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Will flying cars take off? Japan's government hopes so
- nabla9 8y ago>“This is not a rich person’s toy. This is a mass market solution,” Forget the technology of creating flying car for less than $10 million. What I want to see is feasibility analysis from safety, economic, noise. energy and infrastructure point of views. - Flying car would be an energy hog. Flying consumes a lots of energy. Especially without large wings. Even if it's electric, that's increases energy consumption. - How does aviation safety scale? Visual inspection every morning, how many hours fight time before deeper inspections are required? Almost every part that goes to commercial aviation costs 10X what it costs for a car, because you must secure every nut and bolt. - Noise levels. Even after you design the car to be as silent as possible the decibels will be higher than you get from leaf blower.
- FabHK 8y agoA lot of your concerns have been addressed in Uber's "Elevate" study [1]. For noise, they're targeting at most half the noise of a truck, at most 1 dB increase in the day night level indicator (DNL), and a maximum 5% increase in nighttime awakenings. As for efficiency: a normal car does about 1 mile/kWh, an electric fixed wing about 2 mile/kWh (thus, better), though VTOL would increase that by 50% or more, an electric car about 3 mile/kWh. So, could be quite feasible, and a lot of the groundwork is being done. [1] https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf
- nabla9 8y agoThanks for the link. After studying it more, it seems that Uber plan requires battery technology that does not exist yet. > battery cell specific energy of 400 Wh/kg Tesla (=Panasonic) has 207 Wh/kg
- FabHK 8y agoYes, and unfortunately battery specific energy grows much slower than Moore’s Law.... :-/ Battery and regulation remain huge obstacles.