An Australian startup called Alauda came out of stealth mode this week to announce its plans to host the world's first "flying car" race in 2019. It built its own scaled-down prototype, a racecar-shaped quadcopter called the Alauda Mark 1 Airspeeder, that it plans on testing in 2018. And naturally it's taken to Kickstarter to raise money to fund all its efforts. 

It's a twist on the typical story we hear these days about flying cars. While most engineers and developers think the only possible use case for these vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOLs) — which are really just oversized drones, when you think about it — is some sort of aerial taxi service, Alauda is going in a different direction. Its focus is on speed and sport. Its goal, in its own words, is to build "the Ferrari of the sky."

"Since there's been cars, there's been motorsport," Alauda CEO Matt Pearson said in his Kickstarter video. "And any type of vehicle, anything we build, we want to race. Anything that makes us go faster, fly higher, we want to compete."