Okay, maybe this has already been asked, but:
It’s 2008 . . . where are the flying cars?!
Because cars don’t fly.
Vehicles that fly are called aircraft.
There are several different types of aircraft–fixed wing, helicopters, autogyros, blimps, and so on, and you can buy one today. There are even a couple of airplanes specially modified to enable you to drive them on the road if you wish.
A roadable airplane doesn’t sound as cool as a flying car but it’s the same thing.
Until we invent antigravity we’re stuck with obeying the laws of physics, and the laws of physics dictate that vehicles that operate by flying through the air are aircraft, not cars.
Don’t forget the other obvious factor: regular cars we drive on the road cause a million accidents a year and kill 40,000 people; flying cars would be deathtraps of orders of magnitude higher.
And if Detroit made flying cars that stalled on left turns like my '78 Dodge Diplomat did…well, look out below.
Seriously, I can’t imagine the technology ever existing that would make flying cars as ubiquitous as regular cars while keeping within acceptable levels of safety.
[Evil]
The carnage would be glorious!
[/Evil]
Bingo. Especially as we head into “I wish I had a laser cannon on top of my car, in order to deal with all these assholes who are thinking about shopping and holidays instead of actually DRIVING” season.
We have enough “car plows into house” stories now. Imagine if they came from above at 150 mph.
Where are the lane markers in the sky? Where are the floating road signs? Do you pass on the right, the left, above, below, or through the middle of the 7-11?
People can’t handle driving in 2 dimensions. Let’s not give them a third.
I can see that there are few tht remember the Jetsons.
OK, let me get more serious.
How would a flying car be used? Flying a mile is less efficient than driving a mile. When you park in a lot, do you park near one store and then move your car to park near another? No; you walk. Flying is better for longer distances. So what you would do is fly your flying car to a parking lot and then either walk to your destination or use another conveyance (subway, People Mover, monorail, moving sidewalks, etc.).
Wait… This is sounding familiar. A fixed-wing airplane is operated in the same way; except that it’s not called a ‘flying car’, and the parking lot is an airport. Did you know that Cessna once sold a model called the 150 Commuter?
Or take a helicopter. The Robinson R22 is a relatively inexpensive helicopter with relatively low operating costs. Take my word for it, they can operate out of tight areas. Destination areas, such as city centers, could have public-access rooftop heliports easily enough. Shopping malls could designate areas of their car parks for flight operations. Anyone with a big enough yard could fly right to his house. I can even imagine Jetsons-style high-rises with landing platforms. Just attach the wheels to your helicopter and roll it to its parking spot.
But liability rules would have to be completely overhauled. Local noise ordinances would have to be changed. In short, we have ‘flying cars’ in the form of helicopters. We have the ability to allow more use of them in our cities. The only real stumbling blocks are the rules and laws.
On the downside is that these ‘flying cars’ can’t be had for 20 or 30 thousand dollars. (But then, the last time I checked the Moller SkyCar concept costs much more than that too.) A Robbo will cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars (still relatively inexpensive when we’re talking about helicopters), and the R44 will cost half-again more. You could get a RotorWay Exec for about $60,000 I think, but you have to build it yourself. At least that’s cheaper than some cars.
They’re also more expensive to operate than a car. Maintenance rules are more numerous than for cars, and are strictly enforced. Maintenance costs. And there’s fuel mileage. Last time I checked, a ‘flying family car’ such as a Cessna 172 Skyhawk gets about 15 mpg. My Prius has averaged over 48 mpg over the last six months, and 30 mpg – twice the mileage of a Skyhawk – is common in many cars. Would you commute in an Escalade or a Hummer if you could do in a Toyota instead?
We have ‘flying cars’ now. I wish more people would make use of them. (My theory is that if more people did, then demand would increase and more would be made and prices would go down.) If you want a ‘flying car’ all you have to do is go out and buy one. (And get the training to use it, of course.)
Where are the flying cars?
I don’t know, but wherever they are, the videophones are probably nearby.
OK, a semi-serious rumination on this.
First, though, I think the question should be “It’s 2008; what happened to all the high-speed trains?”
Read on:
I define “flying car” to be some sort of aircraft. No other assumptions.
I could say that we already have them. Cessna makes a small “commuter” prop plane (the 17x series). Not cheap, but not as much as a Ferrari. Still, it’s a plane not a car. That means you need training and license to fly it, according to the gummint. You could try doing it without, but if they catch you… And flying a plane isn’t nearly as easy as driving a car. Taking the lessons and getting the license is an exercise in self-preservation.
You also need a runway. We don’t use airplanes or helicopters for commuting/errands/whatever (normally) because we don’t have the infrastructure. Planes need a runway, and even helicopters need clearance and space. They don’t work well with modern shopping malls. Even so, in the 1960s some communities were built around taxiways, with a central runway! You could either drive or taxi on the taxiway.
Of course, there’s safety. If your car’s engine dies, you coast to a stop. If your airplane’s engine dies, you glide until you stop. The difference is that you can keep most of your steering and brakes until your speed is zero, and pull to the side of the road. In an airplane, you start to lose control as you lose speed, and you’re still going at a nifty clip when altitude = 0.
And how do you handle traffic? For cars, you can use fences and roads, on the assumption that most cars don’t travel well off-road, and if they do a fence usually stops them. Try doing that in the air. And in a car, you’re generally limited to a “two-dimensional” space to look around. In the air, you have to be able to look above you and below you.
To get around traffic control, some theorists suggest using radar and computer control. This would work, but we’re not there yet. And in our wonderful capitalist system, we need at least some demand first. Look for this to come first for commercial airliners.
Engines: any sort of engine capable of putting out the power you need to fly runs hot and fast. It needs specialized materials and engineering, and it needs constant maintenance. That makes it expensive, and makes it nearly impossible to put into something for the average consumer who doesn’t even change his or her oil!
But to cap it all, flying cars make as much sense as home to business personal locomotives. In the heyday of passenger trains, nobody went around saying that we needed personal trains that would take us from our house to the grocery store. “Hey, it’s 1908 already, where are the personal trains?!” Trains are for long distance; trams/carriages/omnibuses/bicycles/wagons/carriages are for short distances. Trains are fast, and you don’t have to drive your own train for four hours to get to the city. Somebody else does all the infrastructure and maintenance. Trams, etc. are handy. They’re not fast but they get you pretty much from anywhere to anywhere.
That’s the sad part, really. As I said, instead of asking “Where are the flying cars?” you should ask “What happened to all the trains?”
Why do I have to drive four hours to go skiing, instead of taking a train? Planes would take an hour, yes, but they’re much more expensive and do poorly in the mountains, especially in iffy weather. A train can deal with harsh weather better than an SUV or an airplane.
Alas, we made the mistake of thinking that cars would replace both trams/streetcars/buses and trains. They don’t. We know that now, but it’s almost too late to change.
As I said earlier, Cessna once made an airplane actually called ‘Commuter’. Cheap is relative. A new 172 Skyhawk (four place ‘family plane’ like a flying Ford Taurus, for those not familiar) costs around 200 kilobucks. But airplanes are not like cars. Nobody wants to regularly drive a 30-year-old car. But airplanes are aluminum and don’t rust like cars do. And they’re regularly inspected and maintained. A used 172 from the early-'60s will run about $25,000 and a mid-'70s model will run around the $50,000 range. I’ve seen a bunch of two-seaters in the $25,000 range, and there is a decent variety of makes. For about the price of a Prius, you can get a '70s-vintage Grumman AA-1B.
As for training, we have to be trained to drive cars. Aircraft require much more training. But like a car or motorcycle, if you want to operate an aircraft you will get the required training.
True, planes need runways. Sadly, many runways are closed and built over. Helicopters don’t need so much. I’ve seen plenty of parking lots that are more than adequate to handle them. The way I’d handle it is this: Designate a helicopter landing/parking area and remove the obstructions (light standards, trees, etc.). There would be a specific landing area. If space provides, the pilot can hover-taxi to a parking space. If not, the pilot can pull the wheels out from under the seat or used attached wheels and simply move the helicopter to a spot. This is done every day at airports. (You wouldn’t be able to do this with a larger helicopter, but most people couldn’t afford them anyway.)
Another advantage of helicopters. The goal is for airspeed and altitude to both equal zero at the same time. 
I’d rather have an engine failure in a car than in a helicopter, but it’s a risk one has to take if one wants to use that mode of conveyance.
The ‘rules of the road’ are established already.
Not really. Airplane engines tend to be slow-turning and large-displacement. The ones we used today are pretty much 1930s technology. A modern car’s engine is much more exotic. A modern airplane engine is basically an aluminum block and cylinders with iron/steel liners. As for maintenance, let’s assume a typical Lycoming O320 with a 2,000 hour TBO. That’s about 200,000 miles before you need an overhaul. Not too shabby. Oil changes and such can be done by the owner. But yeah, people today don’t work on their cars much. They don’t have to. With the old-tech engines in aircraft, they must receive regular attention (such as oil changes) and one can’t afford to let things go.
There have been several attempts to use modified car engines in aircraft. The Pond Racer basically used modified Nissan engines. Porsche made an aircraft engine for a while called the PFM. Many homebuilders use car-based engines. The big problem is liability. Airplane makers are a conservative lot. They use proven technology, even if it is nearly a century old. Engine builders have been successfully sued after airplane crashes even when it has been proved that the engine had nothing to do with the crash. This makes manufacturers nervous. If they use a modern engine and anything goes wrong, whether or not with the engine, they are up the proverbial creek.
Fixed-wing aircraft are better for longer distances. But not too long. Let me tell you, a Cessna seat gets mighty hard after four hours. (And dad’s 182 Skylane had long-range tanks, so it could go up to seven hours.) Helicopters, on the other hand, are not suited to long distances. They do best over short ranges (because they’re slower than fixed-wings while burning the same amount of fuel and generally carrying less of it) where their maneuverability is an asset – for example, maneuvering into the heli parking at the mall.
I believe a vehicle should match the mission. If I need to haul my boat or get a load of lumber, I’ll use the Jeep. If I’m commuting to the office, the Prius is a better choice. If it’s a sunny day and I just want to go to the store for a week’s groceries, I can use the motorcycle. A Cessna 172 or a Piper PA-128 would be good for trips of, say, 50 to 400 miles. A Robinson R22 could be used for commuting (given a minimum of infrastructure) maybe 25 to 100 miles. In a fixed-wing ‘flying car’ you can do a bit of shopping. A Robbo has storage under the seats. Shop lightly. (BTW, a Schweiser 300 only has a glove box; although I think you can get a fake fuel tank for a small amount of cargo.)
The rich in Sao Paolo apparently are using helicopters to avoid the gridlock in the city streets. They have landing pads all over town. I remember learning of this a while back when one of them crashed, killing the occupants.
[soapbox]In the more general proposition of “why don’t we have all that gee-whiz stuff Popular Mechanics promised us?”, some thoughts.
First of course, not everything that can be imagined can be built, and more importantly not everything that can be built can be made practical. Jet packs for example can be built but given the laws of physics they simply can’t carry enough fuel to be worth it. Rockets are essentially flying fuel tanks in which highly volitile fuel is stored in the thinnest metal balloon possible and flung into the sky at the very limit of structural failure. Something as nifty as the Wankel rotary engine has been unable to compete against conventional designs due to drawbacks and limitations that keep it a novelty item. Flying wings didn’t offer enough advantage over conventional designs and had drag and stability problems. The list goes on.
Second, a lot of predictions in the past were based on false analogies. For example people envisioned long-range passenger aircraft as sort of flying luxury liners, not realizing that getting there fast enough meant airplanes would be flying coaches, not flying liners. People who thought that commercial space flight was as simple as putting rocket engines on an airplane didn’t realize the real limitations mentioned above meant that you couldn’t design a rocket as though it were an airplane.
Lastly, I think there’s a broader reason for why we didn’t get the predicted “gee-whiz” future. And that is that many of the startling technological advances that took place from the mid-nineteenth century to about the mid-twentieth fell into the broad category of mechanics. That is, the conversion of energy into mechanical power through appropriate machinery, especially applied to transporation. And my radical theory is that we have now invented most things that can be invented in the field of mechanics.
There might be things that new economic circumstances might make feasible. Advances in materials technology might give us improved strength/weight ratios or materials with novel properties to work with. We might fill in the corners and dot all the i’s. But short of an unforseeable virtually magical new set of physics to utilize (like say, gravity control), there simply isn’t much more that can be done with known forces applied through known materials.
Technologies pass through a well-known developmental cycle resembling a bell curve: a slow prolonged beginning, a “take off” point, a peak where the technology is mature, and then if applicable a decline as rival technologies replace it. The gee-whiz future was based on the naive assumption that the exponential advance in applied mechanics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would continue into the twenty-first. If cars went from model-Ts to T-Birds, then the cars of the future would be 400mph supercars. If aircraft went from the Wright brothers to the Right Stuff, then future aircraft would fly you to the Moon for your family vacation. If you could build a 100 story skyscraper, why not a 500 story one? But what happened was that mechanical engineering has largely peaked.
Probably the future is in more sophisticated engineering. Better and faster design, self-assembly, dynamic materials.[/soapbox]
First, I have to admit that I’ve never understood train enthusiasts. Trains have some function for hauling freight, but have never in their entire history, as I understand it, have been profitable for moving passengers.
And it was in 1908, the heyday of train transportation, that people were already talking about flying cars.
The reasoning is basic. Trains are large, worthless, and insane as people movers. Flying cars get you from where you are to where you want to be. Period. Trains can never do that.
Cars do do that fairly well, but of course in 1908 there were barely any strips between cities that qualified as roads. Flying vehicles didn’t need roads. In those days, takeoff distances were so short that they weren’t thought of as needing airports either. So the entire infrastructure of hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of dollars that we’ve put into roads, bridges, tunnels, hi-ways and by-ways could be eliminated and that money put into other research or infrastructure.
Flying cars also worked inside cities because, again, they were cars. Remember that subways were barely in existence in 1908. In fact, most cities were having furious battles between the streetcar, el, and subway interests as to which was the most - or least - desirable because each had enormous problems. (For the best overall account of this, see Downtown: It’s Rise and Fall, 1880-1950, by Robert M. Fogelson.) The advantage of flying cars was that they also replace trains and train substitutes inside cities because of their dual use as cars, to get around inside the cities where the roads already existed. That’s why airplanes (and helicopters) and flying cars always remained two separate lines of thought. People kept reinventing flying cars because they were the perfect transportation mode to get around all the known costs and problems of travel.
Trains were the problem, not the solution. We’ve since developed ground cars as the second best compromise solution, but people are still wistful for flying cars because their perfection would be a real solution to a real problem that no other mode of transportation comes close to.
You looking for a flying vehicle?How about one that seats four. Maximum speed is no great shakes though.
It will only cost you $29,000
A few millimeters off the ground is not flying.
I always thought the laws of inertia would make the popular image of flying cars impossible, and dangerous.
[QUOTE=Lumpy;10504050
Lastly, I think there’s a broader reason for why we didn’t get the predicted “gee-whiz” future. And that is that many of the startling technological advances that took place from the mid-nineteenth century to about the mid-twentieth fell into the broad category of mechanics. That is, the conversion of energy into mechanical power through appropriate machinery, especially applied to transporation. And my radical theory is that we have now invented most things that can be invented in the field of mechanics.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting hypothesis. I think it has some merit. But I would be interested in other dopers’ thoughts on that one.
I’m not 100% convinced I agree (Somewhere I have a quote attributed to someone important at the US Patent Office in 1898 or thereabouts, to the effect that everything that can be invented had been invented already), but I do think that a lot of that Popular Mechanics/The World of Tomorrow stuff looks simple or doable in theory, but in practice just doesn’t work that way.
I’m going to use Laser Guns as a good example. In theory, all you need is a portable power source, a focusing point (diamond lens, perhaps?) something to emit the beam, and a gun chassis to mount it in, and hey presto, Stormtrooper Blaster Rifles all round.
The fact that you can’t walk into your local gun store and ask for a “Phased Plasma Rifle in the 40 Megawatt Range” with a straight face suggests that making Laser Guns isn’t as straightforward as it seemed back in the 1950s.
I’d say that’s the problem with most of the Retro Futuristic technology we all grew up expecting- it just isn’t as easy or economical or practical to create all that stuff as we thought it was going to be.