Flying Car Hits Speed Bump in Nobeoka

Akihabara News (Tokyo) — A plan to conduct eVTOL (flying car) test flights in Nobeoka city, Miyazaki Prefecture, has become a point of contention between the mayor and the city council.

Nobeoka Mayor Yoji Yomiyama is enthusiastic about the plan to conduct test flights in his southern Japanese city, and his administration included the project in its supplementary budget requests for the current year. Unexpectedly, however, the assembly passed an amendment which removed the eVTOL funding.

The mayor objected, and an extraordinary council session was held on July 11 in which the eVTOL funding plan was rejected for a second time.

Councilman Mikio Kitabayashi, who is leading the opposition, explained his objection to the funding as follows: “There are too many unknown points. I began to question whether it was acceptable to work on this project without deliberating it over a longer period of time. I would like to have more in-depth discussions with the mayor so that the mayor’s administration and the city council can work together for the development of Nobeoka City.”

For his part, Mayor Yomiyama denounced the council’s actions as “regrettable and unexpected,” pointing out that about 95% of the cost of the flight test was going to be covered by national subsidies in any case, and that the delay puts some of these subsidies in jeopardy.

Last autumn, it was announced that Nobeoka had received a Digital Garden City subsidy from the central government to begin preparing a “flying ambulance” service to launch in 2025 that would utilize an eVTOL.

This confrontation over the eVTOL test budget appears to be part of a wider political division within Nobeoka city. The mayor has been elected twice with opposition party support, while the majority of the council are local politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Nobeoka city has a population over 110,000 people.

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