Hacker News Reader

That's why I don't think we would ever have flying cars either. We can barely handle driving on flat surfaces and I suspect most people on the road only get by idly emulating simple line following machines rather than actually engaging the whole situation.

It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current flying vehicles, planes, so I can't see any alternative to full automation of a mass of flying cars.

It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current non-flying vehicles too!

Agree on the flying part, not so much on the line following machine. If you think about it: think about the vast amount of cars and miles driven every day. Think of the sheer number of decisions every driver has to make all the time. I think it’s a wonder that the traffic accident rate is rather low.

About 40,000 people died last year in the US. That's over 100 people dead every single day. Millions are injured on a scale from minor bruising to permanent disability every year. It's the number one cause of accidental death if you ignore overdoses. This is not a low rate.

I mean cars wouldn't be accepted today if they were just invented. The only reason why we think 30k deaths a year is fine is because "that's the way it's always been", and cars come from an age when one out of three children would die before they turned 5.

In a sane world we would have only segregated rail transport in urban areas and cars in rural areas where the population density is less than 10 people a square mile.

For the whole world, cars kill 1.2 million people per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Though there are better places than the US, quite a few countries are willing to put up with absurdly higher risks.

I'm of the same mind. There's a reason pilots have to have hundreds of hours of training before they are allowed to fly solo. Adding a third dimension to piloting a small personal vehicle takes every bit of concentration and awareness a human can handle. I definitely don't want to see the average driver next to me every morning and afternoon -- the one making all kinds of bad decisions like running red lights and not looking before merging -- behind the wheel/stick of a flying craft.

Conversely, there are a bunch of countries where you can get your PPL before your driving license. I first flew a plane when I was 14. It's not that hard.

Not while the sky is still big enough perhaps. I can take off, poke about and land at a rural airport without seeing anyone but without coordination a busy airport would be a writhing pile of twisted metal. Also it does take a particular type of person to choose to fly, so you are already in a minority of people. The majority of people drive, that is a lot of room for bad judgement.

Indeed. If your car's power cuts, or breaks fail - the odds of you surviving are incrementally getting higher every year we're on the road. Cars are getting safer and safer, but surely part of that is due to the fact they're on the ground.

If I'm even 10 metres under the ground, flying at 50km/h, if this device fails, of the battery runs out, you're not gonna live to the tell the tale. There is no parachuting, no way of gliding safely to the ground (like planes and helicopters). What is the safety net?

I can't ever see a world where even a minority of the population adopt flying cars. The chance of catastrophic failure (death) is too high.

This. For all the, "Where's my jetpack?" angst in the world of science fiction fanboys (I am one) and start-up builders, there seems to be a disconnect with the rest of humanity on this issue. If the chance of failure is > 0% and odds of death on failure is > 95%, I don't see how a product like this will ever become more than a pipe dream, or at best a prototype flown by a thrill seeker over open water for a publicity stunt.

Edit: After reflecting on this I realize that airplanes probably fall into these statistics, at least for catastrophic failure anyway. I'd be curious to examine statistics in more detail to figure out what a comfortable level of risk would be, but for now, I guess I fall into the ranks of your typical armchair critic on this one.

Commercial airplanes are much safer than cars (because they're rigorously maintained, observed, and operated by professionals). Little ultralight planes might be the best analogy for this project - but they're used by thrill-seekers, just like you predicted.

Commercial airplanes are usually able to safely glide under engine failures. A jetpack is going to drop out the sky. Just from glancing at this flying bike, if the power cuts above 10m, you're probably going to die.

Fixed wing can glide, helicopters can autorotate, open rotor e-vtols don’t autorotate because they don’t have variable pitch blades and their inertia is way too low anyway. jet-vtols have no rotor blades at all so... you’re right if an e-vtol or jet-vtol experiences a catastrophic failure then it’s going straight down! Many of the e-vtol companies say they solve this by having x levels of redundancy..we don’t buy that at JPA. We want to build a saftey system that can rescue the pilot from 5 feet or 50 feet or 5000 feet. Now that’s a challenge! But we believe doable.

People do crazy shenanigans on motorcycles in 2D already. Source: owned sportbikes, have the titanium implants to show as my "credentials".

Can't imagine the stupid s%%t some are going to do in 3D.

This!

So back in the day (fault of bad meds) I was sometimes a crazy driver. Poor impulse control. Drive it like you stole it. Whatever. But hey. I'm still alive, and I never got anyone else seriously injured or killed.

But anyway, one afternoon I was doing slalom at ~90 mph through ~70 mph traffic. And then, out of nowhere, this dude on a racing bike blew through at 140 mph or more. And we were all damn lucky that I saw him just before using the same gap that he was heading through. It would have been a serious mess.

I promise that was not me. I don't do that.

I do other things.

I always thought that if anything like this ever happened, it would be a self flying machine, with minimal human input

> then the only real issue is the noise pollution

I live on Moffett Field next to the 101 -- the vehicles from the 101 are far more annoying than the airplanes. Just listen to traffic noise pretty much in any urban or suburban environment. The Caltrain sounds like -- well, a freight train. My point is that if we cared about noise pollution, we'd be paying more attention to the everyday noise all around us and developing technology such as a hypothetical road surface that absorbs sound or finding ways to make the loud train horns unnecessary. The noise from trains and roads is far more obnoxious than any airplane sounds.

Airplanes are a few orders of magnitude farther away than what these vehicles are suggested to fly at.

True cars and trains are loud. However, we're on the verge of both Caltrain and car electrification, which will significantly reduce ambient noise.

I can't believe we haven't cut & covered the Caltrain line yet. I imagine that's a project even the plentiful peninsula NIMBYs could get behind.

As sibling points out, airplanes at moffett are rather far away, whereas these flying bikes are meant to be point-to-point in dense environments. Also note that there's lots of regs & techs that help reduce noise for larger planes, and I'm not sure the same is going to be true for these smaller vehicles, similar to how all those two-stroke lawnmower and leaf blower engines are horrible both environmentally and noise-wise because they're optimized for size.

At normal highway speeds most car noise comes from air movement and tires. Electrification will only deliver a slight noise reduction.

The Caltrain horns are so loud I have decided I believe in a conspiracy theory - the volume was mandated in the name of "safety" by a lobbying group secretly working for the auto industry.

Nowhere else I've been are trains so obnoxiously loud.

Just as for $1500 drones we will have a fly by wire system that precludes controlled flight into terrain or other obstacles.

Systems do not preclude controlled flight into terrain. They simply purport to. These are different things. And before you say "in that case it's not controlled" well yes it is.

Given how many days of the year the roads are frozen and/or snow covered where I live, the safety trade-off might be worth it. Just so long as the max height is only about half a meter off the ground (hovering, not flying).

I'm having trouble finding good references to cite [1], because the internet doesn't have a long-term memory, but early reactions to the automobile were identical to this. People had never tried to maneuver machines faster than a horse could pull one.

The driving skills that we take for granted now, that seem to come naturally for so many people, were totally nonexistent a little over a hundred years ago. Our brains can now process lots of things moving at different rates of what would have been bewildering speeds to any human not that long ago. We negotiate traffic and anticipate tricky situations and have developed rules that help coordinate the chaos.

Yeah, there are a lot of collisions and deaths all the time, and there are a lot of people who aren't great at it. But even the not-great ones are capable of something that nobody was when the automobile was introduced.

Lots of things turn out better than we expect just because most people don't really want to die. If it were possible for people to fly around overhead in some kind of personal vehicles, my guess is most folks would learn how to handle it.

[1]: Best I could do for now: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-histor...