Europe's flying taxi dreams falter as cash runs short | Hacker News Reader

Europe's flying taxi dreams falter as cash runs short

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19 pointsZeljkoS57 comments

Flying taxis are a solution to a problem that no one has. It's ridiculous anyone is financing this stuff.

Lilium spend 1.4 Billion since 2015... and looking them up they seem to have gone the not uncommon path of hiring a multitude of big shot executives and of spending on swanky offices in several countries. No product shipped yet.

Now, there is a market for flying taxis. Currently it is quite niche and helicopters are used. It will probably remain niche so it's not clear how these companies might fit in.

Hmm, if you can make a better helicopter, using new EV technology, you've solved a problem, there's a market for that, and I'm sure this will happen.

But that's relatively niche, and the "flying taxi" companies were promising a whole lot more "disruption" than that.

I don't think it's strictly true that nobody has the problem of wanting to travel medium distances quickly. In fact, everyone has that problem - that's why the roads are congested and the trains are busy.

It might be more accurate to say that the kinds of flying taxis these companies are proposing - noisy, highly constrained location, unsolved airspace congestion issues at scale, probably quite unsafe - are not really a solution. But even so, there's clearly demand for helicopter transfers to airports - if an electric flying taxi can deliver that at half the per-hour cost and equivalent safety, then it's a win.

> But even so, there's clearly demand for helicopter transfers to airports

I mean, maybe some? How much? For instance, to take Paris, the example from the article. You can apparently get a helicopter from Paris to CDG for 4000 euro, taking 17 minutes (from a not-particularly-central point). Last time I was in Paris, the RER took 30 minutes from the airport to the center, and cost a couple of euro.

I'm sceptical that helicopters to airports could ever be a huge business, even if you cut the price by ten times.

400 euro, 4-6 people... I'd do it.

Maybe once, as a novelty, but if you're using the airport a lot, the train is probably less fuss.

Manhattan is a better example - there is no fast alternative route between the city and airport, and that's why you see a lot of helicopter transfers. I can see this working in a lot of US cities where public transport is poor and the airport is far away - Seattle, LA, Bay Area etc.

It's just weird helicopter until some ground braking tech is invented. I wonder how these flying car company pitch decks look like.

I'm not sure if your "ground braking tech" means that you are concerned with the aircraft literally landing slowly and safely on the ground when power is lost, or if you mean radically better, metaphorically "ground-breaking" tech.

Yeah, "flying taxis" could be cool tech, but for now, companies like Electra seem to have a bit more realistic vision and product.

Their aircraft is a traditional airplane, but uses eight electric motors, batteries, and a turbine powered electric generator.

The specs are pretty nice. Seats 9, 75 dBA at 300ft, with 40% less fuel use than a standard turbo prop. The range is in the hundreds of km, it doesn't require charging infra at every site, and it's "blown lift," so it operates as a STOL aircraft needing only a soccer field's length to operate.

https://www.electra.aero/technology

only academics think in terms of "problems" and "solutions". You need to think in terms of demand. There is gigantic demand for a flying taxi

Is there? From whom? For what purpose? How much are they willing to pay for it?

>From whom?

Everyone who currently takes a ground-based taxi, I would guess.

>For what purpose?

Getting from A to B in the shortest amount of time.

>How much are they willing to pay for it?

Now there's the real question. Apparently the price is too high right now for there to be a sustainable market. We'll see what happens as prices come down as the tech advances.

It is not but perhaps it is about a decade too early.

The price of drone technology is dropping fast; and will open for an abundance of use cases that right now seem silly and unnecessary - like package delivery, fun rides, and taxiing.

Unfortunately this development will be mostly in China - sadly the best an European drone company could hope for would be to turn this into some sort of military project.

Vehicles that could be used as a taxi are also big enough to be used as an ambulance or police vehicle, so they're also a solution to various problems we do have.

My previous apartment was here, and before we moved out there were 20-26 sirens per day, lasting 10-90 seconds each, coming from and going in all 5 main exits from that junction, often getting stuck in traffic regardless of path or which emergency response service they were*:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/dLEkZdtCGgaRAoi88?g_st=com.google.ma...

* at least four different services; the extra one was something I had difficulty translating as the prominent word on the side was literally "network" — I think that was the gas mains?

My sister lives 500km away from Perth, but needs to be there every couple of weeks. When family visits, it's a huge pain to have to drive 6 hours after the long flight to Perth from pretty much anywhere (the closest city in Australia, Adelaide, is a nearly 4 hours flight away - plus airport commute time, security etc.). We would pay a lot of money for a flying taxi that could go to Perth in an hour or so, or even more if it could fly all the way to Adelaide, 2,130 km away. I suspect many regions around the world have people in similar conditions (some very rich people in the area own helicopters, but the price to fly and maintain them is extremely prohibitive for everyone else).

I don't expect that any aircraft with a 2000+ km range would be classified as a "taxi".

More like a tour bus, but for the air. "Airbus" has a nice ring to it :)

The "bus" aspect is more related to how many passengers it carries. Implying that it carries a lot of people.

There's certainly demand for a helicopter that is half the cost and twice as reliable for emergency services and VIPs at least.

Helicopter might be the #1 (accidental) killer of rich people globally

Ok, but don't call them "flying taxis" then.

Most of these flying taxi designs seem to be multi-rotor, and I'm not sure they are more reliable. Even a single-engine helicopter can autorotate, these multi-rotor ones generally can't (maybe they could) and depending on the rotor configuration, can't fly with one rotor out of action. For example a typical quadrucopter with one motor out just falls to the ground.

EDIT some discussion here: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/37360/can-a-pas...

Electric air travel has the potential to be pretty revolutionary.

For regional carriers, there's a big potential maintenance cost savings that comes with electric power. See the orders for the Eviation Alice (https://www.eviation.com).

Our opposition as a country to investing in public rail infrastructure could lead to rail being leapfrogged by regional air travel using new technology. There are real topographical challenges that lead to choosing between a 7.5hr train trip vs a 45min flight.

From a logistics perspective, there are potential efficiencies to be gained from running more routes to smaller airports. Organ transplants sometimes fly on private jets to avoid risking organ viability due to a commercial flight being delayed. Those are some of the reasons for the investments in Beta (https://www.beta.team).

Also, air transport of people and cargo will continue to evolve and grow, so we may as well utilize a clean power source.

As an aside human piloted flying taxis have been a thing for ages. They can even be quite reasonable if you get the regulators out of the way - I used one in Belize which cost about US$60 consisting of one pilot in a 4 seater Cessna (a while ago - maybe 2x now). In most countries though the safety regulations make it very expensive.

From the article:

> CityAirbus has an 80km range and can fly at 120kmh

That's a 40 minute flight compared to roughly a 1 hour drive and vastly more expensive. Is this really useful?

Getting around a congested city is probably way faster than using a car. It's called CityAirbus for a reason ;-)

Then again, it's an individual solution to a societal problem. I would prefer a solution for the masses, like getting rid of cars in cities and improving public transport.

> I would prefer a solution for the masses

But some people do not want to be part of "the masses", they want to fly around in flying taxis because they think they're better than everybody else. That's why companies like these exist (and hopefully fail).

How long before noise complaints cause the CityAirbus to be restricted to narrow lanes above highways that will be just as congested as the highway below?

WFH is the best solution. You get a better distribution of people across a whole region thus solving the traffic problem. It won't even be needed to invest in public transportation networks anymore.

No it is not. You get to replace the social parts of the job too, and pay for the place to be prepared for the job, if at all possible.

WFH really means convert your room into an office or rent a coworking space. Is anyone paid extra for that? Nope! And it's really not for everyone either, you cannot get interactive with coworkers in the same way.

> WFH really means convert your room into an office

you just need a computer and the company usually mails one to you

Real estate in places close to work is already so expensive that with anything further you can easily afford a whole additional room.

As for the social aspect - to the degree it's possible at work you can cultivate that online and during occasional get-togethers. It's not worth the time waste and environmental destruction associated with commuting.

Never thought of the social aspects. I am married with kids and have a strong social cricle. I guess it's harder for the people that are missing those.

As to converting the room into an office, I think everyone that works with a computer has a desk and a chair at home. You just need to put the company machine on it.

Which city are you driving through at 80kph?

I want to move there.

I wouldn't, that sounds like a pedestrian nightmare (and I'm not even talking about the noise)

> and I'm not even talking about the noise

Or the pollution from tire/paint/asphalt.

Trains in Berlin's public transport go up to 90km/h and don't wait at traffic lights. I bet there's plenty cities with faster public transport, but probably few that can provide near perfect last-mile coverage in the entire metro area. If you want to go fast especially during rush hour, that's an option.

Whenever I've tried picking two random points in Berlin on Google Maps, averaged over all the point pairs I chose, public transportation takes an average of about 50 minutes regardless of physical distance.

If both ends happen to be right by the same line then you can do better, of course — connections and stop distributions are what drag things back to that value.

My old apartment and employer were 8 km apart*, Google says 48 minutes by public transit, 28 minutes by car, 30 minutes cycling, for average speeds of 10/17/16 km/h respectively.

Public transport has a huge cost advantage, it lets me learn the language during my commute, and it's a huge space saver relative to personal cars, but it's nowhere near as fast as you'd expect from the peak speed.

* by foot, or 7 km as the crow flies.

You can take I-95 through Philadelphia at around 100kph when there's no rush hour traffic.

Crossing let's say Paris from north to south probably takes 1h by car, something like 5km... This is already 24x faster.

Metro?

It’s also infinitely more dangerous, don’t forget that perk.

Hadn't realised any of these companies were still going; weren't they about three hype cycles ago?

They could have pivoted to small military VTOLs, lots of MAV companies did, i.e.quantum-systems.

Rushing specialist and replacement parts to large scale equipment in use, would reduce the burden of relocating this equipment.

The fact that they did not try, might be a hint on how well it worked.

Sigh. I guess China will be able to finance, redesign and manufacture these. Won’t be Europe, at least. Maybe in the 2030s?

Now, if Europe could jump start its manufacturing by getting its defense contracting up to speed…

> I guess China will be able to finance, redesign and manufacture these.

"will" ? They're all already on it:

https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/chi...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/xpeng-aims-for-flying-car-pr...

https://cnevpost.com/2024/11/13/xpeng-aeroht-modular-flying-...

You might call this a ludicrous rich man's toy, and you'd be right. But the fact that cutting-edge ludicrous rich man's toys are now appearing first in China is itself a show of strength.

> Now, if Europe could jump start its manufacturing by getting its defense contracting up to speed…

Jump start? Manufacturing in the EU has been pretty constant to slightly growing in recent years as % of GDP at around 15%. For comparison, the US is at 11.4%.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/EUU/eur...

https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi...

grandparent post also assumes that Europe is not ramping up arms production and defence spending. I'd be happy to hear more about it from someone who knows the field, but AFAIK, it is happening, the assumption is incorrect.

It's sad that this is necessary, but it very much is.

Private money doesn't want to finance this, and State money should NOT finance this, as it's an individual "luxury" solution to a societal issue. Hence, there's no money or interest and the companies fail. That's a very acceptable and normal cycle.

There are many dreams that are failing. Self driving is solved having private driver by upper class. The same is for flying taxi. Renting helicopter is no big deal. Few hundred euros per hour and you’re anywhere in no time. Maybe flying taxi is a solution to no problem.

> Self driving is solved having private driver by upper class

Hah, funnily enough, Uber is basically a private driver. It's the realization of the middle class being able to have luxuries that used to be reserved to the upper class: exploitating the working class. And no need to feel guilt because the exploitation is outsourced!

Oh, wait, if I look in my history books there's this thing called a... taxi?

Self driving seems to be doing quite well. See Waymo.

The problem with "flying anything" plans is that ground vehicles are pretty inherently stable with regards to most types of failures. Cutting or losing power solves most problems.

Not so with aircraft: any failure leaves the vehicle in a notably unsafe state - hence the delta between maintenance standards for road vehicles ("have brakes which work" basically) and aircraft.

Judging by these comments we should all just go back to riding on the backs on donkeys, except even that was at one point only a privilege for the clergy.

If private money isn't enough, how much state money should go into it vs other modes of transport?

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