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Are flying cars finally here?
- kristofferc 3y agoFlying cars already exist. We just call them helicopters.
- flurdy 3y agoThese flying cars are essentially just snazzy helicopters for wealthy people and enthusiasts. They can 'never' scale to be a mass-market, rush-hour queuing solution and holiday mass-exodus. Well 'never' is a long time, but at least quite a long way away before the AI, technology and materials can support a lot of traffic, mid-air fender benders, breakdowns etc.
- luzojeda 3y agoA helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway. When people talk about flying cars they imagine that. Something that can fly and go around roads as a _car_ would normally do.
- trgn 3y agoPeople's imagination is dumb. They picture cars ,the annoyance of being stuck in traffic, see all the empty sky and think, hmm, you know what would fix this, flying cars. But imagine that world, with millions of flying cars, and it'd be 10 times as awful.
- bluGill 3y agoWhat they fail to realize is how bad air congestion would be. Airplanes landing need a lot more separation than cars. Parking lots that now have 4 entrances/exists will need to share 1 with 10 neighbors.
- UberFly 3y agoI think the only way flying cars will work is if humans are taken out of the equation as much as possible.
- trgn 3y agoRobot flying cars would still be awful. The car noise and pollution is already insufferable, now bring it overhead. And the fallout of an accident are already grotesque, now multiply this by 9,81. Flying cars are a fetish: because they are futuristic technology, therefore they are desirable. That is the motive force behind them.
- rob74 3y agoYeah, something like the (even more) heavily modified DeLorean Doc Brown returned with from 2015. Key technologies still missing would be (a) the energy source (a "Mr. Fusion" which can generate energy from random garbage you throw into it) and (b) some kind of levitation not based on rotors, rockets or jet engines (anti-gravity?), apparently also used in the hoverboards.
- mrguyorama 3y agoI think this is ahistorical. Flying cars were always point to point "Jetson's" style vehicles, where you didn't HAVE a highway, because everyone just traveled as the crow flies. It's only when this was obviously impossible that futurists pushed the "mostly a car but can also fly sometimes" angle.
- simne 3y ago> A helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway Yes and no. In some EU countries, helicopters accepted to land near highway, and pick up (or disembark) passengers just like ordinary taxi. Also there very typical case, helicopter landed near Gas station to refuel. Generally, strict restrictions exists on flights over large cities, but over rural area and over big water, regulations easier. Even so, if in large city exists big river, aviation could flighting over it with very easy restrictions.
- woleium 3y agoIf we are unable to make full self drive work for cars, how are we going to safely have flying cars land anywhere except far out of the way airports? The dream of flying cars is to reduce City traffic, and until we can take off and land safely in a city there is no point.
- mannykannot 3y agoSafely and not unacceptably noisily - and the same applies en-route, as well. There are other scenarios where small, autonomous VTOL aircraft would be very useful, and in such cases, the question of whether such vehicles could reasonably be called flying cars becomes mainly a lexical/usage one.
- Retric 3y agoI’m more worried about people on the ground being safe. There’s not a lot of safe places to crash over a dense urban environment. Any plan that involves 10,000x more aircraft flying over cities is inherently flawed. eVTOL over rivers, lakes, or designated ‘flyways’ could work but such limitations would make flying cars far less useful, unless they can also operate as cars.
- ta1243 3y agoHow would flying cars reduce city traffic? You know what does reduce city traffic? People travelling by foot, subways and bikes.
- amalcon 3y agoThey would reduce traffic the same way subways do that: by getting people who might otherwise travel by personal auto off of the street entirely, and into another channel with a separate (though still finite) capacity. There are reasons that air travel won't do too much in this regard in the foreseeable future -- mostly around cost and the fact that ATC-managed airspace actually has quite a low capacity. Those are practical issues, not fundamentals.
- bluGill 3y ago
- Gravityloss 3y agoI've followed and thought about this space for long. It might turn out that humans are the last things to fly on autonomous vehicles. Quadcopter drones are already used routinely for information gathering purposes. We might get autonomous small aircraft that do van sized cargo delivery quite soon. Those and other similar systems then get enough repetition and practicalities sorted out that eventually humans can be transported.
- lagniappe 3y agoOne thing that my child mind never accounted for was what happens if my flying car breaks down? In a normal vehicle, it cruises to a stop and gravity keeps it on the ground. That same principle becomes sheer terror when applied to a flying car model.
- jader201 3y agoI mean, there are ways to still mitigate most of the risk. Obviously probably an oversimplification, but I could imagine one or more of the following: - reliable ejection + personal parachute - gliding mechanism - parachute for the vehicle itself The latter two assume the vehicle is fairly small and/or lightweight. Of course, similar to airplanes, multiple redundancies would also mitigate risk. A number of mitigations could help reduce risk below that of driving cars (which can be quite risky in some areas/situations, but we take the risk anyway).
- ta1243 3y agoOK, so you eject. You're safe. Meanwhile your 3 ton vehicle plummets onto the people below. I guess that's their own fault for living at street level.
- WrongAssumption 3y agoAbsolutely tracks with the car industry’s historical concern for pedestrian safety. None.
- Abekkus 3y agoPedestrians aren't customers, and deserve to die, and have their land replaced with more highways.
- throwup238 3y ago> reliable ejection + personal parachute “Ejection” means a rocket motor under the seat and a 50% chance of spinal damage. Not sustainable for consumers and no one in GA use them outside fighter jets.
- James87211 3y agoBetteridge's law of headlines. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no"
- Fripplebubby 3y agoYou might want to read the article, which ends with the author flying one.
- dhosek 3y agoOne. And the question is are they here. There have been flying car attempts for many years that have resulted in working prototypes. They aren’t here. They’re just over the horizon along with self-driving cars, cold fusion and commercial airships.
- ta1243 3y agoHeadline: Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct this time
- fanatic2pope 3y ago"Is the opposite of yes no?"
- sethammons 3y ago20 years ago, the Moller Sky Car was making headlines. Still not much to show. But the demo videos were pretty neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shlZySkGq6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shlZySkGq6g
- obloid 3y agoLonger than that even. Here it is on the cover of Popular Mechanics in 1991: https://img.tecnomagazine.net/2017/07/Moller-Skycar-popular-mechanics-1991.jpg https://img.tecnomagazine.net/2017/07/Moller-Skycar-popular-...
- khrbrt 3y agoForget flying cars -- a 50's consumerist fantasy. I'm begging for basics like safe bike lanes, fast public transit and cheap high speed rail. > It’s often remarked upon, in boosterish circles, that American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death. We shouldn't tolerate that either!
- iancmceachern 3y agoPlus one for bike lanes!!
- nox101 3y agoYou can demand perfection in planes. That will likely raise their price and operating costs. in which case more people will drive causing more, not less deaths. That isn't to say we shouldn't always try to make them safer. But if you put every passenger in a pod like the president in "Escape from New York" you'll make planes safer and still cause more death
- dangus 3y agoAnd yet, in most years, the American commercial aviation industry achieves perfection. I think we can demand the same from cars, or at least something better than 30,000 deaths per year.
- staplers 3y agoAin't happening while manual driving exists. Street racing and road rage are real problems and only got worse during/after covid.
- trgn 3y agoMore bollards, trees. Drive like a maniac, crash into a bollard.
- boringg 3y agoThere are significantly more drivers than pilots and are much less regulated - i.e. capability. More interactions in driving then airplanes - more traffic. Much higher probability of collision or issues. Flying has more complexity for the most part but also has a high degree of automation.
- neom 3y agoNot exactly flying cars, but Korea is rapidly making real progress on drone taxi, helps the government has seriously supported such things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKGK_8gmNQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKGK_8gmNQ4
- lmpdev 3y agoAmerica will go to any length to avoid undoing an export far more damaging than any of its nuclear bombs: its 1960s city planning Even if it means crippling its own economy and the economies of its allies Think of the trillions of dollars lost per year globally because some seppo modernist urban planners were arrogant enough to think they’d uncovered the ultimate solution to designing cities regardless of the nuances or context Want to begin repairing Pax Americana? Get private interests out of your public infrastructure operations. Be a role model for other countries within the American Empire to emulate
- jonnycomputer 3y agoFlying cars are a terrible idea. A fun idea. I wish I had one. But a terrible idea as a mass consumer item. Don't make me count the ways.
- kkfx 3y agoWell, are here? No. They can start to spread in few years? Yes. Where: NOT for urban mobility despite the claims. Instead they match PERFECTLY the substantial green new deal, or the large sprawl of single family homes and small buildings because no one want flying things in a dense are, take off and landing are nightmarish etc while in a moderately spread area they are the perfect match: you have nature, space to evolve, and anything is still nearby because 60km is just 10' flight. How? Well, at first I think not eVTOL but some VTOL with various tech, simply because the battery is too heavy to be efficient in such form, we can make eSTOL that for not-so-short range flight are nearly efficient as cars, but they can be used in a mid-dense scenario, so they are possible and practically useless. A small note: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... EU/McKinsey focused NOT on the possibility of flying stuff but on public acceptance of them. Take a serious note on that. Some small planes are already as efficient as car for many kind of flights and they do not demand the road infra from any point A and B of a flight, of course there are various constraints, but roads have others constraints as well. The reality is that we have roads because we can naturally work, ride animals who walk etc, modern era means also modern means.
- throw7 3y agoIn the sense that the current driving population will pilot around a "flying car", no, that will never happen. A. aviation is expensive so the general populace will never afford it and B. imagine the idiots in cars now except in the air.
- JudasGoat 3y agohttps://archive.ph/W59wq https://archive.ph/W59wq
- neonate 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240415143700/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/are-flying-cars-finally-here https://web.archive.org/web/20240415143700/https://www.newyo...
- TeeWEE 3y agoA Dutch company sold 100 flying cars to Dubai: https://innovationorigins.com/en/dutch-flying-car-soars-with-80-million-dubai-mega-deal/ https://innovationorigins.com/en/dutch-flying-car-soars-with...
- seanoliver 3y agoNew York actually had Air Taxis (passenger van helicopters) that shuttled people around the city until 1979 when a horrible crash ended the company forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways