OK, everyone who’s been waiting for flying cars, your wait is over:
Well, almost over. That just a prototype, so it may take a while to get it into production. But it flies, and looks like a car, well, one that’s a mashup with a quadcopter. Also may take a while to get FAA certification. And once you get one, don’t forget to get a pilot’s license…
That’s not a car, that’s a Transformer!
Oh great. The “drivers” in my area are quite idiotic enough in two dimensions, TYVM.
Flying cars aren’t anything new. The prototype Convair Model 118 flew in 1947.
The AC-35 auto-gyro flew in 1936. Technically this wasn’t so much a flying car as it was a road-worthy auto-gyro, so if you don’t want to put this on the list I don’t blame you. It does (or did) both fly and drive, though.
The Taylor Aerocar first flew in 1949, and in 1956 the Civil Aviation Authority actually approved it for production. The company wasn’t able to get enough interest to actually put it into production, however.
There are a lot more on Wikipedia’s page for flying cars.
XPeng is basically following Microsoft’s playbook and is claiming to have invented something that has actually been around for quite some time. Then again, it worked for Microsoft…
Don’t worry about everyone being able to go out an buy one. It may look like a car, but likely the price, if it ever gets on the market, will be half a $million, minimum. Probably more. Same with the transformer car. These will be rich man’s toys.
Still doesn’t mean the drivers/pilots will be any more competent in 3D than they are in 2D. Not looking forward to the safety issues here.
Well, since it’s a flying vehicle, they’ll have to get a pilot’s license to fly it. Just because it’s also a car does not repeal that requirement.
But I know what you mean. Everyone thinks of the Jetsons when they think flying car. Consider all the cars (ignore the heavy trucks and buses) on the road at once in the LA area during rush hour. Tens of thousands, probably. Now think of all them taking off and flying, but not being constrained to fly over the highways. Just going a direct line to their destination. Absolute chaos.
Pshaw, I’m not the least bit worried about driving my flying car up in the air with all the other soon-to-be car flyers. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? An occasional fender-bender? I’ve had plenty of fender-benders on the ground. Fender-benders in the air can’t be much worse, can they?
Not that it’s worth (over) thinking this, but they would almost certainly still follow specific routes. For the same reason I can’t drive my car diagonally across 4 lanes of a busy road because my destination is 3 blocks down on the left side of the street, you wouldn’t want flying cars doing that either. Also, whatever form ATC would take in this scenario, it would easier for them if they could put people on a route and just check in on them from time to time and focus their energy on people entering and leaving the tracks.
Similar to how planes fly over the Atlantic.
There’s lots of ferment in this corner of aerospace right now. Lots of companies are building prototypes that triangulate between airplane, helicopter, and taxicab. All or substantially all powered by electricity from batteries, fuel cells, or both.
The business model is akin to a taxicab or bus company using professional pilots operating company-owned vehicles. There’s no expectation these things will ever be privately owned or operated by any but the uber-rich who in any case would have a chauffeur, not drive it themselves.
They’d operate at least at first on canned routes as terrestrial busses do now, then eventually some form of on-demand point-to-point ride-hailing but still from fixed landing facilities (“vertiports” in the argot) located at airports, train stations, stadiums, shopping malls, downtowns, etc. Essentially anyplace that generates a critical mass of would-be riders to/from. So it’d be a weak form of aerial taxicab.
A major design goal is to eliminate the pilots and go to remote human control and/or fully autonomous operations pretty early in the industry’s life cycle, like 5-10 years from this stuff being mainstream (at least for the comfy+ class living in really big cities). Which itself is 5 to 10 years out at best. This autonomy idea is frankly much more believable than are self-driving terrestrial cars.
Their interaction with conventional aviation and conventional ATC is being defined now. But whatever specific form it takes, and whatever licensing is required for operators of these things, it will be utterly different from what aviation is doing now.
[aside]
Wiki is pretty useless on this topic. Too much is happening too fast for them to keep up and there really aren’t good secondary sources about the current state of industry play.
Actually, the North Atlantic Track system is now beginning to be dismantled as obsolete. The replacement is full free-flight direct from one shoreline to another. This dismantlement is still the work of a decade or more, but direct trajectories are being flown now in at least some of what was historically NAT airspace.
Oh, great, we have crazies out there that can’t handle two dimensional driving. Now, I have to worry about them dropping out of the sky? 
Minnesota just installed flashing yellow left turn arrows and signs saying “Left turn yield on flashing yellow arrow” because drivers here are too stupid not to drive directly into incoming traffic. I don’t see this being a reality here any time soon.
Exactly my concern about this.
Quoting myself for context:
Late add/edit: That came out a bit off-key.
I didn’t / don’t mean to pooh-pooh your suggestion that flying cars will be on fixed routes in the early days, and perhaps forever. That’s spot-on thinking. I was trying to add a bit of insider trivia to your choice of example.
No criticism was intended, and I’m sorry if it came off that way.
One way to do it is have the “cars” being exclusively driverless in the air (as in, not having any flight controls at all), while under human control on the ground. Drivers will drive on streets and roads, as they do now, to designated areas - like highways or city avenues - at which point they’ll enter their destination, let go of the wheel, and let the automated ATC system fly them as close as possible to their where they want to go, at which point they’ll land and take control of the car. To actually fly a car yourself, you’ll need a pilot’s license, and you can only use it in rural and wilderness areas, so as not to pose a risk to automated flying vehicles or to people on the ground.
The vehicles I’m talking about are not in any sense cars. They have no ability to operate on roads. They are effectively helicopters that need less-extensive heliports and are (supposedly) quiet enough to be acceptable flitting to and fro in great numbers over our heads.
Now you’re right that if we ever did get true point-to-point vehicles that could be cars e.g. from home to takeoff point then again from landing point to work, something like fully automated flight and fully manual road driving is probably the way to accomplish that goal.
There are a couple of outfits in China and other countries trying to make that double jump from idea to working eVTOL machine to working flying roadworthy e-car. Seems like a fun way to convert investor cash into small visionary engineering shop employment, but not the makings of a real industry. At least not yet.
If I built a flying car I would not have called it XPeng!
Misread this and thought “great, unsafe at any speed altitude”.