ENGINEERS in Japan are racing against the clock in a bid to be able to light the Olympic torch at the 2020 games with a flying car.

The Summer Olympic is frequently viewed by the host nation as a way to show off its prowess and it appears Japan isn’t taking the opportunity lightly during the next games, due to be held in Tokyo.

The plan is to reportedly drive the car around the athletic track in the new national stadium before flying it into the air to light the cauldron in the climactic moment of the opening ceremony.

A team of young automotive engineers from a group called Cart!vator are working on the project. They have set up a garage and testing facility in an abolished elementary school on loan from Toyota and are working to bring their vision to life.

The finished product is expected to be about 3.5 metres long and about 1.3 metres wide.

The car will be a single person electric tricycle with propellers positioned on the front and rear corners to provide a vertical take off and landing (VTOL) system.

The vehicle is designed to be operated with the steering wheel and accelerator pedal either in the air or on the road.

According to the group’s website, the project is designed “to a new era where everyone can fly freely”.

It also points out that flying cars will allow us to live on water by reducing our reliance on roads.

Although the team is relatively small, they plan on producing a full-scale working prototype while partnering with a large company for funding and production needs.

The group is led by Tsubasa Nakamura, an automotive expert who founded the project dubbed SkyDrive in 2012.

And their plans for the flying car aren’t limited to the theatrics of the Olympic opening ceremony as the group ultimately hopes to make the product commercially viable.

“If technological innovation is achieved in the battery performance and other fields, the vehicle could be commercialised in the future,” Masafumi Miwa, an engineer working on the car told The Asahi Shimbun.

A small prototype of the car — one fifth of the proposed size — was demonstrated at the Maker Faire Tokyo in 2014. However as the group seeks to scale the plan upwards they face challenges as the larger frame becomes more difficult to elevate and control.

The team believes they will need about 30 million yen ($A$380,000) to achieve their first manned test flight.

It remains to be seen if the project is able to be used in the Olympic ceremony, let alone made commercially available any time soon. It may be a far fetched idea currently, but it would certainly make for a memorable Olympic moment.