — according to the video at least — become airborne long enough to fly over another vehicle.
Reactions to the clip have been mixed: Some speculated the flying car was just a drone covered in an automobile cutout; others thought it was an AI-generated spoof. One commenter compared Dukhovny’s appearance to a discount Nicholas Cage. Still, the founder is not deterred.
“There’s only one way to convince people,” he said from a small pool house in the housing development. “They shouldn’t believe me. They should believe their eyes.”
Since the time of “The Jetsons,” flying cars have been a symbol of the future, of a high-tech utopia just out of reach. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous companies trying to bring that dream to life: Aska, located less than 30 minutes away from Alef in Mountain View; Samson Sky, which makes a three-wheeled model; and Xpeng, a Chinese company that is working on what looks like a flying minivan, to name a few. A number of companies, such as Volocopter and Joby Aviation, are currently building “air taxis,” or small, piloted aircraft meant for on-demand, short-distance travel, like the latter’s recently announced partnership with Virgin Galactic to shuttle passengers between the airline’s two U.K. airport hubs.
But nothing has captured the public’s imagination quite like Alef, which was founded in 2015, when Dukhovny sat down with four friends at a coffee shop in Palo Alto and sketched the idea on the back of a napkin. (Dukhovny likes to say that his co-founders told him the idea would take six months to make a reality. “That was 10 years ago,” he deadpans.)
Part of the interest may be because of Dukhovny himself: a tall, severe-looking Soviet immigrant whose uniform consists of black jeans, a black leather jacket, tinted sunglasses — even inside, even when it’s raining — and a tightly slicked bun. A software engineer by trade, Dukhovny moonlighted at the start of his career as a promoter at San Francisco clubs like The Factory and Ruby Skye, and as a DJ using the stage name “DJ Wizard” — a fact that the press seemingly cannot get enough of.
While Dukhovny insists his DJ days are behind him, when I emailed him about an interview, he emailed back from a Yahoo address starting with “wizard_files.” He admits to still producing small events and to missing playing before a crowd. He is frustrated that Oliver mocked his music career, remastering and playing one of his original songs, “Sex Machine,” on the air. Still, he says with a grin, “They made it sound pretty good.”
Being a former nightclub promoter lends itself surprisingly well to the world of startup culture, as both require a steady supply of self-aggrandizing hype. The nightclub Dukhovny played in his younger days was “one of the biggest,” he claims; his co-founders today are “engineering geniuses,” their mission nothing short of “fixing the world.” Even his DJ name has a grandiose backstory: “For thousands and thousands of years, wizards were usually the positive character who did some magical stuff to help everybody. We’re coming back to the idea of fixing the world, helping the world.”
It was this enthusiasm that pulled in venture capitalist Tim Draper, who also knows a thing or two about self-promotion, and who was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, and, less auspiciously, Theranos. Dukhovny says he sent a cold email to Draper almost 10 years ago, asking him to invest in the company. To his surprise, Draper wrote back, and after seeing a series of improving prototypes, became the largest investor in the company to date. Draper declined an interview request but did confirm his investment, adding in an email that “Jim and his team are true visionaries. I expect to be flying into my own parking space within the decade.”
With Draper came other investors — including Jim Boettcher of Focus Ventures and Eric Ball of Impact VC — and the ability for Dukhovny and his co-founders to work on the project full-time. They currently have more than 3,000 preorders — the equivalent of nearly a billion dollars in flying vehicles — and plan to start production on the first one by early next year.
Still, they are hamstrung by some of the problems of a small startup: At one point during our interview, it begins to rain, and Dukhovny remarks that the company can’t launch test flights for days after a downpour because the test field gets too soggy. When I ask him why they don’t just move to a less muddy field, he scoffs, “We’re a small startup. We cannot afford another field.”
Boettcher, who invested in Alef three years ago, told me the company has so far raised just $8 million — a small sum for a company nearly a decade old that would require billions in capital if it really took flight. Boettcher spins this into a positive, saying Dukhovny has been “very frugal” and “very good at leveraging interns from different colleges.” Still, not everyone is thrilled with the investment. “Even my wife says, ‘That is so mind-boggling. I don’t believe it’ll ever work,’” Boettcher says. “‘How could you put money into something like that?’”
The company is secretive about the exact design of the car — so much so that when an NBC crew came to film the demo video, Alef made the journalist stand half a football field away. So far, no reporters have actually entered the car; when I ask Dukhovny how one would steer it, he says cryptically, “Let me answer it this way: I can teach you in 30 minutes how to operate it.”
The company has released limited information about how it gets the craft airborne: Instead of one main engine in the front, there are four small engines on each of the wheels; the open space is filled with a propeller, motor, and battery systems; on top, there is mesh to hold the car’s structure while allowing air to pass through. “We are obviously hiding something,” Dukhovny says, when I ask about the secrecy. “We’re a seed-level startup, which means we have a huge amount of unprotected technology … We just can’t afford [to show] everything.”
Then there is also the small problem that the cars are not currently flyable in the United States. The model Alef has been demoing is less than 250 pounds, under the FAA limit for a less-regulated “ultralight aircraft.” But the model the company hopes to ship to consumers is more than 800 pounds. That counts as an ultralight aircraft in the U.K. and Canada, Dukhovny points out, but even in those countries, ultralights are prohibited from flying in highly populated areas. He says many of the customers who have preordered the vehicle live in rural areas — places connected by a single road, where the ability to fly over a fallen log or rock slide would mean the difference between making it to your destination or not. “It’s limited,” he admits, “but it’s a good first usage.”
Whether DJ Wizard can make the magic happen and get real-life passengers into his flying cars remains to be seen. Aside from the FAA regulations, there’s also the competition from other flying car companies — Xpeng announced plans to start mass-producing its version next year — and the astronomical cost. Though Dukhovny wants to sell the car at $30,000, it currently retails for 10 times that much. (Getting on the preorder list costs just $150, which may explain the high volume of signups.)
There is also the question of whether a market for flying cars actually exists outside of science-fiction fanatics. Three years ago, Kitty Hawk, a Larry Page-backed flying car company that blew through hundreds of millions in venture dollars, abandoned one of the most promising commercial models, saying it “could not find a path to a viable business.”
Dukhovny doesn’t seem bothered by such details. The goal, after all, isn’t building a sustainable company — it’s fixing the world. Midway through our conversation, he tells me the spiel he usually gives to investors: “There’s a movement about saving the environment, right? There’s a movement of feeding children. There are movements of stopping the wars. But people don’t realize that one of the most valuable resources which we have on Earth is actually time.”
We waste a week every year in traffic, he goes on, which adds up to years over the course of a lifetime — years we could spend socializing, sleeping, innovating, or dancing to techno. “The whole point of why we go to the doctor when we have a disease is to extend life, right?” he says. “Guess what? You’re wasting it in traffic.”
Then he interrupts himself, adding: “Actually, usually I end with this when I do my presentations. It’s the big punch line. Maybe put that at the end.”