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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

> Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future.

Therein lies the problem with public transportation in the US. What do you do after you get to Tahoe, Santa Cruz, or wherever? Most of these places are devoid of functional public transportation, and rental car companies have long lines and routinely screw people over and overbook.

And will the FAA allow you with your tent stakes, hiking poles, bear spray, and camping stove with fuel on the Lilium Jet? (What else are you supposed to do in Tahoe?)

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Also, the website underestimates one point.

The air taxi is not on top of your house.

You need to actually go from your house to the Lilium jet starting point (at least 30 minutes or more in these complex urban setups) and you need to be in advance for the take-off, eventual security checks and security briefing (like any plane).

After air turbulences, then you are at the Lake Tahoe stuck in the middle of nowhere.

You can take your Instagram picture and wait for the next plane to go back.

Was that really worth saving 1 hour in your life ?

The alternative is to gather with friends on the morning, go get your friends with your car on the way, have a lunch picnic, have a tour around in the nature, discover unexpected places. Come home for dinner.

No stress, no schedule, quality time with friends.

Also I don't know about Lilium but one of my biggest gripes about Amtrak and other train infrastructure in the US, besides the sheer slow speed, is the complete lack of basic human necessities at the endpoints of travel. You get off the train and get basically thrown into a dilipidated, desolate parking lot full of locked cars, next to a locked building with no food, often not even bathrooms, no rain shelter, no bus to downtown for an hour, no rental bicycles, and sometimes no signal.

That is a world of difference from Europe, China, or Japan, when you're usually thrown into a food court when you get off the train, and buses leaving every 10 minutes to everywhere you could possibly want to go. Planes replicate that drop-off experience in the US, and Lilium will need to as well in order for it to be a comfortable experience.

That goes for even for suburban trips. How do you get from wherever it drops you off in Palo Alto to say, Facebook or Google's offices? Or the thousand other companies that don't have company shuttles?

The point is, the food court and shops usually make the train companies money because they pay high rent. That only works when enough passengers come through, which I'd guess might be the problem in the US?

(eg in Japan, JR East makes 30-40% of its profits from the shops: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/12/30/business/jr-eas...)

I guess. But what if they started with low rent, just enough to break even? Added comfort to passengers might increase the number of passengers to the train system itself to help get the cycle going.

Obviously you have your personal driver pick you up and bring you to your 10k sqft "cottage" /s

They need to come up with an accompaning service which allows you to arrange for someone with a car to arrive and drive you to your desired final destination.

Or in the case of Lake Tahoe the area ski resort, hotel or casino might provide shuttle service.

> shuttle service

Shuttle service is not adequate. Most people do more than just visit a hotel or ski resort. I think the "easy" US-side solution to this problem would be for there to exist a better, more competent car rental service that doesn't require lining up or saying "no" 10 times to humans trying to offer you add-ons, is available 24 hours, is guaranteed, and is located within a 10 minute walk of wherever the Lilian drops you off.

Kind of like ZipCar, but ZipCar has zero cars in Tahoe, 2 cars for the entirety of Fresno (wtf), and cost twice as much as Enterprise for a daily rental despite the fact that they don't have to hire as many humans, which is backwards. ZipCar should be costing half as much as a place with brick-and-mortar and human agents.

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