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Comment by megaman8 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything wrong with Flying cars, conceptually. I would love to be able to cut my commute time by 1/3, imagine all the new job possibilities, and how many more candidates companies will have.

The problem is, maybe it can never be done cost effectively enough to make viable for everyone. I mean, we can't even make simple trains cheap: here in CA, it costs almost 250$ a month to BART back and forth

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Imagine a noise of your "flying car" taking off, reaching to the houses underneath from above. Unobstructed by buildings or trees. A bullet from a less privileged neighborhood, over which a flight path is sets intercepts it. Fire starts, ballistic parachute fires and deploys, but the "flying car" collides with a light pole, in an uncontrolled landing. Your last wish is - you'd listened in 2019 and financed a tunnel instead ;)

these are all problems that can be solved. the question is, at what cost? will tunnels be cheaper? i have no idea.

> will tunnels be cheaper?

Per person? It’s hard to imagine a subway being more expensive than flying cars... even with the US’ ridiculous public works costs.

As far as I know, physics doesn't allow eVTOL noise to be solved. You need something different than eVTOL.

The problem is that any flying object creates a massive invisible wake behind it which means that they can't be packed too closely. Birds have evolved special flight patterns to form a flock so that they don't get knocked out by each others' downdrafts. Air-propelled flying cars can never travel as close together as grounded cars, and consequently don't fix traffic much at all. If you were to invent some sort of antigravity device, this might be different, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that!

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