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We should just bury the idea of replacing ground cars with their flying counterparts. Not that it is a bad idea to develop electric VTOL vehicle, on the contrar

We should just bury the idea of replacing ground cars with their flying counterparts. Not that it is a bad idea to develop electric VTOL vehicle, on the contrary, but ultimately they are going to replace the existing flying fleet: helicopters and planes. Moving people around cities is much more safe and efficient using trains, buses, taxis and bicycles. Moving people a bit less wouldn't hurt too, with more vertical development, more remote-working, next-door delivery and mixed-use zoning.

fortytw2 7y ago
I think you're neglecting to think about moving people around in rural and or remote areas. Where I grew up (eastern NC) the ability to travel as-the-crow-flies would massively cut down on time to get places, many roads take 30-45 miles of driving to go what might be 15 miles in the air. In that kind of area, there's not the population density to support any kind of mass transit (or even really taxis) and the distances are too far for biking to be practical. Readily available electric VTOL would revolutionize rural America. Not much to worry about in terms of air congestion, either.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Indeed, Alaska has this problem and worse. The region relies heavily on seaplanes and short-take-off-and-landing aircraft for logistics. These eVTOL aircraft would be great in Alaska and especially in places without lakes. Places without a lot of flat area for landing, places like Papua New Guinea, have no good options at all right now, so these VTOL aircraft will be transformative.
  - Retric 7y ago
    It’s not that difficult to learn how to fly a helicopter, you only need 20h with instructor before the first solo flight. While that’s just the beginning it shows getting the basic controls down is not the problem. Thus, these VTOL aircraft are only going to be game changers if they are vastly cheaper, which seems unlikely. The real issue is unit sales being so low. The R22 is a popular and ‘cheap’ helicopter ranking #8 in total sales, but it’s sold less than 5,000 units worldwide over 40 years. PS: Fixed wing aircraft are popular because they have a huge range of inherent advantages. VTOL sounds great, but the downsides are enormous.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      VTOL share most of those advantages of winged aircraft. The reason eVTOL may well be cheaper is that they have a lot fewer moving parts than a helicopter (and much lower vibration, plus using cheaper, lower-maintenance electric motors instead of turbine engines) and much less (and cheaper) fuel. But it'll take good designs. The Lilium one seems non-optimal compared to the Heaviside. And don't rule out eSTOL. I think we'll see more of that. Helicopters have an operating cost per hour an order of magnitude higher than a comparable payload conventional aircraft. The purchase price per payload capacity is also nearly an order of magnitude different. It's not the operator cost that determines the difference in price between helicopters and CTOL.
      - starpilot 7y ago
        It's hard to claim they're cheaper when they have a fraction of the range of gas helicopters. It's apples to oranges, the flying cars now are equivalent to electric golf carts in performance.
        woodandsteel 7y ago
        For those cases where their range is sufficient, they are vastly cheaper. And their range is going to increase over the years as batteries improve.
      - Retric 7y ago
        Helicopters are VTOL, I don’t know what you think it means but it’s just ‘Vertical Take-Off and Landing”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL “This classification can include a variety of types of aircraft including fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters and other aircraft with powered rotors, such as cyclogyros/cyclocopters and tiltrotors.” Similarly, an electric helicopter would qualify as eVTOL. People generally aim for something more efficient in flight, but that’s a separate question.
        Robotbeat 7y ago
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    The economics hardly make sense for a congested city. Forget it for a remote area.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  If the population can't support a few car-based taxis, how is it going to support a more complicated VTOL taxi?
  - fortytw2 7y ago
    I guess the article is actually about taxis specifically, but if the technology exists, they could definitely be sold as personal vehicles for travel along paths that are very long by road, but very short by air. Making rural less... rural, if that makes sense. The market is probably there if someone could pull off a 1-2 seat VTOL that had maybe a 60 mile range.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      I can't see such a vehicle being any cheaper or requiring fewer licences to operate than a helicopter. And helicopters are already available if travelling 20-30 miles in a straight line is a problem you need to fix.
      - LinuxBender 7y ago
        You may be right, but I don't foresee the pilot being allowed to control the vehicle. I imagine governments creating laws before long that would require all drone type cars to use GPS, take off and land from designated areas and would not permit manual control unless you meet some criteria.
        gambiting 7y ago
        In which case unfortunately, again, I can only imagine it would be 100x easier to just automate a helicopter rather than make a "flying car"(whatever that means) and then automate it.
      - digikata 7y ago
        I don’t know about the legal or other regulatory logistics cost of operating a helicopter, but the physical maintenance requirements for helicopters are likely far far higher than a potential electric vtol vehicle.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  That’s a really interesting observation. Especially when it seems like all the automakers designs on selling subscriptions to an electric car on-demand fleet seems nonsensical for rural areas.
- novok 7y ago
  It's also useful for people who live in island clusters, or islands that are short hops to a mainland. Boats are slow and often not on demand.
rndmize 7y ago
I mean, does anyone actually think flying vehicles will ever seriously replace ground transport? Flying will always be more expensive energy-wise than rolling along the ground; it will always have more dangerous failure modes; it will always require larger and more complex machinery, and it will always be more vulnerable to weather. I don't see any of this changing 5, 50 or 500 years in the future.
- eloff 7y ago
  I'm with you in that I seriously doubt the idea can be made practical anytime soon. However, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. If the trip is much shorter in the air, it may bring the energy consumption closer to ground travel, but even then if we're talking electric energy, renewables are set to make that so cheap it doesn't matter compared to other factors like convenience (it's already that cheap, and dropping every year.) Commercial air travel is far safer than most forms of ground transport , so it's at least possible that personal air transport could one day be safer than driving. The big thing really is the advancements in materials science and energy storage density. I don't think we're there yet. But in the next 50 years, very likely in my opinion. The one thing that may not be fixable is the noise. But this is primarily important for rural living. Air taxis could pick you up and drop you at the subway station outside the city, where the nose won't be that big of a concern.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    you hit upon on why this will all pan out renewable energy sources combined with electrically driven transportation never meant we would do less travel or use less energy over all. it means what all break through events in power generation and efficiency meant, more of it for more uses and more people. clean easily obtainable energy is going to lead to an explosion travel and who knows what forms it will take
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Jet travel is safe. Air taxi (civil air and helicopter) is not safe. VTOL flying cars are the latter. Jet travel is sort of energy efficient because it's a flying bus with 100+ passengers. VTOL flying cars are not.
douglaswlance 7y ago
That would be true if cities didn't adapt to the capabilities of ubiquitous flying vehicles. Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits. It means less environmental impact, less distance for people to travel, more efficient energy usage, and probably a ton more. Imagine New York City with landing pads not just on every rooftop, but every few stories spiraling around the outside of the building. People could live without ever needing to travel to the ground level.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits While it's a popular image in near-future scifi that doesn't look too costly at details, flying taxis with any current VTOL technology don't plausibly enable this, AFAIK, because while they can fly over cities easily, close proximity to solid vertical surfaces substantially disrupts the stability and effectiveness of VTOL systems. That's why helipads tend to be either on top of or a distance from buildings now; even with a smaller number of VTOL aircraft, pads aren't at those places because it's the most convenient place for them, but because it's the only safe place.
  - dTal 7y ago
    I think that has less to do with strange aerodynamics and more to do with the deadly whirling blades interacting poorly with the solid vertical surfaces if there happens to be, say, a gust of wind. A ducted-fan based system would be much safer, and could work in a constrained urban environment.
- cesarb 7y ago
  Since we're imagining things, how about a network of skybridges between the skyscrapers, perhaps combined with elevator-like automated people movers? To me, that sounds more viable than flying cars in a dense city.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    You mean like downtown Minneapolis? https://www.minneapolis.org/map-transportation/minneapolis-skyway-guide/ https://www.minneapolis.org/map-transportation/minneapolis-s...
checkyoursudo 7y ago
> trains, buses, taxis and bicycles I'm still hoping for some sort of pneumatic tube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
stefan_ 7y ago
Bury it right next to "replacing gasoline cars with electric SUVs will solve traffic" or "autonomous cars will solve traffic".
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  I'm not sure why autonomous cars won't solve traffic someday. Traffic causing problems like people blocking intersections, not moving when the light is green, or improperly merging, won't happen anymore. Cars will be able to talk to each other and set up optimal routes. They'll be able to more efficiently match up users with carpools. I'm sure you can imagine more. These things won't happen for a long time and definitely not with the first generation of truly autonomous cars. Once every car on the road is self driving though? Things will definitely change.
  - denni9th 7y ago
    While autonomous cars might be able to reduce traffic, they cannot eliminate it entirely. There is a limit on the number of cars which can drive down a road in a certain amount of time. If more cars wish to use the road than capacity allows, then there will be traffic. That can only be solved by increasing capacity, either with more lanes or more roads in the same direction, but this is typically not feasible.
    - RandallBrown 7y ago
      Any type of transportation will eventually suffer from a lack of bandwidth. Busses and trains are better now but they suffer from a major problem of not taking people where they actually want to go. I don't think it's an either/or problem. We'll have autonomous busses, trains, and cars all working together to make travel MUCH better.
bg117 7y ago
Curious to know about the environmental impact. Does anything that fly spend more fuel to stay above ground compared to an object that rolls on the ground? Will it cause more global warming if successful and adopted widely?

fortytw2 7y ago

I think you're neglecting to think about moving people around in rural and or remote areas. Where I grew up (eastern NC) the ability to travel as-the-crow-flies would massively cut down on time to get places, many roads take 30-45 miles of driving to go what might be 15 miles in the air. In that kind of area, there's not the population density to support any kind of mass transit (or even really taxis) and the distances are too far for biking to be practical. Readily available electric VTOL would revolutionize rural America. Not much to worry about in terms of air congestion, either.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Indeed, Alaska has this problem and worse. The region relies heavily on seaplanes and short-take-off-and-landing aircraft for logistics. These eVTOL aircraft would be great in Alaska and especially in places without lakes. Places without a lot of flat area for landing, places like Papua New Guinea, have no good options at all right now, so these VTOL aircraft will be transformative.
- Retric 7y ago
  It’s not that difficult to learn how to fly a helicopter, you only need 20h with instructor before the first solo flight. While that’s just the beginning it shows getting the basic controls down is not the problem. Thus, these VTOL aircraft are only going to be game changers if they are vastly cheaper, which seems unlikely. The real issue is unit sales being so low. The R22 is a popular and ‘cheap’ helicopter ranking #8 in total sales, but it’s sold less than 5,000 units worldwide over 40 years. PS: Fixed wing aircraft are popular because they have a huge range of inherent advantages. VTOL sounds great, but the downsides are enormous.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    VTOL share most of those advantages of winged aircraft. The reason eVTOL may well be cheaper is that they have a lot fewer moving parts than a helicopter (and much lower vibration, plus using cheaper, lower-maintenance electric motors instead of turbine engines) and much less (and cheaper) fuel. But it'll take good designs. The Lilium one seems non-optimal compared to the Heaviside. And don't rule out eSTOL. I think we'll see more of that. Helicopters have an operating cost per hour an order of magnitude higher than a comparable payload conventional aircraft. The purchase price per payload capacity is also nearly an order of magnitude different. It's not the operator cost that determines the difference in price between helicopters and CTOL.
    - starpilot 7y ago
      It's hard to claim they're cheaper when they have a fraction of the range of gas helicopters. It's apples to oranges, the flying cars now are equivalent to electric golf carts in performance.
      - woodandsteel 7y ago
        For those cases where their range is sufficient, they are vastly cheaper. And their range is going to increase over the years as batteries improve.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Helicopters are VTOL, I don’t know what you think it means but it’s just ‘Vertical Take-Off and Landing”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL “This classification can include a variety of types of aircraft including fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters and other aircraft with powered rotors, such as cyclogyros/cyclocopters and tiltrotors.” Similarly, an electric helicopter would qualify as eVTOL. People generally aim for something more efficient in flight, but that’s a separate question.
      - Robotbeat 7y ago
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  The economics hardly make sense for a congested city. Forget it for a remote area.
alistairSH 7y ago
If the population can't support a few car-based taxis, how is it going to support a more complicated VTOL taxi?
- fortytw2 7y ago
  I guess the article is actually about taxis specifically, but if the technology exists, they could definitely be sold as personal vehicles for travel along paths that are very long by road, but very short by air. Making rural less... rural, if that makes sense. The market is probably there if someone could pull off a 1-2 seat VTOL that had maybe a 60 mile range.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I can't see such a vehicle being any cheaper or requiring fewer licences to operate than a helicopter. And helicopters are already available if travelling 20-30 miles in a straight line is a problem you need to fix.
    - LinuxBender 7y ago
      You may be right, but I don't foresee the pilot being allowed to control the vehicle. I imagine governments creating laws before long that would require all drone type cars to use GPS, take off and land from designated areas and would not permit manual control unless you meet some criteria.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        In which case unfortunately, again, I can only imagine it would be 100x easier to just automate a helicopter rather than make a "flying car"(whatever that means) and then automate it.
    - digikata 7y ago
      I don’t know about the legal or other regulatory logistics cost of operating a helicopter, but the physical maintenance requirements for helicopters are likely far far higher than a potential electric vtol vehicle.
dv_dt 7y ago
That’s a really interesting observation. Especially when it seems like all the automakers designs on selling subscriptions to an electric car on-demand fleet seems nonsensical for rural areas.
novok 7y ago
It's also useful for people who live in island clusters, or islands that are short hops to a mainland. Boats are slow and often not on demand.

rndmize 7y ago

I mean, does anyone actually think flying vehicles will ever seriously replace ground transport? Flying will always be more expensive energy-wise than rolling along the ground; it will always have more dangerous failure modes; it will always require larger and more complex machinery, and it will always be more vulnerable to weather. I don't see any of this changing 5, 50 or 500 years in the future.

eloff 7y ago
I'm with you in that I seriously doubt the idea can be made practical anytime soon. However, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. If the trip is much shorter in the air, it may bring the energy consumption closer to ground travel, but even then if we're talking electric energy, renewables are set to make that so cheap it doesn't matter compared to other factors like convenience (it's already that cheap, and dropping every year.) Commercial air travel is far safer than most forms of ground transport , so it's at least possible that personal air transport could one day be safer than driving. The big thing really is the advancements in materials science and energy storage density. I don't think we're there yet. But in the next 50 years, very likely in my opinion. The one thing that may not be fixable is the noise. But this is primarily important for rural living. Air taxis could pick you up and drop you at the subway station outside the city, where the nose won't be that big of a concern.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  you hit upon on why this will all pan out renewable energy sources combined with electrically driven transportation never meant we would do less travel or use less energy over all. it means what all break through events in power generation and efficiency meant, more of it for more uses and more people. clean easily obtainable energy is going to lead to an explosion travel and who knows what forms it will take
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Jet travel is safe. Air taxi (civil air and helicopter) is not safe. VTOL flying cars are the latter. Jet travel is sort of energy efficient because it's a flying bus with 100+ passengers. VTOL flying cars are not.

douglaswlance 7y ago

That would be true if cities didn't adapt to the capabilities of ubiquitous flying vehicles. Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits. It means less environmental impact, less distance for people to travel, more efficient energy usage, and probably a ton more. Imagine New York City with landing pads not just on every rooftop, but every few stories spiraling around the outside of the building. People could live without ever needing to travel to the ground level.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits While it's a popular image in near-future scifi that doesn't look too costly at details, flying taxis with any current VTOL technology don't plausibly enable this, AFAIK, because while they can fly over cities easily, close proximity to solid vertical surfaces substantially disrupts the stability and effectiveness of VTOL systems. That's why helipads tend to be either on top of or a distance from buildings now; even with a smaller number of VTOL aircraft, pads aren't at those places because it's the most convenient place for them, but because it's the only safe place.
- dTal 7y ago
  I think that has less to do with strange aerodynamics and more to do with the deadly whirling blades interacting poorly with the solid vertical surfaces if there happens to be, say, a gust of wind. A ducted-fan based system would be much safer, and could work in a constrained urban environment.
cesarb 7y ago
Since we're imagining things, how about a network of skybridges between the skyscrapers, perhaps combined with elevator-like automated people movers? To me, that sounds more viable than flying cars in a dense city.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  You mean like downtown Minneapolis? https://www.minneapolis.org/map-transportation/minneapolis-skyway-guide/ https://www.minneapolis.org/map-transportation/minneapolis-s...

checkyoursudo 7y ago

> trains, buses, taxis and bicycles I'm still hoping for some sort of pneumatic tube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube

stefan_ 7y ago

Bury it right next to "replacing gasoline cars with electric SUVs will solve traffic" or "autonomous cars will solve traffic".

RandallBrown 7y ago
I'm not sure why autonomous cars won't solve traffic someday. Traffic causing problems like people blocking intersections, not moving when the light is green, or improperly merging, won't happen anymore. Cars will be able to talk to each other and set up optimal routes. They'll be able to more efficiently match up users with carpools. I'm sure you can imagine more. These things won't happen for a long time and definitely not with the first generation of truly autonomous cars. Once every car on the road is self driving though? Things will definitely change.
- denni9th 7y ago
  While autonomous cars might be able to reduce traffic, they cannot eliminate it entirely. There is a limit on the number of cars which can drive down a road in a certain amount of time. If more cars wish to use the road than capacity allows, then there will be traffic. That can only be solved by increasing capacity, either with more lanes or more roads in the same direction, but this is typically not feasible.
  - RandallBrown 7y ago
    Any type of transportation will eventually suffer from a lack of bandwidth. Busses and trains are better now but they suffer from a major problem of not taking people where they actually want to go. I don't think it's an either/or problem. We'll have autonomous busses, trains, and cars all working together to make travel MUCH better.

bg117 7y ago

Curious to know about the environmental impact. Does anything that fly spend more fuel to stay above ground compared to an object that rolls on the ground? Will it cause more global warming if successful and adopted widely?