I’ve always been afraid of being killed by a drunk driver, or dying while at work. Now both of those things can happen at the same time.
We have had flying car for decades now, its called a Helicopter
People are so good at driving in two dimensions, I think we should add a third.
I still don’t understand how helicopters are not flying cars.
If you want everyone to have a flying car, we should talk about everyone having a helicopter first so we can quickly come to the conclusion of why that’s a bad idea.
You are 100% correct that helicopters and their issues are the exact reason why flying cars are a terrible idea for the general population. I even like to point them out as the same thing when people talk about flying cars. There are some technical differences between people’s image of a flying car, which is closer to a drone with the multiple lift producing drives than a singular giant spinning blade, although the little ones would be comparably dangerous in a crash.
That said, helicopters aren’t flying cars because you can’t drive them around on the ground. Which means this product is a helicopter, not a flying car.
The problem with a flying car for the general population is that people are already bad at navigating in 2D and that any technical failure in the air means a vehicle drops onto something and the average person is not going to do a proper checklist and rigid maintenance schedule on their private vehicle.
That is one of the many problems, yes.
I would hope that by the time something like this launched to the general public, it would be a service rather than an expected purchase. Like self-driving-flying taxis.
It doesn’t make sense to have everyone owning their own when they will probably be largely autonomous to avoid issues with individuals driving them (not that everyone owning a car makes sense either, but I digress), so the maintenance shouldn’t be an issue either.
It’s like hover craft, sure they work, but at what cost? Bicycles, now there’s a design one can roll with. There was an HPV, The Gossamer Alabatross, crossed the English Channel in '79. Is anybody riding them now? Do you see similar HPVs anywhere now? No!
That’s because you can get vaccinated against HPV.
Ah, yes, I see, allow me to disambiguate: Human Powered Vehicle
hovercraft, too.
All I see is fully exposed propellers at groin/knee level.
Forget about a birdstrike, you hit ANYTHING and you aren’t taking off or landing.
Yes, what I need is even more noise pollution.
I’ve read the same promise 5 years ago.
And 20
And 50
It was big news 75 years ago too.
Urban air travel you say?
Flying cars is an idiotic idea.
A lot of posts here lately are kind of silly ideas that China tries to sell as the next big thing because it‘s cyberpunk. We should be more cautious about these stories.
The PRC stans have really kicked up over the past couple of weeks.
Even in cyberpunk these flying cars are only for big corpos and the rich.
Special licensing that is on-par with a helicopter license is needed immediately. They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars. Delivery drones and flying cars without corridors just means debris fields.
The alternative is autonomous AI trafficked flying cars that is networked with all commercial drone traffic, but that is 5-10 years away from being reliable and possible.
Regardless, the big issue is safety, a helicopter can land without the engine running. A flying car can also land without power, but not as softly and with less survivability.
They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars.
Wasn’t there something EU <-> UK already?
The alternative is autonomous AI trafficked flying cars that is networked with all commercial drone traffic, but that is 5-10 years away from being reliable and possible.
50-100 years is more likely. The complexity of automated low altitude flight is exponentially more complex than driving on the ground.
Drone swarms already exist. And they work better than self driving cars
Drone swarms are groups of small, agile devices with no passengers.
And they communicate in real time while individually checking their collision sensors for non swarm obstacles. The technology is 100% there, the flight capabilities do not matter nor the fact it’s a passenger vehicle; we have the algorithm and sensor packages right now to do what you think is a hundred years away.
You completely glossed over the small, agile part.
A drone can do a fucking barrel roll with zero impact on its flight capabilities or passengers. Have fun with passengers when an automated passenger drone needs to quickly change thrust direction because of wind shear.
That’s a matter of changing the PID compensations, it’s not a difficult problem. Do you think all drones can do a barrel roll? There are nonagile drones in operation right now, in swarm configurations. Not as large as a car, but again, that’s a matter of tweaking the PID, nothing more or less.
To put it another way you don’t restart learning how to drive a car each time you drive a new car. You tweak your internal pids to that of the new car. The difference is humans are stupid, slow, and have terrible coordination that can’t be immediately transferred over a fleet.
There are a whole lot less obstacles and unknowns in the air, as well as more planes (ha!) of separation available than a car.
When flying, you don’t really need to worry much about random pedestrians, for example.
If the entire system were completely automated, from the car all the way to ATC, and it’s essentially a taxi that you just tell what location to go to and it handles the rest… well that’s basically air traffic today minus the automated ATC part. (That isn’t to diminish pilots at all; just that I think it’d be a lot easier, in general, to replace a pilot than a taxi driver with automation. They’re both still extremely challenging problems.)
If you ignore take off and landing, birds, weather conditions, and everything else that makes flying more complex and dangerous than driving on the ground, sure.
And if you ignore construction sites with high cranes and not documented buildings. Or overland high voltag power cables, wind mills, hobby drones, and local variations of birds.
It‘s just taking the complex challenges of autonomous drivinf into the third dimension. Making it even more complex.
Other than the takeoff and landing, cars have to deal with those obstacles as well.
A computer running a citywide automated traffic system for cars would have all the same complexity, without the ability to separate traffic in three dimensions.
So yeah, if you ignore the parts that make it more complicated it seems easier!
If it is windy, it is far more complicated than driving on the road, especially in cities with taller buildings. Like not crashing into buildings is far harder than applying the brakes when there is ever changing wind shear that you can’t see. This applies to most days in most cities.
It isn’t that complex. The problem with current autonomous driving is the car can only infer what other cars are doing and what is around it, especially if we are talking about an autonomous car with idiotic vision mapping without lidar.
With a flying car that is directed by an AI that knows where every other flying object is, what every flying object is going to do, and the locations of every stationary object based on maps and lidar on the vehicle, you can keep collisions far less likely. Taking the human control out of the picture improves the conditions substantially.
I wouldn’t trust a flying car at all, but I would trust an autonomous one with AI ATC far more than an autonomous car going through a construction zone on a highway in a major city during rush hour.
The problem with current autonomous driving is the car can only infer what other cars are doing and what is around it
With a flying car that is directed by an AI that knows where every other flying object is, what every flying object is going to do
Spoken like someone from a culture where drivers are the only thing around because they have gotten so used to ignoring pedestrians, bicyclists, animals (wild or otherwise),… that might be found on the road and hasn’t considered what else might be in the air at all.
You would have a point if the flying car didn’t have to take into account the wind, updrafts, downdrafts, wind sheer off buildings, and a ton of other flying related stuff that helicopter pilots need to take into account which are barely noticeable to cars the majority of the time.
Then there is landing, the most dangerous part of flying. Imagine if the emergency braking in a csr needed to stop the car without spilling a liquid from an open cup.
Being on the ground is far less complex than flying, otherwise getting a pilot’s license would be easier than a driver’s permit.
With a flying car that is directed by an AI that knows where every other flying object is, what every flying object is going to do, and the locations of every stationary object based on maps and lidar on the vehicle, you can keep collisions far less likely.
This magically perfect AI would work on the ground too. I mean, it knows what birds are going do, why not people?
No, ain’t going to happen and stop trying to make it happen
Fetch…
Jesus F. Christ the BS that gets posted and upvoted in this community is getting more ridiculously Chinese propagandist by the day. Freaking air taxis? Really? Germany has like a dozen of those dumpster fire startups that chew up subsidies like it‘s no tomorrow (because for them there really isn‘t).
As a drone hobbyist, this is absolutely terrifying
25 mins of flight on a charge, and that’s not going to be at max speed , so we’ll ballpark it to 15 miles of range perhaps and that’s assuming no “traffic” or delays on landing. Not terribly practical like pretty much all of these flying car concepts.
Oh, and if anything goes wrong, you’re likely dead.
15 miles by the crow flies is a lot different than 15 miles driving on the ground.
I’m more worried about what happens when one of these contraptions wraps itself around a power line.
Why would they fly into the deep rural country side where power lines exclusively are?
You must be one of those big big city mice.
No I’ve just been to countries that aren’t stupid enough to have overhead power lines anywhere near residential or commercial properties, even in rural communities. The amount of money you save by being lazy with overhead lines is eaten up by the constant repair and maintenance, and in a competent country, health costs that they inevitably cause.
Underground lines are the only sensible solution. I mean you should be generating power that far from its primary draw anyway.
These should only be allowed in ordinary flight zones, far away from any buildings it may smash into.
The CPC will likely never approve of anything similar to this anywhere near residential, industrial or commercial zones due to the danger it represents
Plus, the use of these flying cars are essentially the same as Helicopters
also cities should have public transit anyway. what a massive waste of energy it is to fly people hundreds of feet UP before then even go anywhere.
These articles also never mention how this is going to work in the fabric of a city.
Say optimistically a 15 second separation between vehicles, 4 passengers per vehicle, means one ¨sky-lane¨ can transport 60/15 * 60 * 4 => about 1000 people per lane. That´s worse than a car lane, and an order of magnitude behind bicycle lanes and subways. You can stack multiple lanes vertically, but then it becomes more fun with traffic control for take-off and landing and still a bicycle lane transports more people.
So far these things seem better as a city hopper, or used in a rural setting, but the current ones don´t have the range for that either.
When the chances of dying in a car are just too low… Get high!
https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/are-car-accidents-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-america/
I have gotten to the point that when a scifi world is made futuristic by having… traffic jams in the sky, and futuristic cities absolutely must have magic sky cars in their skyline but there is ZERO thought towards futuristic mass transit I just shut it off.
We already have flying cars that people use as their primary vehicle, it is called living in the middle nowhere Alaska and owning a bush plane. The thing is, that is actually the only kind of situation where everyone owning a flying car makes sense, extreme isolation, huge empty distances and no roads.
The whole point of a city is NOT to need something like a flying car.
