In that kind of area, there's not the population density to support any kind of mass transit (or even really taxis) and the distances are too far for biking to be practical. Readily available electric VTOL would revolutionize rural America. Not much to worry about in terms of air congestion, either.
The real issue is unit sales being so low. The R22 is a popular and ‘cheap’ helicopter ranking #8 in total sales, but it’s sold less than 5,000 units worldwide over 40 years.
PS: Fixed wing aircraft are popular because they have a huge range of inherent advantages. VTOL sounds great, but the downsides are enormous.
And don't rule out eSTOL. I think we'll see more of that.
Helicopters have an operating cost per hour an order of magnitude higher than a comparable payload conventional aircraft. The purchase price per payload capacity is also nearly an order of magnitude different. It's not the operator cost that determines the difference in price between helicopters and CTOL.
Similarly, an electric helicopter would qualify as eVTOL. People generally aim for something more efficient in flight, but that’s a separate question.
Even so, only about 1000 single engine piston airplanes are sold every year.
https://www.controller.com/listings/aircraft/for-sale/list/m...
(Additionally, a lot of general aviation aircraft have moved to turboprop in the last few decades.)
You're right, they last forever, and so the market for new aircraft is tiny. Really a vicious circle: high costs lead to low volume leads to high costs.
The market is probably there if someone could pull off a 1-2 seat VTOL that had maybe a 60 mile range.
That said, if it is an LSA, at least in the US, it would have to meet the normal LSA or E-LSA regulations. Including the service schedule, which is less onerous and non-LSA general aviation, but still far more than a car.
As people already pointed, redundancy. Those systems have a lot of engines.
The simplest ones have fixed engines, and the most complex ones have then engine move in a single axis. Both are much simpler than an helicopter.
Electrical motors inherently require less maintenance, what isn't as large a change as it seems.
All the e-VTOL designs I have seen can glide, what places them on the same category as airplanes, that require much less maintenance than helicopters.
They are mechanically simpler, but aerodynamically and electrically vastly more complex. These designs are only possibly due to modern engineering, otherwise they would have been invented before the helicopter.
Electrical complexity is more reliable by orders of magnitude, and aerodynamics won't fail mid-flight.
If the trip is much shorter in the air, it may bring the energy consumption closer to ground travel, but even then if we're talking electric energy, renewables are set to make that so cheap it doesn't matter compared to other factors like convenience (it's already that cheap, and dropping every year.)
Commercial air travel is far safer than most forms of ground transport , so it's at least possible that personal air transport could one day be safer than driving.
The big thing really is the advancements in materials science and energy storage density. I don't think we're there yet. But in the next 50 years, very likely in my opinion.
The one thing that may not be fixable is the noise. But this is primarily important for rural living. Air taxis could pick you up and drop you at the subway station outside the city, where the nose won't be that big of a concern.
Jet travel is sort of energy efficient because it's a flying bus with 100+ passengers. VTOL flying cars are not.
""" Doing the math
In other words, take these comparisons with a grain of salt: In 2013, traffic accidents killed 32,719 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The fatality rate was 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled. Assuming an average vehicle speed of 50 miles per hour (a big assumption), the fatality rate for automobiles translates to 1.1 per every 2 million hours.
Taking the preliminary 2013 fatality rate in general aviation of 1.05 fatalities for every 100,000 hours of flight time and scaling it up to 2 million hours gives a comparison rate of 21 general aviation fatalities per every 2 million hours. This suggests that stepping on a private plane is about 19 times more dangerous than getting into the family sedan. """
from: https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
renewable energy sources combined with electrically driven transportation never meant we would do less travel or use less energy over all. it means what all break through events in power generation and efficiency meant, more of it for more uses and more people.
clean easily obtainable energy is going to lead to an explosion travel and who knows what forms it will take
I'm still hoping for some sort of pneumatic tube.
Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits. It means less environmental impact, less distance for people to travel, more efficient energy usage, and probably a ton more.
Imagine New York City with landing pads not just on every rooftop, but every few stories spiraling around the outside of the building. People could live without ever needing to travel to the ground level.
While it's a popular image in near-future scifi that doesn't look too costly at details, flying taxis with any current VTOL technology don't plausibly enable this, AFAIK, because while they can fly over cities easily, close proximity to solid vertical surfaces substantially disrupts the stability and effectiveness of VTOL systems.
That's why helipads tend to be either on top of or a distance from buildings now; even with a smaller number of VTOL aircraft, pads aren't at those places because it's the most convenient place for them, but because it's the only safe place.
Traffic causing problems like people blocking intersections, not moving when the light is green, or improperly merging, won't happen anymore.
Cars will be able to talk to each other and set up optimal routes. They'll be able to more efficiently match up users with carpools. I'm sure you can imagine more.
These things won't happen for a long time and definitely not with the first generation of truly autonomous cars. Once every car on the road is self driving though? Things will definitely change.
That can only be solved by increasing capacity, either with more lanes or more roads in the same direction, but this is typically not feasible.
Busses and trains are better now but they suffer from a major problem of not taking people where they actually want to go.
I don't think it's an either/or problem. We'll have autonomous busses, trains, and cars all working together to make travel MUCH better.