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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

why are all these new variants of sport aircraft appearing at the moment? There must be something in the water because I've seen so many re-interpretations of the flying car in the past year or two. They look cool in movies but how are they at all a practical method of transportation outside of being toys for the ultra-rich?

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Electric cars have increased the availability of mobile electric power systems: experience with batteries, motors, controllers etc in cars is transferable to aircraft. It's "in the air" so to speak.

Edit: Also the mass market adoption of small quadcopters; these "distributed electric propulsion" flying car type things are basically the same concept: flight control by altering the speed of an array of propellers.

Also a lot of university teaching/research on both of the above.

One of the main backers of Lilium is Frank Thelen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Thelen), a VC from Germany, best known for his participation in the German version of Shark Thank ("Die Höhle der Löwen").

He seems to believe that eVTOL are the future of mass transportation, like an airborne version of taxis. I personally don't find that plausible at all, but maybe I'm just not creative enough to imagine a future where this would work.

I really hope that's not the case. Mass transit that's just cars that are even more noisy and can drop on people from the sky?

I mean I love the sci-finess of the concept also I doubt it'll ever "fly".

But I will bet money that we'll see self driving electric Ubers on the road before we see those air-taxis.

And it's going to be incredibly hard to compete with those. Especially as city will be becoming less crowded as more and more people realize they don't need a car anymore.

I live in Bangkok where Taxis are extremely cheap compared to owning a car. I would never bother getting my own car, it's just so convenient to let someone else drive in the city.

There are two axis here:

- are the air taxi concepts technologically viable? I'd say yes, after all they are flying one way or the other. Besides being electric concepts like Joby and Volocopter are proofen. Lilium is techologically more challenging, but still feasible with existing tech. Not sure robo taxis will beat them there.

- Commercial viability. We know there will be a market for robot taxis, they are taxis without a driver. There UAM is the big bet, is there a market, and if so how big is it? There robo taxis might be faster.

Be aware that you are usually looking at prototypes, not available products.

Currently its mostly another set of startups to invest in. They might look attractive to VCs because they're ambitious, require lots of capital, and the technical feasability of a specific approach is complex enough to find merits in. The jury is still out if any of them are actually viable from a technology and economic perspective.

Lilium's approach specifically has been publicly critized by aviation experts to not be make sense when looking at the basic physics.

Computerized controls and CFD have made these multi-thruster aircraft practical to design and fly. These things are promised to be way easier to fly than conventional helicopters, with stuff like autolanding since fly-by-wire has become almost a commodity. The flowfields from having 10+ fans interacting with a body was also impractical to analyze in previous generations, but now CFD tooling has caught up and we can get good results without physical tests (of course you still need testing at the end).

It's not so much that I thought them impossible - but what problem are they actually solving?

Controllability, safety, carbon emissions, NOISE, better forward flight performance in some cases. Flying a helicopter is VERY hard and that is a huge barrier to public acceptance, but you need a VTOL craft for a practical everyday air transport. What problem does OS X solve over raw FreeBSD? This is a vastly smoother experience.

I think everyone is trying to replicate the Tesla formula where the first Roadster was a toy for the rich, then followed by real products and now $Trillion in market cap. But there are a few steps in there that are probably hard to copy, like being able to sell carbon credits to other manufacturers, federal tax credit for buyers, etc. Oh, and one Elon Musk.

I could see these being a more cost effective option than helicopter transport. Especially in island areas.

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