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Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy -- want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph (i.e.
by Xophmeister 11y ago
Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy -- want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph (i.e., a road with discrete lanes), how well do you think the general population would cope with this? Maybe autonomous flying vehicles would be more practical, but that still leaves the other two main problems wide open:
1. The energy required to keep the vehicle in the air.
2. The boarding-and-alighting (i.e., landing) bottleneck.
- balabaster 11y ago> People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph +1 just for this statement alone. So far, statistics say that flying is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car... that statistic will likely plummet to many orders of magnitude in the opposite direction if flying cars become a thing. If we do end up with flying cars being the norm, I would hope they will be autonomous and not have people manually flying them without a full pilots license being required.
- jacquesm 11y agoCorrection: statistics say that commercial air travel is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car. General aviation is already a lot worse than that today, and even pilot certification does not preclude accidents in general aviation. It is the whole process around safety put into practice at commercial airlines and numerous design details present in commercial aircraft that make flying with a commercial carrier as safe as it is.
- balabaster 11y agoYou make fair points
- ufmace 11y agoI was going to say something like that, but also, consider the maintenance differences. You can get away with treating a modern car pretty badly, and many people do quite often. What happens when people start putting off standard maintenance for months or years because they couldn't afford it or never got around to it?
- mtgx 11y agoWhich is why even before the whole "self-driving" car madness started, I was thinking flying cars will never work unless they are fully automated. A flying car should only be required the destination as input.
- toyg 11y agoThere is a chance to do with flying cars what we couldn't do with regular cars: force them to be fully autonomous by default. No safe automation, no permit. This would likely mean forcing them to use some sort of target "airparks" for takeoff and landing, at least initially, but it would drastically reduce the chance of accidents.
- fit2rule 11y agoI once drove a very nice car from Essen, Germany, to Cambridge, UK. On the way I had to take a ferry from the Netherlands .. I would have been much happier not having had to take that ferry. I think a flying-car would be the perfect application in that scenario ..
- blktiger 11y agoIt looks like the TF-X is planned to be an autonomous flying vehicle. The user basically just has to tell it 3 landing areas, then the car handles takeoff and landing and calculates whether it has enough fuel/energy to get there. That said, I think we are decades away from making a system like that work. This thing looks like a seriously complicated machine since it's autonomous, has twin helicopter blades for takeoff/landing, a primary engine for cruise, and can drive on the ground. Even if they get all that to work, the maintenance on it is going to be insane.