Flying cars are danger to everyone, cars and driving suck enough! Please don’t let this happen in our skies. What if someone wrecked one into my house and killed me.
Wow! That is fucking cool! It almost looks like a Lambo when it’s all folded up, and looks like it actually drives pretty well. There are a lot of people shitting all over this thing in the comments, but I for one welcome our new flying car overlords.
We’re going to see more of this shit as wealth inequality continues to balloon. The old logic that money was made selling the most products to the most people is eroding, money is now either made extracting rent from normal people or selling prohibitively expensive status symbols to an elite class with so much money they can piss it away endlessly.
It’s why the richest man in the world went from the man who sold the most things, to the man who sold the most prestigious cars, to the man who sells handbags.
there are cars (sports cars, for example) that aren’t street legal. There are also street legal things that aren’t cars (I don’t consider a semi to be a “car”, for example.
Being street legal is not what makes something a car.
planes already have wheels and can move on the ground, called taxiing.
Making the taxiing part street legal (and more efficient, admittedly) does not really change “what” the plane can do. Only the extent of the capability
I will just never understand how so many people look at a broken down car on the side of the highway, then think “what if whatever happened to that vehicle was the same, but 5,000 feet in the air?”
Cars and airplanes do not have the same maintenance requirements. An airplane has strict maintenance protocols that are needed regardless of if it is in-use or not. Critical maintenance items require sign-off by a specialized department. If the pilot doesn’t have the proper maintenance logs and approvals then the plane gets grounded. Yeah sure, some idiot could circumvent that at a private airport, but obtaining a pilot’s license is time consuming and expensive, and the vast majority of pilots take aviation regulations very seriously.
Why would a different type of vehicle that also flies in the air not need to follow similar maintenance requirements?
The only reason cars and car drivers aren’t held to the same standard is because if a car breaks, it just stops moving. If a plane, even just a single passenger one, stops working, it falls out of the sky.
It would require the same maintenance standards as an airplane. Heck, it probably has even stricter standards than a standard airplane because it’ll see a lot of ground use. I never meant to imply that it wouldn’t. I was replying to your broken down car on the side of the highway analogy, attempting to assure you that flying cars will never be treated with that level of lenience.
The same logic can be applied to the fact it has 4 wheels and drives. This is a car, that has wings and can fly. Or - it’s an aeroplane then can turn into a car. Semantics my dude.
I thought the same thing until the wings got all tucked in there and it hit the highway. I mean, you can park it in your driveway. It still needs a runway but it's the closest I've seen. It's more of a plane that turns into a car.
The driving part isn’t as important as being able to take off vertically. Needing a runway makes it the worlds only airplane you can drive to the airpoint to take off with, not as convenient as the flying cars we’ve been promised.
Like a helicopter in terms of what it can do, but those things are real hard to fly. If we were ever to have flying cars, they’d need to be dead simple for the masses to cope with them. People can barely handle 2 dimensions, throw in an extra dimension and a good helping of speed…
They have flying prototypes and some key FAA approvals already.
Initial planned use is “air taxis” ala uber between skyscrapers, which tracks because uber was a big investor. Seems like a viable way to give more people a more affordable"helicopter" style around major urban areas at least.
How is either a better or more affordable option than a cheap helicopter? Air taxis using helicopter have existed for decades and fly around urban areas every single day.
Will people still need a pilot’s license and all of the associated time + training that requires? Because they will surely also need to have a driver’s license and insurance and everything else required of owning a car!
I do not understand the appeal at all unless it’s just a refusal to give up on a very specific childhood nostalgia.
The idea is that this will be launching from landing pads in the city and will be publically accessable via a small hanger area. The trips are supposed to be mostly automated, with a human pilot for safety. The 6 props allow a lot more control in a simplier manner than a traditional helicopter.
It is supposed to be a lot cheaper, safer, and more accessible than helicopters, along with being way more of them available. Something akin to what dirigibles tried to do in the 1930s with building launchpads, but way more reliable and efficient.
The appeal is another type of transit, for now. The design as I understand it can also convert to “airplane” mode and fly for an hour or so at 200mph on battery power. I expect that if the air taxi service is safe and steady enough, these will be also be available for 200 mile flights without the irritation of standard air travel. Hell, they may sell them to people directly at some point.
I linked their website above if you want to do a deep dive.
It won’t be. The technical knowledge required to obtain a pilot’s license is greater than most people are interested in, not to mention the aptitude required to obtain that knowledge. It is also very expensive to own an airplane, even if it just sits in a hanger.
We have had legit flying cars for generations, they are called “helicopters” and most people can’t afford or safely pilot one.
If you think the classic sci-fi “in the future we’ll all be using flying cars and it’ll be awesome” thing is a good idea, just try to realistically imagine how crappy life would be for us all if you and every idiot you fight with in traffic every day had a helicopter.
maybe they are talking about the helicopters you can drive around in too. they don't have big rotors on top, just basically a little fan in the front to cool the radiator when not in flight mode.
You’re using that point to call them different, I’d use that same point to call them all alike. Passenger vehicles are all fairly consistent in concept, and this is why no scifi “flying car” will be markedly different than giving every dope with a driver’s license their own helicopter.
If they were driven by competent AI, it could be feasible with a slew of new safety regulations in specified areas of the country/world.
But we aren’t even there yet with cars. You could absolutely argue some companies are very close, though! 100% not Tesla at any stretch of the imagination, but others have been putting the work in for over a decade with advanced technologies and countless hours of testing.
The competency of the AI is key. Maybe we’ll be there in another generation or two, but I’m not inspired with much confidence while even the big celebrated AI models still work like crap and can’t be trusted with actual human safety.
Also, accidents will always happen no matter what. On a 2D road a crash can be very tragic, but the area of effect is way limited compared to an equivalent car crash happening in the air causing human and machine parts to rain down dangerously onto an entire neighborhood and the people in it. Even under some imaginary complete and flawless AI control, any airborne “road” will always be a hazard to whatever’s underneath it.
You can't with this car plane either, a runway that gives room for the wings and tail to extend AND to be out while moving forward up to speed or landing will be necessary.
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