Those investments and others like them were sustaining in more than a financial sense. "If I ever had dark times and thought about how easy it would have been for me to walk away from the project," says Moller, "just remembering how people like that had put their trust in me kept me going."
By the end of 1968, Moller had built and tested the XM-3, a more stable version of the XM-2, though it too was incapable of controlled flight. As work on his prototypes intensified, he was bolstered by help from a few employees and a parade of graduate students who had jumped at the chance to work on cutting-edge aeronautics technology. At that point Moller found himself wondering if there wasn't an intermediate, far easier target he could pick off along the way with the tiny rotors he was developing. What besides vehicles might need a lightweight push from a blast of air? As an admittedly reckless skier, Moller had always felt that standing around waiting for a chairlift was as inefficient as forcing aircraft to use an airport. But if he could design a backpack containing a powered rotor...
It probably goes without saying that the backpack thrust unit wasn't destined to eliminate the ski-resort lift line. Of the many obstacles that arose, Moller wrestled most heavily with the requirement that peaceful mountain slopes not sound like Daytona when skiers were schussing uphill. So he developed his own muffler and tested it out on motorcycles, which were a passion of his. It soon occurred to him that the demand for motorcycle accessories far outstripped that for thrust-pack accessories. Eventually, the Supertrapp muffler, as he named it, would become one of the most popular aftermarket accessories ever made for motorcycles and would be a hit on the race-car circuit as well.
Supertrapp was a $5-million business and was still rapidly growing when he sold it, in 1988, to free up time and money for his Skycar work. "I loved creating a physical product that was made on an assembly line and that made money we couldn't have survived without," says Moller. "But it occupied a lot of my best people."
Was that successful venture a fluke? Apparently not. When Moller had started searching for a larger work space in the mid-1970s, he recognized that the Davis area lacked the sort of research-and-development industrial park that was starting to thrive around many other major university towns. So he spearheaded the development of one and made millions more when he later sold his interest in it.
For Moller those accomplishments were useful distractions. "Anything I did besides work on the flying car was to raise money for the car," he says. "Everything was for the car." To that end, the ancillary businesses were valuable not just for the cash but also for the credibility they gave Moller in the eyes of prospective investors. He might be a dreamer, but he was a dreamer who could make money.
Never quite enough money, though. Everything Moller could scrape together from investors and his side business ventures was instantly gobbled up by flying-car R&D to the tune of as much as $3 million a year. Like the resulting prototypes, Moller's finances were underpowered and lurchy. He owns the building he operates in, but he's lost and regained it twice, once frantically negotiating to keep it while lying in a hospital bed with a broken neck from a motorcycle-trail-riding accident. (He also races go-carts, and he plays racquetball daily.) "I thought they were going to chain the door that time," he recalls. Moller says that he's been involved in about nine lawsuits, everything from disputes over distributor contracts -- including one with a large investor and former board member of the company -- to liability for allegedly faulty muffler parts. Moller sued one company for refusing to pay royalties on an engine design that he says violated one of the 43 patents Moller International owns on its technologies. All suits were resolved in his favor, he claims.
One way or another, the work on the vehicles went on. By the early 1970s, Moller had turned his attention to a different type of engine, named a Wankel after its German inventor. Moller believed the engine's ability to churn out high horsepower in a light, cheap, low-maintenance package made it perfect for a flying car. In 1974 the Wankel-powered XM-4 embarked on its maiden flight of a few wobbly feet.
Moller realized there was little point in bringing out additional prototypes without first achieving quantum leaps in power and control. Doing so took him another 15 years -- 12 years past the 10-year mark he had once set for himself. "We never felt discouraged about the slow evolution of the car," he says. "The only thing that was disheartening was having to sometimes put the work on it aside to raise money."
Finally, in 1989, he smoothly piloted the eight-engine, flying-saucer-like M200X to a height of 50 feet alongside his building. In theory, 40 feet is as good as 10,000 from an aeronautical point of view. The M200X's one-man design wasn't a marketable one, but it proved the concept of a hover vehicle with multiple small engines. Moller flew the M200X more than 200 times in front of current and prospective investors and other potential boosters.
To fund the Skycar, Paul Moller developed a muffler that he marketed to motorcycle and race-car enthusiasts
By 1990, Moller was working on a new machine designated the M400. The lack of an X in the name was significant -- X is generally taken to mean "experimental" in new aircraft. From the beginning, the Skycar, as the M400 would later be jauntily named, was intended to be the real deal. It would be Moller's do-or-die project. "It was what I had been moving toward for most of my life," he says. "Making it work was everything to me. Just accepting the possibility of failure would have been the first step to failure."
