Google founder's secret flying cars revealed

Google co-founder Larry Page is using his own personal wealth to fund not one, but two, ambitious start-ups that are racing to create the world's first mass-produced flying car.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Page has invested more than $135m, since 2010, in a new start-up called Zee.Aero and is now channelling large amounts of his own fortune in a new company called Kitty Hawk.

The US newswire also claims Page had hoped his financial backing of both companies would remain secret. For example, at one of the companies Page invested in, he occasionally worked under the pseudonym GUS - the guy upstairs - in an attempt to avoid being identified by the employees.

Zee.Aero is already at the prototype stage and has been regularly conducting test flights, says Bloomberg.

Thanks to Page's considerable investment, Zee.Aero has already poached designers and engineers from organisations like NASA, Boeing and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

In 2012, Zee.Aero was caught patenting one of its prototypes (pictured) that looks more like a plane than a car. According to the drawings, the two-seat aircraft has eight propellers to enable vertical take-off in confined spaces.

The patent also describes the aircraft as "safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient and compact".

Kitty Hawk, meanwhile, is said to be developing a quadcopter drone, similar to the Chinese drone-maker, Ehang.

It's not known whether the Kitty Hawk version will be piloted or be fully autonomous, like the Ehang's 184 drone that recently was granted use of a US State-approved test facility.

It's thought that Page could follow in the tyre tracks of Elon Musk and dominate the emerging flying car and passenger drone industry in the same way Musk helped pioneer the mass-produced pure-electric car.