4 ms·

IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) ke

IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) keep to a limited area). But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars, and some standard will be introduced to allow all them self driving cars to talk to each other. At that point, Level 5 will be much easier, even obvious. All he effort invested in assistive driving will seem silly.

krzat 7y ago
I wonder if it's possible to solve noise problem with flying cars. Maybe use active noise cancellation at the source? No idea if it's even theoretically possible, but would be neat.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Aren't flying cars going to be much noisier than surface cars?
  - krzat 7y ago
    Yes, that was my point. We will need some clever tech to make the noise bearable.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Joby is using some low noise props that are very effective. Quieter than most of the ridiculous motorcycles and loud cars on the 101. If we care about noise, we should be addressing the motorcycle industry. I can’t hear a C-130 flying overhead at 1000 feet when I am in my house, but I can hear motorcycles zipping by on the freeway behind my house.
- nradov 7y ago
  No, it's not physically possible to do any significant active cancellation of the noise caused by a rotor / propeller spinning through the air. The noise sources are too spread out (especially with multi-rotor designs) and cover too much of the audible range. Blade shape can be tuned to an extent for minimizing noise but that also reduces efficiency (not much to spare). Larger, slower turning blades are also quieter but there are practical physical limits on size and weight.
coldtea 7y ago
>IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of those things. Well, unless we develop "antigravity" or something... Add the possibility of huge damage caused from a failing/failing/crashing flying car, not just to the road and other cars there (like with a car) but to any building, group of people, etc. If it was a car-replacement (and thus getting on it was laxer than flying a plane, with flight plans, airport checks, special licenses), it would also be perfect for suicide terrorism too! Here's a funny but insightful post I've found, hammering on the topic: Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying cars. QED! The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying cars. Let’s glance back at a little history, always the best response to this kind of futuristic cluelessness. The first actual flying car anyone seems to have built was the Curtiss Autoplane, which was designed and built by aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss and debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917. It was cutting-edge technology for the time, with plastic windows and a cabin heater. It never went into production, since the resources it would have used got commandeered when the US entered the First World War a few months later, and by the time the war was over Curtiss apparently had second thoughts about his invention and put his considerable talents to other uses. There were plenty of other inventors ready to step into the gap, though, and a steady stream of flying cars took to the roads and the skies in the years thereafter. The following are just a few of the examples. The Waterman Arrowbile on the left, invented by the delightfully named Waldo Waterman, took wing in 1937; it was a converted Studebaker car—a powerhouse back in the days when a 100-hp engine was a big deal. Five of them were built. During the postwar technology boom in the US, Consolidated Vultee, one of the big aerospace firms of that time, built and tested the ConVairCar model 118 on the right in 1947, with an eye to the upper end of the consumer market; the inventor was Theodore Hall. There was only one experimental model built, and it flew precisely once. The Aero-Car on the left had its first test flights in 1966. Designed by inventor Moulton Taylor, it was the most successful of the flying cars, and is apparently the only one of the older models that still exists in flyable condition. It was designed so that the wings and tail could be detached by one not particularly muscular person, and turned into a trailer that could be hauled behind the body for on-road use. Six were built. Most recently, the Terrafugia on the right managed a test flight all of eight minutes long in 2009; the firm is still trying to make their creation meet FAA regulations, but the latest press releases insist stoutly that deliveries will begin in two years. If you’re interested, you can order one now for a mere US$196,000.00, cash up front, for delivery at some as yet undetermined point in the future.Any automotive engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good car design. Any aeronautical engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good aircraft design. It so happens that by and large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle. Thus what you get with a flying car is a lousy car that’s also a lousy airplane, for a price so high that you could use the same money to buy a good car, a good airplane, and a really nice sailboat or two into the bargain. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. It’s not that nobody’s built one; it’s that people have been building them for more than a century and learning, or rather not learning, the obvious lesson taught by them. What’s more, as the meme above hints, the problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of technology to enable it. When people insist that we’ll have flying cars sometime very soon, in other words, they’re more than a century behind the times. We’ve had flying cars since 1917. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today isn’t that they don’t exist. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today is that flying cars are a really dumb idea, for the same reason that it’s a really dumb idea to try to run a marathon and have hot sex at the same time. https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/ https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/
arethuza 7y ago
"But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars" If they want to land at some point presumably they have to avoid landing on these things?
- greedo 7y ago
  As well as trees, birds, powerlines, antennae, and even locusts!
bluGill 7y ago
Flying cars might or might not happen (see other discussions here). However they will never be more than a niche. Airplanes need far more safety space than cars. For a car you need a few dozen meters to the cars front and back, and less than 1 side to side. For airplanes it is thousands of meters in all directions, and you are limited as to height before you run out of atmosphere. So even thought planes run in 3d space, there is in practice less space for them than the few roads in a city.
- xyproto 7y ago
  Humans and bikes need even less safety space than cars. I don't think safety space is a good criterion for predicting how widespread a means of transportation will become. A fast mode of transportation, with a large safety space requirement, may be more efficient than other modes and/or become popular.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    The point is there isn't enough space for all the [single occupancy] cars to become airplanes. Speed doesn't change that because speed increases the space needed between airplanes. Now if we change to flying buses we might be able to pull something off, an express bus that picks up people for a few stops in the suburb for 10 minutes, then flys at >150mph downtown is a very compelling competitor to a car and will get anybody who currently drives 20 to minutes downtown to ride if the cost is reasonable (those in closer in suburbs will still drive). I don't think the business or environmental models work out.

krzat 7y ago

I wonder if it's possible to solve noise problem with flying cars. Maybe use active noise cancellation at the source? No idea if it's even theoretically possible, but would be neat.

arethuza 7y ago
Aren't flying cars going to be much noisier than surface cars?
- krzat 7y ago
  Yes, that was my point. We will need some clever tech to make the noise bearable.
- briandear 7y ago
  Joby is using some low noise props that are very effective. Quieter than most of the ridiculous motorcycles and loud cars on the 101. If we care about noise, we should be addressing the motorcycle industry. I can’t hear a C-130 flying overhead at 1000 feet when I am in my house, but I can hear motorcycles zipping by on the freeway behind my house.
nradov 7y ago
No, it's not physically possible to do any significant active cancellation of the noise caused by a rotor / propeller spinning through the air. The noise sources are too spread out (especially with multi-rotor designs) and cover too much of the audible range. Blade shape can be tuned to an extent for minimizing noise but that also reduces efficiency (not much to spare). Larger, slower turning blades are also quieter but there are practical physical limits on size and weight.

coldtea 7y ago

>IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of those things. Well, unless we develop "antigravity" or something... Add the possibility of huge damage caused from a failing/failing/crashing flying car, not just to the road and other cars there (like with a car) but to any building, group of people, etc. If it was a car-replacement (and thus getting on it was laxer than flying a plane, with flight plans, airport checks, special licenses), it would also be perfect for suicide terrorism too! Here's a funny but insightful post I've found, hammering on the topic: Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying cars. QED! The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying cars. Let’s glance back at a little history, always the best response to this kind of futuristic cluelessness. The first actual flying car anyone seems to have built was the Curtiss Autoplane, which was designed and built by aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss and debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917. It was cutting-edge technology for the time, with plastic windows and a cabin heater. It never went into production, since the resources it would have used got commandeered when the US entered the First World War a few months later, and by the time the war was over Curtiss apparently had second thoughts about his invention and put his considerable talents to other uses. There were plenty of other inventors ready to step into the gap, though, and a steady stream of flying cars took to the roads and the skies in the years thereafter. The following are just a few of the examples. The Waterman Arrowbile on the left, invented by the delightfully named Waldo Waterman, took wing in 1937; it was a converted Studebaker car—a powerhouse back in the days when a 100-hp engine was a big deal. Five of them were built. During the postwar technology boom in the US, Consolidated Vultee, one of the big aerospace firms of that time, built and tested the ConVairCar model 118 on the right in 1947, with an eye to the upper end of the consumer market; the inventor was Theodore Hall. There was only one experimental model built, and it flew precisely once. The Aero-Car on the left had its first test flights in 1966. Designed by inventor Moulton Taylor, it was the most successful of the flying cars, and is apparently the only one of the older models that still exists in flyable condition. It was designed so that the wings and tail could be detached by one not particularly muscular person, and turned into a trailer that could be hauled behind the body for on-road use. Six were built. Most recently, the Terrafugia on the right managed a test flight all of eight minutes long in 2009; the firm is still trying to make their creation meet FAA regulations, but the latest press releases insist stoutly that deliveries will begin in two years. If you’re interested, you can order one now for a mere US$196,000.00, cash up front, for delivery at some as yet undetermined point in the future.Any automotive engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good car design. Any aeronautical engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make for good aircraft design. It so happens that by and large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle. Thus what you get with a flying car is a lousy car that’s also a lousy airplane, for a price so high that you could use the same money to buy a good car, a good airplane, and a really nice sailboat or two into the bargain. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. It’s not that nobody’s built one; it’s that people have been building them for more than a century and learning, or rather not learning, the obvious lesson taught by them. What’s more, as the meme above hints, the problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of technology to enable it. When people insist that we’ll have flying cars sometime very soon, in other words, they’re more than a century behind the times. We’ve had flying cars since 1917. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today isn’t that they don’t exist. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars today is that flying cars are a really dumb idea, for the same reason that it’s a really dumb idea to try to run a marathon and have hot sex at the same time. https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/ https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/

arethuza 7y ago

"But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars" If they want to land at some point presumably they have to avoid landing on these things?

greedo 7y ago
As well as trees, birds, powerlines, antennae, and even locusts!

bluGill 7y ago

Flying cars might or might not happen (see other discussions here). However they will never be more than a niche. Airplanes need far more safety space than cars. For a car you need a few dozen meters to the cars front and back, and less than 1 side to side. For airplanes it is thousands of meters in all directions, and you are limited as to height before you run out of atmosphere. So even thought planes run in 3d space, there is in practice less space for them than the few roads in a city.

xyproto 7y ago
Humans and bikes need even less safety space than cars. I don't think safety space is a good criterion for predicting how widespread a means of transportation will become. A fast mode of transportation, with a large safety space requirement, may be more efficient than other modes and/or become popular.
- bluGill 7y ago
  The point is there isn't enough space for all the [single occupancy] cars to become airplanes. Speed doesn't change that because speed increases the space needed between airplanes. Now if we change to flying buses we might be able to pull something off, an express bus that picks up people for a few stops in the suburb for 10 minutes, then flys at >150mph downtown is a very compelling competitor to a car and will get anybody who currently drives 20 to minutes downtown to ride if the cost is reasonable (those in closer in suburbs will still drive). I don't think the business or environmental models work out.