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I think I am with Musk on this form of transportation. Much too loud for even a small number of people to use them without high noise pollution in any urban are
by njarboe 9y ago
I think I am with Musk on this form of transportation. Much too loud for even a small number of people to use them without high noise pollution in any urban area. Helicopters and planes are bad enough and they are quite rare. Even existing freeways are quite noisy. Bring on the tunnels. Unless we can get some kind of anti-gravity or super noise cancellation, I hope these flying cars don't become popular.
- sarreph 9y agoWhat about electric propeller motors though? Aren’t they much quieter? If you could get the noise close to that of a glider then the only other pollution you’d have to worry about is visual. Then we’d need to start investing in active cloaking methods :)
- etrautmann 9y agoEven small drones are awful from 100’ away. Scaling that up will certainly be loud enough to be a problem in most urban areas
- dspillett 9y agoWhile this will be significantly louder than a drone it will also be much lower pitch so might be less irritating to the human ear. Less like a mosquito on steroids! Still far worse than silence of course but perhaps not much worse than road traffic noise unless you are directly under a common flight path?
- njarboe 9y agoI might be more sensitive to noise than most, but I've been in urban parks where I'm enjoying my time, relaxing, and a single small drone flies far (100ft) overhead. Its unnatural buzzing sound is quite annoying. Glider only action I would guess would be fine, but you have to get to altitude first to glide. And then altitude control near landing will have to be powered. I would love to see it in action and get to fly around myself. Fun times. But imagine a million of these in the air at the same time like you would have over LA or the Bay Area.
- bdamm 9y agoCheap drones are much louder than they have to be. Larger & slower blades make less noise. A full-size electric airplane can be quite quiet.
- matte_black 9y agoDJI made some advancements on their latest Mavic Pro which is 60% quieter and a much more pleasing pitch. You certainly would not hear it at 100 ft unless you were looking for it. The technology for quiet drones exist (blade design) it’s just that companies don’t give a fuck. Maybe with regulation...
- reacweb 9y agoYes, I am very surprised that a simple blade replacement can have such an impact on noise. The difference is so big, I can not understand why noisy blades are still sold. This kind of improvement should have occur since many years.
- Retric 9y agoIt's an efficiency trade-off. Larger blades for example add more weight and cost, but can rotate slower.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y agoIt might be a fantastic tradeoff, considering how loud vehicles are anyway, and how much it might improve car traffic and shorten rush hour.
- thinkloop 9y agoTrue. If it were up to me I'd move all transport under ground. We pay exhorbitantly in quality of life having car-centric cities.
- 762236 9y agoThe propellers create noise due to turbulence
- pcr0 9y agoDepends on the location. Tunnels are great for cities but flying cars make more sense for suburbs or the countryside, where building long sparse tunnels isn't worth it.
- njarboe 9y ago"any urban area" I agree.
- alexdong 9y agoThere are many remote areas in the South Island that are hard to get to. For example, West coast and particular the Haast area, wasn’t connected to the rest of the country until late 1980s. That is, 130 years after Western people started colonisation here. Previously the only way to get to these remote areas is via light aircraft and helicopters. “Flying doctor” and nurses weren’t uncommon. (Our midwife used to fly in, deliver a baby and fly back home for tea.) Public transportation, especially long distance ones, are poor. (Comparing to Switzerland and China.) Dunedin is only 100 miles away from Queenstown but it usually takes us 4:30 to 5:00 to get there by car. So if you see this news from these perspectives, you’ll see why it’s so cool and why the downsides aren’t that bad at all.
- onion2k 9y agoIt has a range of 62 miles. It's not going to work for "hard to reach" places or long distances.
- WoodenChair 9y agoRight now it has a range of 62 miles. That's obviously just a starting point.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago100 kilometre range, even 50k in and 50k out, has the potential to make a lot of hard to reach places not.
- taneq 9y agoEspecially if it's VTOL and rechargeable from a wall socket.
- EdwardDiego 9y agoWe have a race in NZ called the Coast to Coast - you start with a foot in the Tasman Sea and finish with a foot in the Pacific Ocean. It can be either done in one day (called the Longest Day) or two days, and comprises cycling, a mountain run across the Main Divide, then more cycling, then kayaking, then cycling again. But the fact that it can be done in one day should give you a hint as to the breadth of the South Island of NZ. Something like this would especially benefit our isolated West Coast, or if it can safely land in mountainous areas would be of great use in hunting.
- jorleif 9y agoI wonder if gliders that are powered by electric motors only during takeoff and landing could be a solution here. It's not like we get very annoyed by eagles soaring in the sky.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoTakeoff and landing are probably always going to be the noisiest part thrust-powered flight.
- jorleif 9y agoThat is a good point... So now I'm back to the giant slingshot idea.
- icebraining 9y agoWhat about a buried rail gun, as a less explosive version of the columbiad in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon? You'd step on to a circular platform, get slowly lowered into the barrel, then shot into the sky, where the wings would open :)
- Piskvorrr 9y agoAcceleration profile could be the issue here.
- stcredzero 9y agoScott Addams got there first. https://goo.gl/images/dsGSgv https://goo.gl/images/dsGSgv
- FabHK 9y agoTakeoff, in particular (as you have to build up kinetic and potential energy). For landing, you could glide in without thrust.
- drivebycomment 9y agoJumping to the conclusion based on pure conjecture ? See their launch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8 where they specifically mention how quiet it is (and the noise profile in the video indeed seems not annoying at all).
- DeusExMachina 9y agoIt sounds pretty noisy to me in that video, even with the music partially covering it. It’s hard to say if it’s noisier than a car, but I wouldn’t say it’s quiet at all.
- hawkice 9y agoBeing within ~10x the noise of a car is pretty quiet, considering they'll be up in the air most of the time. Unless the video is really misleading about noise, this won't be an insane nuisance.
- smoyer 9y agoIt's definitely going to be noisier than a car because of the propeller noise. Small aircraft don't generally have mufflers on their engines, so a gasoline powered aircraft will have both propeller noise and engine noise that are greater than that of a modern automobile (imagine your car without a muffler or even much of an exhaust pipe - no, not you Tesla owners).
- davidcbc 9y agoThe video specifically mentions that they are fully electric. It isn't a gasoline powered aircraft.
- smoyer 9y agoYes ... my point was that it was going to be quieter than a gasoline powered airplane and noisier than a car. As an aside, I suspect the "buzzing" noise made by the propellers was attenuated in the video post production.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoI live at the bottom of a steep sided valley. About 5 miles away is an RAF site, they regularly fly two or three helicopters up our valley under the radar and it is super super noisy. But those wankers on bikes with loud pipes are still the noisiest. In conclusion I'm not that bothered by flying cars. If you want to reduce noise in my area, get electric bikes on the road.
- cmplxconjugate 9y agoOne of the things I noticed about living in China is the noise difference due to the illegality of riding petrol motorcycles in the cities. It’s a really nice change. Too bad people beep their car horns constantly.
- jlebrech 9y agoanti-gravity will come about by necessity, until we have flying taxis we might not need it (that much)
- jakecopp 9y agoAs long as we're putting trains in those tunnels! Cars on freeways or sleds don't carry nearly as many people/hour.
- njarboe 9y agoBy trains do you mean buses? or lots of buses. Or how about many buses mixed with cars. You should do a quick Fermi calculation and you will find that with a close packed stream of single passenger vehicles at 200kph, the people/hour is higher that BART at rush hour. Use vehicles where people stand and are packed like sardines, as it is on BART at rush hour, and then you are getting a crazy high people/hour. If you really need to have all new transportation systems be public trains to feel good about building it, then, yes, there will be public trains in these tunnels.
- jakecopp 9y agoBuses are good too, though bus rapid transit doesn't have the appeal of trains. I'm not sure if this is a problem inherent to buses or BRT systems having worse service on average giving them a bad image. 200kph close packed cars would be nice, though you have to deal with: - Close packing which definitely needs autonomous driving. I want something we can build in 2018. - Merging at 200kph in tunnels. Those on and off ramps are expensive to dig. - Load balancing between on/off ramps. If everyone wants to get off the same exit at 200kph I don't know where the load goes when you have to transition to 50kph traffic. Are you going to disallow exiting from an off ramp if it's at capacity and would slow down the tunnel? Where do these people get off? - Where do you park all of these cars? That's a hell of a lot of downtown parking! How much does downtown land cost per square metre, multiplied by the area of the sum of cars in the city? Trains solve all these problems, and more importantly are here right now! It's not a technical problem, it's a political one. I don't understand the obsession with all these far off possibilities that might be better than rail. I'm just as big a fan of Elon Musk as the next person but Hyperloop has given a lot of ammunition to opponents of rail. "Hyperloop/The Boring Company is coming so we shouldn't build efficient metros that are already implemented in Japan/China/Europe and reduce reliance on cars and foreign oil."
- Shivetya 9y agoI was more concerned with all those open propellers. I would have expected them to be either shrouded or even a simple prop protector; think wire ring; to keep them from inadvertently colliding with people or objects.
- bfuller 9y ago>Helicopters and planes are bad enough and they are quite rare go to Bogota and tell me you think taking a helicopter around the city is rare.
- peterwwillis 9y ago> Much too loud for even a small number of people to use them without high noise pollution in any urban area. Have you lived in a city before? I go out to the street, and all I hear is cars passing by. I go into my apartment, and I hear the drone of my A/C. When it shuts off, the drone of the exterior A/C of a nearby building starts up. Then one couple below me start yelling at each other. A dog starts barking across the street behind my house. A subway car rumbles by below me. Later, a freight train blares in the distance. And you think a little "whrrrrr" above my building for 6 seconds is going to register??
- njarboe 9y agoI have lived in the Adams Point neighborhood in Oakland that has a population density of 32,000 per square mile for over a decade. This is about the same density as Brooklyn. It is right next to the I-580 (but is luckily below grade by this neighborhood), near the 980/24 freeway and 1/2 mile from downtown Oakland. No AC and no AC from my neighbors. I'm thankful for that as a few new buildings do have AC and walking by them is not very pleasant in an otherwise relaxing evening stroll. I know many of my next door neighbors and luckily don't have any habitual yellers or badly trained dogs near to me. Early morning garbage trucks once a week and gardeners leaf blowing in front of leafless condos is the biggest noise problems. Cars are not so noisy as the narrow street keeps most people driving under 25 mpg. I can hear the freight trains as they pass through Jack London square, but that is a couple of miles away. Maybe I have just stumbled upon a high density urban setting that somehow is not so noisy compared to others. Have you walked around Paris? There are lots of quiet streets right in the middle of the city. Maybe a million of these flying around the Bay would be fine and I'd love to see them work and then tested out for noise. I sure hope they are so quiet you would not notice them. Traffic congestion is making living in the Bay Area much more unpleasant than it could be.