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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

Self-flying air vehicles like this are probably easier to implement than cars. For simple reasons, such as there being no obstacles like roads, street lights, pedestrians, and because you have a 3rd dimension there is significantly more space so the vehicles can be more spread out. The trip itinerary is a lot easier because you're essentially going from point A to point B in a straight line. Also, starting from day one, you could mandate that no human is allowed to pilot these types of vehicles, so you wouldn't have a mix of human and computer pilots that you have with cars.

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Well I agree with all that you're saying. But this is still a car. If you want it to make "the last mile", which can take you from your home door to work. Then you'll need it to drive on ground and deal with traffic with other cars. And then only fly if there's a good enough spot for both take off and landing. Just like the hybrid on the video.

I think can of a few dirty workarounds. But for this to be optimal, I still think we'd have to master fully automated both air and ground driving first.

I wonder how they would coordinate a large number of these flying objects, both in flight and while take off and landing. You know, large cities have millions of cars... It sounds really 'sci-fi' to imagine all those million cars flying :)

Easier? We use UAV's every day. What we have to do is make them able to land and take off reliably so that they don't kill their users. Thats a engineering problem and you could solve that in about 5-10 years.

The answer to safety issues should not be a matter of restricting people from operating them. By that mentality, you'd ban a huge range of very useful things.

I disagree, restricting humans is exactly what needs to happen for personal air travel to ever to be safe. The humans are the rogues, they're ones that are going to cause problems, not follow standard procedures, drink and fly, check their cellphones while flying etc. Imagine how much uncertainty and risk could be eliminated if you know that 100% of the vehicles in the air are all computer controlled, and use a common communication/navigation protocol. It would simplify everything.

Exactly. A sufficiently advanced "flying car" should be able to simply take a destination entered via smartphone, generate a flight plan, file the plan electronically, ping a regional air traffic control server for takeoff clearance, and run a preflight self-diagnostic, all in a matter of minutes.

Yep and then when the computer hangs up, or a lightning hits your plane and burn all the electronics, or the turbulence is so hi that the autopilot simply disconnects, or a sensor breaks in the middle of the flight and the flight computer throws erroneous predictions, or a software update introduces a bug that is active just in certain circumstances, etc... I think that eventually it will be possible but ( and I am talking of 30 million $ planes) actually there are simply to many failures too many times ( once a year is enough and I assure you that potentially dangerous failures happen far more often than that) to have a fully autonomous plane flying with people inside. Don't even start thinking of consumer grade planes.

A robotic car could be made to Self stop whenever a failure happens, that is a luxury that planes don't have.

The mix of human and computer pilots is inevitable. There has to be a manual override option. Otherwise, the cars simply won't sell, no matter how ultra steadfast and safe the technology is.

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