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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

We have flying taxis. They're called helicopters and they're pretty much exclusively used by very wealthy people for commute-type scenarios. What is yet to be shown by any of the "giant drone" prototypes I've seen to date is a realistic cost projection showing a ~10x reduction in comparison to a helicopter with similar safety levels within the next 10 years. I have also yet to see how these aircraft will deal with FAA regulations - a flying car is great in theory until you're subject to all the same rules as normal aircraft.

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@mdorazio - agreed that helicopters today are largely reserved for the commutes of the wealthy, and they are also too loud for most cities (outside of NYC and Sao Paulo) to tolerate at any meaningful scale.

My team and I published a whitepaper in 2016 that goes into detail on the cost projections for electric VTOL: uber.com/elevate.pdf.

You don't quite need a 10x reduction -- helis are ~$10/passenger-mile today and an Uber X is about $1.50, so you need a 6-7x reduction to be on par. You get ~30% from the new vehicle (electric, more efficient) and you get the remainder from higher utilization and low factors enabled by the lower cost and noise. Scaled manufacturing and autonomy get you to ~$0.50/passenger-mile which is on par with the variable price of car ownership.

The FAA is extremely supportive of certifying these aircraft -- here is the Administrator Dickson speaking to that directly yesterday: https://evtol.com/news/dickson-faa-15-evtol-aircraft/

Add -- the utilization and load factor efficiencies apply to helicopters today, we are proving that with Uber Copter in NYC: https://www.uber.com/blog/new-york-city/uber-copter/ -- ~$200 from Manhattan to JFK

Just some rough estimates here, a Jetranger helicopter costs ~$1000/hr to charter. Assuming the helicopter's 300 kW engine was magically replaced with electric batteries, that's only ~$30/hr for energy. And an eVTOL will be far more energy efficient in forward flight and at idle than a helicopter.

So I could see a path to 10x improvement by eliminating the pilot and keeping utilization high. Even if you budget $100/hour maintenance cost, the cost can be far lower than conventional helicopters.

Ah yes! Get to 10x cost improvement by eliminating the pilot. Perfect.

This is called putting the bell on the cat. Or Belling the cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

No, it's not just eliminating the pilot, although yes electric making that easier is one aspect.

An electric aircraft can have multiple engines (to wit: an octocopter) rather than just one a turbine that is a both high tolerance technological marvel and high maintenance. They don't need to long high speed blades whirring above to achieve VTOL, they can have small propellers in cowling's. They don't have to carry lots of highly flammable fuel that is highly likely to start a fire in suburbia ifthey become ubiquitous. With luck they will have solid state batteries. They don't need spinning wings under high stress, they can have passive wings that glide naturally. They don't need a big heavy engine to generate the power needed for takeoff, as powerful electric engines are powerful yet small, light and easily redirected without a gear train.

A lot of things change. Admittedly some are way worse for electric, like flight endurance - and so it's no coincidence we are talking about taxi's here, not long haul fights. But when it comes to taxi's most things are improvements over ICE engines we have now. Thinking it is just about the presence or absence of a pilot is simplifying things way too much.

Especially when the pilot is only 20% of the price!

To be fair, autonomous flight is probably an order of magnitude easier than autonomous driving. Particularly because it's far more predictable and you can put beacons on drones to automatically avoid collisions.

The sky is mostly empty space and landing zones are clearly marked and purpose built. You don't have to worry about any pedestrians or unpredictable drivers or roads.

> You don't have to worry about any pedestrians or unpredictable drivers...

Actually you do. Most airspace is uncontrolled, where the collision avoidance algorithm is "see and avoid". There are plenty of airspace users who do not broadcast any kind of beacon apart from being visible to other pilots.

You could demand that they all wear electronic beacons. Such technologies do exist. However they aren't currently predicted to work well enough in the expected congestion created by large numbers of autonomous aircraft in the future. And it faces most of the same practical challenges as putting beacons on pedestrians and all other road users.

That is not fair. Autonomous flight is just as hard as autonomous driving due to the need to handle mechanical failures. If something breaks in the air you can't just pull over and stop. Current autopilots are generally unable to cope with failures and rely upon a qualified human pilot being ready to take back control within a few seconds.

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever have autonomous driving... mostly because we’ll have autonomous flying first and it’ll be way better!

Flying is an order of magnitude worse than driving energy-wise. Even with electric motors it's still going to be a problem. Tesla travels for about 300Wh/mile, I doubt any flying machine would be within 10x of that.

The sky is mostly empty space when, and only when, there are not flying taxis at sufficient scale for society to bat an eye

That's why I mentioned beacons for collision avoidance. They wouldn't be expensive. If we're about to build this industry from the ground up I would expect to see something like that done anyway.

Fuel only makes up a small part of that $1000. The lion's share of the hourly charge goes towards paying off the amortised cost of buying and maintaining the helicopter itself. If you magically eliminated the costs for fuel and for the pilot, you're still probably paying $700+/hr.

Source: https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2017/08/07/about-helicopter-f...

Electric fixed wings conceivably are a lot cheaper to maintain than a helicopter, but a lot of the infrastructure costs etc. seem like they'll be similar. You already have helicopter operating out of small pad locations with out security and line ups, etc. All of that has too look pretty similar.

I can see how you might change a $200 15-20 min helicopter ride into a $120 15-20 min VTOL ride profitably, but hard to see how it becomes a $60 ride any time soon...

> with out security and line ups

You have that on general aviation too, today.

> I can see how you might change a $200 15-20 min helicopter ride into a $120 15-20 min VTOL ride profitably, but hard to see how it becomes a $60 ride any time soon...

Last I looked, range was an enormous problem.

Let's see. 20 min VTOL ride. 30 minutes reserve "fuel" or 1 hour if IFR. +more "fuel" to reach the alternate airport (if fixed wing) or the nearest landing site. These are recommendations for GA, if you are doing this commercially the requirements may be different (tend to be stricter)

You can get away with a lot if you only fly in clear blue skies in locations with very stable weather. You still need to have plenty of range for unforeseen events. You don't burn off batteries when flying either, so empty or full batteries weight the same.

These things won't get cheap in the short term. Non-helicopter efficient VTOL is pretty hard to do, that doesn't help costs either. Companies would do well in trying to solve one problem first (flying 'vtol' taxis) before trying to solve the other problem (electric airplanes).

I think we are saying basically the same thing - this works only on short runs and the fixed costs are similar. So where are the putative gains? 2x I can see, maybe. But it's a big maybe. 10x seem to be fantasy land. So that means no disruption.

> a lot of the infrastructure costs etc. seem like they'll be similar

Helicopter infrastructure is so cheap that there are many places with a pad that is just used for emergencies.

sure; it's a little bit heavier if you have customers but still - where is the savings for an electric VTOL?

To be thoroughly honest, I said the same thing about Tesla 10 years ago and the technology did in fact get wayyy cheaper. New economic realities are upon us.

But like you said, safety is harder when you are airborne. Can't imagine what NYC would be like with 1000 helicopters in the sky.

  New economic realities are upon us.

I don't see anything about tesla that wasn't reasonably perceivable 10 years ago, or anything like a new economic reality. People have been saying for decades that electric cars will work well if and when we can get the battery cost down a bit.

We haven't seen the kind of reduction above poster is positing in electric cars yet, and that's beyond the 10 year window (and we aren't going to, as drive train isn't enough of the cost).

Yeah, electric cars are all about battery cost which is coming down rapidly due to economies of scale. Tesla was great in taking the initial cost and that together with $7500 tax rebate made them feasible in the beginner.

It looks like they are here to stay, but I would warn they still make a lot less cars at a lower profitability than most major car makers.

NYC did have air taxis: https://youtu.be/8nbz5VFilxY

Didn't it come to an end because one crashed on a roof and lots of people got dismembered?

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