those chinese lads made a useful cybertruck (but still ugly)…and they have an automatized aero-taxi and a flying car that you can operate! they’re unstoppable!
I want to suggest to people reading this and picturing chaotic sky traffic with random crashes and cars crashing down onto the towns below… maybe give China a bit more credit than that? They’re not stupid. They’d have to be monumentally stupid to grant public access to flying cars without a traffic plan.
Would love to see data comparison on how cost and fuel efficient they are compared to other vehicle types as well as safety-related statistics.
It is mathematically impossible for flying (or rather hovering, to be more precise) vehicles to be more fuel efficient than ground vehicles.
I mean think about it from a physics standpoint. A flying vehicle needs to constantly expend energy to overcome the force of gravity pushing it down. A ground vehicle only needs to overcome friction forces, the main one at slower speeds being friction between the ground and wheels. It’s the same reason why pushing a cart to carry heavy loads is easier than carrying something by just lifting it in your arms. It’s why wheels were invented.
That ground friction is even lower when you are looking at a train where the point of contact of wheels on the rails is much smaller than rubber tyres on asphalt. And it’s even lower for maglevs, where the main friction is air drag. In general the rule of thumb for energy efficiency is: Trains > Automobiles > Planes.
Of course the advantage of flying vehicles is that they can generally get from point A to point B faster since they can go in a direct line, which saves a little bit of fuel, but mainly it saves time. So this will be a convenience thing, and making it economically viable from an energy standpoint requires you to have cheap and abundant electricity. This is also why we haven’t seen personal flying vehicles take off as a commercially viable option until now with the progress we’ve made in EVs and electric batteries. Because if it was powered by fossil fuels it would be far too expensive.
Well…that and the advent of machine learning opening up the possibility for developing adaptive software which allows drone-like flying vehicles to maintain stability and fly autonomously or semi-autonomously.
I have seen videos of these machines (or similar ones) being used in medical emergencies in remote areas. That’s probably a more practical use. Perhaps as cities develop into massive superstructures, air travel may be more necessary, at least in a smaller scale after trains do a greater portion of transportation.
Remote rural areas are probably the best use case, yes.
It is mathematically impossible for flying vehicles to be more fuel efficient than ground vehicles.
That’s not flying, that’s gliding.
Oh no…
I’m honestly pretty worried about people flying around the place on their own. It makes it so much easier to mess up, I believe, and way more dangerous than what cars currently are.
Hope they are reeeeally careful with how, or if they actually roll these out, because it could be such a nightmare…
And as always, fuck cars, and long live pedestrianization and public transit. It is technologicalny impressive, though, and the autopilot could be a lot better. But still…gives me the ick
Most of these are probably going to have to be autonomous. It’s the only way to make this safe. They might introduce a special license allowing you to fly them manually after you take a course, but this will probably only be allowed in very sparsely inhabited areas and may be more of a tourist gimmick than anything else.
For practical everyday use you will have to have these run on automated systems that keep track of where others are at any given time and can fly along designated virtual lanes. I am not expecting these to be individually owned, at least not at first, but rather have taxi services owning an entire fleet of them and you just call them via an app.
The main problem right now is not the technology it’s how you regulate them to make them safe, and i trust that China has a good handle on that, and if i had to guess i’d say they’ll probably finish implementing the regulatory legal structure for this to become commercially viable in a couple of years, with possible setbacks if there is any kind of serious accident in the meantime.
Rare China L.
