From what I understand, the main problem with the sorts of “flying cars” like in the OP (really, they’re more like roadworthy airplanes) is that the requirements for planes and cars are different enough that when you try to combine them like this the end result is something that’s both a bad plane and a bad car.
But…but…they fly!
XPeng is the manufacturer’s name. AeroHT is a division or something like that. I don’t know if they have a model name for the flying car itself.
There’s a Chinese company called Ehang that builds a drone capable of carrying two people; they have done a few demos these past few years. There is no possibility for piloting, it’s autonomous.
Actually, I already have a pilot’s license so that’s not a problem for me (although I might need a rotor add-on).
When I see something like this my thoughts go rather like this:
- This is not the first flying car - there have been iterations of that since the 1940’s.
- What happens if the motor quits? What recourse do you have? (Ability to glide? Auto-rotate? Deployment of vehicle parachute?)
- Have they gotten past the the problem that, so far, “flying cars” tend to be crappy aircraft and crappy ground vehicles?
Well, except for the very, very small sub-set of uber-rich who also happen to be pilots…
Training and testing requirements for aviation are more stringent than for ground-based driving. Also, the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving. Which, of course, is something to be concerned about but after an initial period of chaos and debris-clearing things should settle down.
IOW: Give 'em all a license, let gravity sort 'em out!
Works for me! [evil leer smiley].
Not fair! You’re a ringer!
I also see lots of promise for the Volocopter.
"Ah… … I’m a civilian who would like to report a UFO sighting … " 
It’s a car. And a plane. Both. So you’ll get charged for both.
Get back to me we they reissue the flying tank. Not only can I fly, but I will have sufficient armament to take care of annoying drivers and pilots.
Another one, Alef, is being developed:
You can put down your deposit now ($150 standard or $1500 higher priority) for this $300,000 vehicle!
Unfortunately only 25 mph on the road; I haven’t found out what its flying speed is.
They did not exactly get an airworthiness certificate in the usual ordinary sense of the term.
They got a certificate that lets them fly their testbed in a highly limited manner. True, that’s a 100% essential milestone on the way from initial inspiration to a production product offered for sale. But it’s about step 230 on a journey of 10,000 steps.
Geez, lots of hype, not much substance.
First, not the “first real flying car”. There have been other actual flying cars. Unfortunately, they tend to make be really crappy as both cars and aircraft. It is the first electric flying car, or rather, it would be if there was an actual flying prototype.
Only a 100 mile or so flight range, which frankly I do not find impressive. Glide profile of a brick so hope your engine(s) don’t fail. Hope it comes with a ballistic recovery system standard. I don’t care what they say about drone licenses, this this is going to require a pilot’s license (not a big deal for me - I already have one - but the average person will find it to be an obstacle).
Seems like yet another “flying car” company that is great with hype and attracting investor attention but hasn’t produced something that actually works.
Not impressed.
If we finally get flying cars 50 years from now, it’ll be because of the work of companies like this right now. I don’t understand the negativity. Sure, it won’t work - but any progress is good progress, right?
Flying cars are like nuclear fusion: they’re always “30 years away.”
First, I question if flying cars are a desirable thing. (Keep in mind I am an aviation enthusiast and licensed pilot, so I’m all for flying in general).
But let’s assume a “flying car” is a cool and desirable thing.
There are some very big differences between traveling on the ground with two dimensions of movement and in the air with three dimensions of movement. Among other things, if your car has a problem it’s pretty easy to pull over to the side of the road until you can get it fixed. Or, even if you don’t pull over, your car will eventually stop on its own and just stay at that point. If your aircraft has a problems “pulling over” means landing, and “eventually stop on its own” can mean slamming into a planet at high speed, which will ruin your day for sure. The major failure modes have very different results.
Note my use of the phrase “glide profile of a brick” in my prior post. One of the things that makes airplanes relatively safe is that if your engines quit working you can still glide, or as one of my flight instructors put it, “you switch to gravity power”. This allows you to land without a working engine in a controlled manner. Heck, gliders always operate in that mode. Rotorcraft like helicopters have something akin to that called “autorotation” that also allow one to survive engine failure while high in the air (this is, I’m told, a bit more tricky than fixed-wing gliding but I’ve known people who successfully auto-rotated to the ground in an emergency so it is doable). Another wonderful feature of these two techniques is that they can be done by a trained human using mechanical controls and don’t require computer systems.
The Alef is basically a very large quadcopter (octocopter?) with a mesh fairing to make it car-shaped. Without power it doesn’t glide, it falls. So I have to ask - can this thing auto-rotate? Is that even an option? Sure, they have this weird sideways-mode that turns the sides of the fairing into airfoils (which is a neat idea to increase efficiency in a VTOL aircraft, but more on that later), but can you actually use that to glide? And is this something that can be done with a Mark I human controlling it, or does it require a computer system of some sort?
Fortunately, we do have a work-around for a lack of an emergency glide/autorotate option and that’s a ballistic recovery parachute. I’ve not used one myself, although I have flown on small airplanes equipped with one. There’s a big red handle you pull in a Dire Emergency that launches a parachute that provides, if you’re lucky, a survival landing. Note that I said survivable, not gentle. Injuries up to and including broken bones can be a side effect of such landings and sure, you’ll recover from that. After a couple months. Maybe you’ll get really lucky and just be shook up and maybe a little bruised. And you have no control over where you land once you do that, so hope you don’t wind up in a tree, which subsequently collapses dropping you down another 10-30 meters onto the hard ground, or deposits you into a body of water with hungry alligators (which really did happen on one occasion in Florida to an unfortunate pilot).
Second, this thing is apparently a hybrid between a rotorcraft and a fixed-wing, allowing both vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and also fixed-wind operations, which are more efficient and allow longer range. It’s a great idea and the US military (among others) have poured a LOT of money into developing this sort of aircraft culminating in the Osprey. Not that that is the only tiltrotor aircraft to exist. But this is a tricky technology and tiltrotors have all sorts of problems and issues, The Alef is significantly different in many respects and might be an improvement in some ways but there is even less history using their method of going from VTOL to cruise than tiltrotors so yes, I’m a bit skeptical until a lot more testing occurs.
Meanwhile, I have to ask - who is actually in charge here? Are you a passenger in this machine which essentially does the flying for you? An autonomous passenger-carrying drone? Not necessarily inherently bad, but autonomous vehicles are still not ready for prime time. If not that, then you need to be trained to fly it. And, sorry Alef, you’ll need more than a drone license to do it. At a minimum you’d need a private pilot license with a rotorcraft category, unless there’s a tiltrotor category (is that a thing? not an area I’m familiar with personally) AND a multi-engine license. I suppose if you can afford $300,000 for this thing the time and money to get a pilot’s license isn’t that big of a deal, but if the human aboard is doing the flying it’s going to be a bit more than the driver’s license you currently get for the road.
Oh, yeah, about those multiple rotors - when everything is going according to plan you get nice, controlled, balanced thrust. I’m assuming that one steers by altering the power output for the rotors to lead to a controlled tilt and directional change. I’m also assuming this is all controlled and balanced by an onboard computer of some sort, because that’s how that sort of thing is done (toy quadcopters use tiny computers/chips, but it’s a matter of scale). How well does this system compensate for a rotor that stops for whatever reason? How well can it handle multiple failed rotors? If your quadcopter/drone crashes you’re out money. If you’re flying car crashes with you aboard that’s a lot worse day for you, and given the necessary size and weight for this thing means that this thing is going to cause damage when it slams into the ground, or kill someone it lands on top of.
Oh, about the people on board - I think people have these fantasies that being able to fly means you can go all willy-nilly without restraint. But that’s not reality. We have ATC and flight rules to keep aircraft from slamming into each which is not only bad for the people on board but can have bad consequences for those the accident pieces might fall on. Given everyone on the road a flying car then you’ll need “traffic lanes” in the sky and all sorts of traffic rules to keep the carnage down. You’ll still have traffic jams, only now they’re in three dimensions instead of two.
Can we talk about weather? There’s a problem with weather and aviation, or rather, people and weather. Small aircraft have limited ability to fly in bad weather. For that matter, large aircraft have limited ability to fly in bad weather. You can drive your car in weather too severe for large commercial jets or even military aircraft. This has to do with physics. You will not be able to fly your Alef in a thunderstorm. Well, you could but you stand a good chance of getting killed doing so. Can we trust people with their fancy flying cars not to try? It’s not just thunderstorms or blizzards, dense fog can kill aviators, too. Are you going to need an instrument rating along with your multi-engine tiltrotor high-performance pilot’s license?
I see these “concept videos” and people talking like these are going to be flown in cities/downtowns. Um… have these people ever actually been in a small aircraft? Or walked in the Chicago Loop and had experience of some of the interesting things skyscrapers do to wind as far as updrafts, downdrafts, and pseudo-windtunnel effects? Maybe you look at that and think “cool” but I think “tossed like a sock in a dryer”. What tall buildings do to air currents adds further complexity to this whole idea, and additional hazards to anyone in one of these things.
Now, lets talk about whether this is a practical vehicle or not. On the ground it only goes 25 mph. That is not very practical. That’s bicycle speed (OK, pretty high bicycle speeds, but still in that range). How is that a practical car? It’s a super-expensive golf cart, that’s what it is. It’s a “car” in that it is vaguely car-shaped and can travel on a road but that’s about it. In the air they’re saying it has about a 110 mile range. That’s… well, it’s the aviation equivalent of a golf cart. You can get a kitplane for under $50,000 that can do better than that. Hell, you can get a used Piper or Cessna in that price range (although there are maintenance costs with those that can be significant).
Which gets back to the major failing of all “flying cars” up to this point: they are crappy cars and crappy aircraft. Sure, they can drive and they can fly but they don’t do either particularly well. Same reason you don’t see many amphibious craft: they tend to be crappy cars and crappy boats at the same time. I’m not saying this crossover could never happen, but there’s a long history of failed ideas with the occasional dead human body in the mix.
So yeah, I’m skeptical.
But then, I have both a driver’s license and a pilot’s license already. While I’d love to have personal aviation much more accessible to everyone I don’t think a flying car is the way to do it. General aviation is fading because most people don’t want to put the time into the human side of the equation to make it safe (that is, pilot training and practice), and a lot of lawsuits and regulations have increased the cost of the hardware involved. Mind, I’m not entirely opposed to the regulations, a lot of them are necessary to avoid a bloodbath, but safety costs money. You can have cheaper aircraft, but they are more limited. Ultralights/sportplanes/etc. do cost less money - but they also are more limited in their capabilities. Yet they are still better aircraft right now than this proposed flying car.
Flying cars are going to be constrained by existing aviation regulations. They’re going to be limited by physics. And if you get a lot of them you’ll need traffic rules just like ground vehicles. (Actually, there are already traffic rules for aviation, it’s just that non-pilots are blissfully unaware of them).
Also, to separate this out from the technical aspects of this, here are reasons why I am highly suspicious of this particular “flying car” company:
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They are NOT the first flying car, as this very thread shows. Promoting themselves as such is dishonest. There is no way I’m trusting my life to a dishonest aviation company.
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They don’t actually have a flying car at this point. Again, their promotional materials imply they do. See above statement about dishonesty.
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They do NOT have an airworthiness certificate. Initially I thought that maybe they had licensed this under the Experimental category but in reality they only have authorization for exhibition and flight testing. Nothing wrong with that - it’s a necessary part of developing new aviation technology - but goddamit be honest about what you do and don’t have. Again, see above statement about honesty.
Now, if they had said they were building the first electric flying car, and that they had a prototype authorized for exhibition and flight testing I’d feel a lot better about the whole thing. Otherwise, I’m lumping them in with Stockton Rush and Oceangate, in the category of cool tech-bro and hubris that can get someone killed.
I saw an interview with the CEO on the news yesterday. When the newscaster got overly enthusiastic, he very carefully explained that they were only in the testing stage. He seemed to be paying attention to safety concerns. At the very least, he is aware of the potential for lawsuits if he screws up.