Is that an empty weight of 850 lbs or a gross take off weight of 850 lbs? Big difference there. Let’s be generous and assume it’s empty weight. That’s not entirely unreasonable for a two-seat aircraft (I’ve flown two-seaters ranging from around 400 lbs empty weight to over 2,000 lbs empty weight, there’s quite a range there). So that doesn’t raise immediate alarm bells…
Yeah, I’m not sure of that, either.
The article linked above said it’s a cruise speed of 110 mph but the wikipedia entry says that, yup, it’s the range. Crappy journalism strikes again. That’s… not impressive.
Their website is pretty darn spiffy, wonder if that’s where the money is going?
I could buy an aging but airworthy Cessna or Piper product for 1/5 the price and the damn thing would actually be something I’d fly. Or get into an ultralight, although they’re quite limited. On the other hand, they’re an actual flying machine and have a greater range that 110 miles. All of the above are safer in the event of an engine failure and if you’re really concerned even equipped with an emergency parachute.
Nope, if I had $300k to spend on a flying machine it wouldn’t be on that “flying car”.
You have to include the weight of the battery. That’s always the problem with jelectric airplanes. As I mentioned, the lightest 50kWh battery I could find was an upcoming one from Bosch that weighs something like 450 lbs, leaving only 400 lbs for everything else. It has eight motors and propellers. Those motors are at least 30 lbs each, so 240 lbs of motors. That leaves 160 lbs for the rest of the aircraft.
Imagree with everything else you said - especially that it’s a lot easier, cheaper and safer to just buy a used aircrft or a homebuilt. And there are homebuilt STOL planes out there that can take off and land in just a few feet, while being utterly normal airplanes otherswise.
That seems pretty high. The best electric motors can reach >15 kW/kg, which implies only 8 kg of motors total if we double the power requirements to 120 kW. And if we include inverters, H3X has the HPDM-30 motor that gets 33 kW in 4.1 kg. That’s only 33 kg (72 lbs) for a total of 264 kW, which is a pretty big safety margin (though you still need the props).
Hmm…I did a search for 10kW electric motors for aircraft, and they all seemed to be in that range. However, after your post I dug a bit more, searching for only the very lightest electric motors for aviation, and found some pancake motors designed specifically for UAVs and other similar uses, and it’s continuous 7-10 kW for 3.1 kg. It looks perfect for that application, so I’ll revise that and say the motors are about 25 kg. Controllers are about half a kg each, so maybe 30kg total. So 72 lbs, plus maybe 450 for the battery, leaving 328 pounds for the rest of the airframe.
Oh, and it also has to have wheels, steering, brakes, etc. So I looked up golf carts, which are probably the closest competitor on the ground. They tend to weigh in the neighborhood of 800-1,000 lbs, with maybe 200-300lbs of battery. And other than that time I’d rather not recall during a company golf tournament, they don’t fly.
I have real questions about the mesh skin as well. How much will be lost pushing and pulling air through it?
That’s a good name for it. Another good one would be “Below the average flying altitude of a flying car”.
A ballistic prachute needs about 400 ft of altitude to deploy successfully. Also, deploying one over a city is not a guaranteed save. Maybe not even a likely one. There’s a lot of obstacles to get tangled up in.
Actually, there have been successful deployments as low as 100 feet with the BRS. Meaning “survivable”, not necessarily “uninjured”. Even so, 260 is the recommended minimum and the more altitude the better.
Hard to say, but it might not be as bad as it seems. It won’t be the same as the mesh covering just the rotor area, since the air can come from the full upper area (aside from the cabin). If the rotor air speed is 200 mph, but the rotors are only 25% of the total, then the air speed through the mesh will only be 50 mph(ish). And I’d predict there’s a v^2 term in there somewhere, so the excess drag might be fairly small.
Bosh’s battery is probably a good starting estimate, but note that li-ion batteries can reach 300 Wh/kg, so a 60 kWh battery might only need 200 kg for the cells. The structure doesn’t have to be as robust as in a highway-capable car, so there’s probably a lot of room for improvement here. And battery tech does keep improving.
What do you think the odds of survival are if you pop a ballistic chute over a city? Or at least walking away uninjured, and without hurting/killing someone else?
If we have to rely on ballistic chutes for safety, these things won’t be allowed over built-up areas. Most aircraft with chutes have enough glide capability to at least avoid downtown cores and such.
None of these are going to depend on a chute. They’ll depend on there being plenty of reserve thrust and control capacity, and have multiple redundant power systems. Ideally, they’ll have some system so they can safely autoland without human input.
Oh, I agree. These things will probably spend 80% of their flight time in a regime where the chute is useless anyway.
I had a closer look at the body of the thing. It looks like it’s designed to allow air to pass vertically, but present as solid to the air in forward motion? It’s not a mesh of round wires as much as a grid of thin panels. I assume they’ve wind tunnel tested it, but it’s… interesting.
I expect that it tilts forward in flight. So with respect to the airstream, “forward motion” is always the vertical axis of the vehicle. Except on the ground, of course, but that 25 mph is basically nothing in an aerodynamic sense.
Just to be clear - right on the side of the canisters that hold those chutes it is very clearly printed that there is NO guarantee of being injury-free, or survival, if you use one. Having spoken to a couple people who have used one, even under ideal conditions it is NOT a gentle landing. The intent is to allow you to survive, not to be a pillow-soft landing.
That said - assuming a successful chute deployment it’s going to be a lot less of an impact that if the hunk of metal/composite didn’t have such a device. It’s the difference between winding up stuff on top of the roof of a building vs. going through the roof.
Well, no - the BRS should be the last resort. We should rely on quality-control engineering and construction and quality pilot training, not parachutes. Parachutes are for when engineering, training, and planning aren’t enough.
Archer claims that trips that normally take 60–90 minutes by car can be done in 10–20 minutes in the company’s air taxis.
I just don’t see how this saves that much time: your auto trip is one trip from start to finish so it will be 60-90 minutes. But your air taxi trip is three trips: 1. car to airport, navigating airport, parking, buying ticket, waiting for the flight. 2. the air taxi flight. 3. Navigating airport, renting car, driving to final destination.
There are a few points in there to be optimized. If they use an app that’s something like Uber, then you can just book/purchase your trip well in advance. Not to mention schedule an Uber itself to pick you up when you land. If they can cordon off the landing pads close to a road, then it might take under a minute between leaving the aircraft and getting in the car.
That leaves getting there in the first place. Again, maybe just use Uber. Or have the pad right next to the parking lot so that it’s a short walk.
It would be a huge boon to schedule all these things in one step, too–pay for parking, the car rideshare, and the air taxi trip all at once. They can schedule things dynamically for max efficiency.
Sky drift: Boeing’s pilotless air taxi could take passenger flight by 2030: Wisk is working with its sixth-generation aircraft, which promises to transport up to four passengers and additional luggage on each trip.
Commercial air taxi services may commence in the next two or three years but will not reach scale until the mid-2030s.
Electric air taxis will remain a premium-priced mode of transport aimed at mid- and upper-income travelers.
Market growth will depend in part on operators’ ability to fund initial losses and reduce costs over time.
Investors in the advanced air mobility market must cope with uncertain timing and potential market volatility.
There are probably readers here who could come up with $170,000 for a flying car when it is available in a couple years or so [but note you also have to help build it–51% experimental amateur built aircraft rule]:
[I trust myself to build a lot of things–but no, not an aircraft]
That has a lot of points of articulation (especially the v2 model). Therefore a lot of points of failure, though at least it only transitions on the ground.
Interesting that they use the (powered) wheels to shorten takeoff distance. I’m not sure that’s a good sign, though. If it’s too underpowered to take off in a reasonable distance without assistance, it’s probably also not going to have a great climb rate, etc.
