What I want is an amphibious flying car, so it can be a crappy boat, too! 
Perhaps a flying submarine and railroad locomotive could be grafted on for completeness.
But don’t you understand? It won’t avoid city traffic. It will just move it above ground. You’re a pilot, I think. Do you really want to share airspace with drunks, texters, exhausted people, the very young, the very old, people in mental/emotional distress, and the plain old incompetent? It 's bad enough in two dimensions. What would be fender benders ending with two people exchanging insurance info would become deadly collisions, killing not only the operators but people on the ground.
Yes a helicopter is not technically a flying car. But it’s as close to a flying car as you would want to exist in the real world.
I’d disagree with this definition. It’s certainly one possible answer. But in my view, a flying car is a device that answers the question posed by someone stuck in traffic: why can’t I just fly above this damn mess?
The question is getting to be less ridiculous over time. So what are the requirements? The craft has to be VTOL. And, we’re seeing, non-electric VTOL craft are just too expensive/noisy/finicky/unreliable/etc. to ever be used in a consumer craft, so high-power lithium batteries and motors are a prerequisite. The vehicle has to be 90-100% autonomous. Somewhere between “push the joystick in the direction you want to go, and the vehicle might go that way if it deems it safe” and “set your destination and push the button”.
It’s probably a requirement that the vehicle has some ground handling capability, so you can pull it into your garage when needed. But I don’t think it needs to actually navigate city streets (the OP’s example, Alef, and others notwithstanding).
People attached wings to cars a long time ago, and yet people are still wondering why we don’t have flying cars yet. The conclusion is obvious: those aren’t what people had in mind, because they don’t solve the problem that people care about. The new Urban Air Mobility have at least some chance of doing that.
They won’t be controlling anything. The vehicle won’t let them do anything dangerous. It probably won’t even have traditional control inputs.
3D space is far larger than 2D. It fully solves the traffic problem if every vehicle is autonomous and you can stack traffic flows in 50-foot layers.
ETA: This reply aimed at @Larry_Borgia’s post three above. Mostly ninja’ed by @Dr.Strangelove in his two fine posts just above.
Yes, I do understand the whole thing is 99% crackpot.
But the theory of flying cars is that with 3 dimensions and therefore a hundred plies stacked vertically, and no reason not to have the equivalent of 50 lanes horizontally on each “freeway”, traffic will disappear; there simply is lots more room in the air for paths and vehicles than there is on the ground for roads and vehicles. So no congestion. That much at least is a real mathematical fact.
Even the ultimate in automation imaginable by 1950s SF authors would never enable truly autonomous vehicles, and you’re right that ordinary consumers will never have the skill nor diligence necessary to operate them safely. But we are closing on autonomous air vehicles. Which is actually a much easier problem than self-driving ground cars.
Where “flying cars” are doomed to fail in my mind is in affordability. Flying Rolls Royces for the very wealthy or corporate overlords? Sure. Flying Toyotas for the rest of us? Hah, it is to laugh.
I’m not going to say the whole thing is a likely outcome. But an electric VTOL craft is really a pretty simple thing. It’s got a fuselage, some motors, a battery, and a control system. The motors and batteries are rapidly advancing due to EV cars. And the control systems got super cheap due to drones (and cell phones).
All of this adds up to very little “natural” cost for the vehicle. The question is just of scale. Can a UAM ride the cost/volume curve down to the point of consumer affordability? Probably not, but I hesitate to say it’s impossible. It happened with EVs, and ICE vehicles a long time before, so maybe.
The biggest sticking point, IMO, is completely revamping how airspace is handled. For UAMs to be interesting, it has to be possible to take off and land in any of a hundred million spots, support traffic handling for a hundred million vehicles in 3D space, and so on, all autonomously and with a negligible chance of failure. It’s just an immensely complicated system, with no obvious gradual path between what we have now and there.
The question thereby becomes: will ordinary people need the equivalent of flying cars in that future world?
The answer is not obvious. That future will be cracking under the stress of climate change. All the trillions of dollars in the world economy will be either going toward mitigation or toward wars or toward walls to stop migration. Any of them may make any kind of individual transport by the hundreds of millions unworkable. Additionally, if the entire world is so fully automated and computerized what exactly will the needs be? Delivery of supplies will always be a necessity but leisure transport may find other ways of being accommodated. Or even suppressed.
I thought we had learned the lesson from Golden Age science fiction. Never let engineers tell you how the future will work. All futures are surprises.
The good future is the one where we transition to a clean, high-energy economy. Basic calculations involving the area of solar panels required to replace current electricity and fossil fuel use suggest this is possible. But it remains to be seen if that actually happens.
Sticking with fossil fuels is a failure for the reasons you mention. But a clean, low-energy economy is also a failure. It implies a dramatic reduction in standard of living, both in western countries and otherwise.
Energy is the ultimate medium of exchange. It doesn’t just keep the lights on. It solves the freshwater problem, and the food problem, and the mineral problem, and the trash disposal problem, and everything else. Almost all of the harm from climate change and related issues can be mitigated with enough clean energy. However, getting there will be rough, at best.
Optimistic me sees EVs as evidence that there’s a non-zero chance of this future happening. They’re better than I ever imagined they might be 30 years ago. Pessimistic me sees that we still aren’t making the clean energy transition quickly enough.
Depends on what you mean by “low energy”. If we actually get to the ideal energy world of 100% renewables and electrifying everything, we’ll only have to replace about one-third of the energy we currently get from fossil fuels. See this Sankey diagram of US energy usage:
Note the grey box on the upper right labeled “Rejected Energy”. Virtually all of that is waste heat generated through burning coal, petroleum and natural gas. Since renewables don’t generate much in the way of waste heat, that’s energy we don’t have to replace. Yes, there’ll be some loss when electricity is transmitted long distances, but it’s usually in the 5-10% range. Ditto for storing energy in batteries or pumped storage. Nothing at all like the 75-80% loss of energy in internal combustion engines, for example.
Most definitely. But note that the carbon-free sources add up to less than half of the “energy services” total. So we’ll need to double the carbon-free generation at least to reach the same level. And probably more like triple, since we’ll also need it for a few energy hogs like desalination and fuel synthesis (since long-haul flight and rockets will need chemical fuels of some kind).
That’s all possible–solar is getting to be incredibly cheap–but it is a big jump from today.
Great points just above by several posters about energy.
Turning just to this …
Vehicles are still going to be made of then-exotic materials using then-exotic battery & motor tech. Due to them being weight-critical flying machines, there will always be reasons to make them from the lightest, strongest, highest energy density tech available. And if that tech is rapidly advancing that’s another way of saying older vehicles will quickly become economically obsolescent, leading to high amortized operating costs over short lifespans.
The other issue is the FAA and other national equivalents. Due to the public safety aspects of falling UAMs landing on buildings and people.
The vehicle certification, testing, and maintenance standards will be much higher than for cars. Even over automotive-scale production runs, the non-recurring engineering costs, the regulatory compliance costs, etc., will be a significant price increment. Over supercar or limousine-scale production runs they’ll be ginormous. That places a hard lower limit on the sticker price of a UAM.
Ditto ongoing maintenance. Compared to a conventional aircraft UAM maintenance man-hours per flight hour will be small. Compared to a car they’ll be large. And use more highly trained = expensive techs.
There is a path forward that’s being aggressively worked worldwide.
Essentially the new machines never interact with existing ATC and conventional aviation never interacts with UAMs. UAM “ATC” (IOW deconfliction and 4D routing) will be full auto from the git-go whether the machine is piloted or autonomous. A lot more is going on in this space than is making the lay press.
Conventional helos will end up with one foot in each camp once the UAM airspace control expands from limited routes between limited ground vertiports to the full “free flight” from anywhere to anywhere. With carved-out airspace UAM-exclusion zones for things like airports, high value / risk ground installations, etc.
My bottom line: Just as you suggest about the energy transition, for the promise of UAMs to come together an awful lot has to go more right and more quickly than is typical for large-scale tech revolutions with large social / political components. If progress stalls at an early stage for whatever reason it’s probably doomed as the inevitable cost spiral pulls it down while Wall Street moves on to the next bright shiny object.
As our esteemed resident historian just said:
Yes the two sticking points for the flying car* really are the energy cost and safety.
So I see it as inherently linked with some kind of energy breakthrough like fusion or a new hydrogen economy or whatever, plus AI to make the entire thing driverless. The latter will happen a lot sooner than the former.
* I take flying car to mean “A flying vehicle used for everyday transport the way cars are now”. So something which can be rolled out at scale. If we’re talking more niche uses, then quadcopters are already pretty much there but they are largely just taking some of the market from helicopters: e.g. search and rescue, short-range travel for the rich and one-off experience flights.
Meanwhile, a vehicle that drives and also flies I think will always just be a concept thing. I don’t see much point in it.
There are 4 types of vehicles that fly. Rockets, planes, 'copters and blimps.
We won’t have flying cars of any notable usefulness until someone invents a fifth. Blimps are too big. Rockets are just insane to consider. Planes need a runway. Copters are inherently loud, energy hungry, and have very unfriendly failure modes.
Bravo Mr. Flying Car, you made another quadcopter. Now make one that can break down without killing everyone, and that can fly past my house 500 times a day without me wanting to murder the pilot.
The modern eVTOLs and eSTOLs that are really flying now in prototype form for UAM are exactly what you’re suggesting do not exist. They are indeed a 5th kind of flying machine, albeit combining some aspects of both airplanes and helos.
The Alef vehicle in the most recently cited press release upthread is pure hype. The real ones are not hype at all; they’re real.
They are not helicopters. They are not loud and they do not have unfriendly failure modes. They are being designed to happily overfly ordinary suburbia all day every day and night without making objectionable noise or falling from the sky.
I’ll let you argue with this guy.
Let me know who wins.
That guy is an idiot. Touché.
In more detail, the context way upthread was about the “car” part of “flying cars”. I was making the argument there that eVTOLs are not roadworthy cars and aren’t intended to be. They are flying machines, period.
Conversely, the context down here between you and I is about the “flying” part of “flying cars”. Some of these things take off & fly akin to a quadcopter drone toy. Which has rotor-borne lift in common with a helo, but lots else is different. But the “overgrown multicopter” design for UAM is pretty well recognized as being a dead end or at least a niche design for very short range ops only. Purely rotor-borne lift is stunningly energy-inefficient and forces a slow maximum forward speed.
The current thinking of the more likely useful / successful UAM designs are variations on the tiltrotor concept, where multiple rotors are used to get a nil takeoff run then very quickly, like within a few seconds, the thing transitions to high speed forward flight with the weight carried by wings, not rotors. So akin to the operating cycle of a V-22, but with far fewer big moving parts. And harkening to one of your objections, far less inherent noise.
So not a helicopter. Or at least not merely a helicopter.
Fair enough. My view is that as long as we are playing with these 4 modes of operation, even a mixed operation like you describe doesn’t get you the type of usability that the phrase flying car evokes.
It’s basically a giant toy, a copterplane for people who could own a helicopter or an airplane or both. A car is something we all can reasonably aspire to drive or take a ride in, a flying car should be the same. That’s what the Jetsons promised us, not rich douchebags taking a joy ride to their yacht.
I’d agree with this. As I said a few posts ago, a flying Toyota for all of us, Hah, it is to laugh!
The UAM promise is for something less yacht-like, more akin to Uber Black, a semi-deluxe hired service that can take you from from your driveway to your workplace’s front door at highish speed with no traffic. And for a fare that doesn’t require a million-a-year income to afford even if used regularly. But does require a professional’s wages, not a truck-driver’s wages. SO not an everyman product, but maybe a top 10% SES product. In the snooty zip codes they’d be commonplace. In the lesser zip codes, they’d be completely absent.
That’s the promise. I’m skeptical they’ll achieve that any time soon.
Of course any transportation alternative becomes more affordable if one can reduce or eliminate their car ownership. Living fairly walkably as I do, I could imagine getting rid of all my cars and relying on Uber for all ground transport, especially in retirement. I can’t quite see relying on an aerial Uber to take me to Target 3 miles away. That’d have to be too expensive to make sense.
Thank you for the “esteemed.” Usually in a thread with engineers I’m just “steamed.”