Compare how much more aerial photography and videography we have now with drones compared to when manned helicopters were the only option.
This is not vaporware. Joby is currently testing in NYC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD_dF8YngpA
Could be straight from some of those start-ups marketing material. Safety, noise, cost all have to be proofen, right now those are just claims.
True, air taxis don't have decades of real-world use, but the claims are not without basis. Quieter operation has already been verified. Better safety and operating costs are highly likely due to the dramatic reduction in complexity/moving parts (similar to electric cars) and redundancy.
Wouldn't they be harder to operate than cars and possibly fall straight down if there is a malfunction? (And use more energy than cars?)
And no one seems to address the often brought-up hard questions:
- Look at the (often) questionable security theater at airports and tell me how you'd scale it down to airtaxis?
- The people that for the foreseeable future will be able to afford airtaxis? Celebrities and enterprise C-level persons, not _you_
- Even if "free sky cars that run on zero energy" popped up from nowhere? The average person has a hard time navigating in 2D and can barely leave their hands off their cellphone
- "AI will fix it"? Sure, dream on.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=magnetschwebebahn+deutschland+nahv...
Among others, Nürnberg and Berlin...
This pipedream evergreen is probably inspired as yesterday's modernity fiction accompanying the ideological deconstruction of recently built bike lanes, which may indeed prove euphoric to his senile voter base struggling to recall it as an already tried, and/or failed concept.
Of course, like with the paper reactor, hypoloop and hot air taxi, no politician really gives a shit, if it's a scam or not. It's just the car on a shtick to drag horse and the buggy in aromatic circles towards their post-politics career...