Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
HN submissions should come color-coded according to link-baitness level.
Honestly, I hope we one day have a solution for some Quadcopter-style of private transportation (best: electric). That would make completely new styles of cities possible as streets would be only used to walk around. Endless nature, no streets in it... just houses with Quadcopters on their roofs, ready to fly away... (still hope they have some kind of crash avoidance system, so flying to the next big time baseball match doesn't result in many deaths each time).
However, even if they do get the VTOL working successfully (many others have failed) there will likely be some regulatory hurdles for flying out of a neighborhood. That isn't unheard of though. There are suburban communities built around small airports with direct access to the runways (similar to golf course communities).
1. The energy required to keep the vehicle in the air.
2. The boarding-and-alighting (i.e., landing) bottleneck.
+1 just for this statement alone.
So far, statistics say that flying is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car... that statistic will likely plummet to many orders of magnitude in the opposite direction if flying cars become a thing.
If we do end up with flying cars being the norm, I would hope they will be autonomous and not have people manually flying them without a full pilots license being required.
General aviation is already a lot worse than that today, and even pilot certification does not preclude accidents in general aviation. It is the whole process around safety put into practice at commercial airlines and numerous design details present in commercial aircraft that make flying with a commercial carrier as safe as it is.
A flying car should only be required the destination as input.
Size doesn't scale, even if the thrust to weight ration will be similar there would be probably 1000 of other differences that will not translate in any meaningful manner to a final full sized model.
Also why do they need permission at all? this is a drone flown in closed private airspace. This is pretty much stretching it as far as veil press releases go.
Because in the last few years as the FAA has gone on their power trip to gain control of small unmanned aircraft, they have deemed any and all commercial activity involving model aircraft illegal unless there is an exception in place.
> this is a drone flown in closed private airspace.
According to the FAA, there is no such thing as "closed private airspace" unless you are flying indoors or at least some kind of enclosure.
I'm not an expert on car power systems but this doesn't appear to be feasible.
Is something that looks like that even a little bit possible?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body
A scale model can easily be over-powered to the point that it will fly (anything can fly if you strap a large enough engine to it and you can vector thrust), but to make this work for a life-sized design the amount of power required to make it fly would likely cause the vehicle to be so in-efficient it would not be economical to use.
This more likely is a flying body (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body) or a blended wing body (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body), as 'give it an enormous engine' hurts economical feasibility.
But yes, it looks as if those wings are there only to have something to hang the engines from.
It'll be a close race between this one and the Moller sky car which one will hit the dealerships first.
/sarcasm.
That would eliminate a substantial number of drivetrain complexities for the vtol / early forward portion of flight.