China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
engineerine.com
engineerine.com
The helicopters (and drones!) are loud and annoying. Until these problems are solved, locals will resist converting all airspace into the equivalent of a loud, high-speed roadway.
EHang claims restrictions will be progressively lifted, but according to China-based eVTOL experts, EHang’s flagship aircraft would need a billion-dollar redesign and an entirely different class of certification to avoid the limitations."
Also from the Chinese Civil Aviation Authority:
https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/t20220...
"EHang EH216-S Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System Special Conditions.pdf" (in Chinese) - https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/P02022...
I get what you are thinking. Detection, maneuvering and trajectory planning are all much easier than on a road. If you mandate built in transponders collision avoidance is also easy.
But what you are forgetting is everything that isn't normal operations. What do you do if anything fails? A car can just stop, break failures, even steering failures can all be reasonably mitigated. This is not the case when you are in the air. Any failure mode needs fast and accurate reactions, even when critical systems have failed. That is why a passenger plane has two pilots. A modern passenger plane can do most of the flying by itself, yet the pilots need to be there.
Aerospace standards are higher and more difficult to adhere to, ensuring any kind of reasonable safety is extremely difficult. How many of these flying into sky scrapers are acceptable?
With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.
Most of these are a total nightmare to implement. There is no such thing as a "controlled descent" into a dense urban center. Even keeping maneuverability with a single defective motor is a hard task, you need to develop and test for this.
>On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.
So ground control can do what? The only reasonable way these could ever safely operate is with a high degree of sensor fusion, information about nearby crafts, their trajectories, obstacles, etc. combined together. You can not put a human into that system and have him make split-second decisions.
>With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.
Passenger plane automation is also "just" a software problem. It is just an enormously difficult software problem with exceedingly high stakes. The problem is not that it is "impossible", but that it is extremely difficult and not worth the risk getting it wrong.
Again, what is the acceptable failure rate for these things crashing into sky scrapers? If it is zero, we are very far away from them being able to take flight.
These are also much more dangerous than cars in case of a failure.
Anyway, detecting and avoiding obstacles should be in the menu. Maybe not as complex as at street level with people and cars doing unexpected things, but maybe with some added complexity that need to have into account like weather, inertia and things near landing sites.
No such thing exists in the air. The air is mostly empty, there are no stationary objects next to the route. If there is a building, aircraft can fly as far as 500 meters away from it - try finding a driveable road with no obstacles at that distance. There is no people or large animals. There is not even curb to hit.
Importantly, I bet there are no legacy vehicles in the approved routes - and I am sure they will have some sort of V2V tech to ensure that all objects in the air will transmit their position and intention.
There are still airplanes flying that have no electrical system but even then some of them have retrofitted a system.
P.S.: Commercial planes (esp. big ones) should have hardly any contact points with flying taxis.
Helicopters don’t have to deal with any of that. There won’t be any random obstacles. No human drivers to contend with. No conflict between legality and practice to navigate.
I can take off from an uncontrolled airport with no GPS, no transponder, no plan, and no radio and as long as I’m in the correct airspace I’m completely legal and within my right to do so.
There are some differences with these rules through out the world.
[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/china-approves-passenger-operation...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ehangstock/comments/mmz42r/for_anyo...
https://www.flyingmag.com/china-approves-passenger-operation... ("China Approves Passenger Operations With Self-Flying Electric Aircraft")
With some clearer wording on what's been approved so far,
- "Early EH216-S operations will come with heavy limitations, which EHang said it aims to lift in phases. For example, flights are restricted to Guangzhou and Hefei and must land where they lifted off[...] In other words, the EH216-S is approved for applications like out-and-back aerial tourism but not air taxi services in cities."
(I don't want to derail this thread too strongly, but the current source looks very much like AI slop. The text is egregiously LLM, and, if you zoom in [0] on the people in the backgrounds of the photos, there's some Lovecraftian horror going on with those faces!)
[0] https://engineerine.com/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQGAuf0rFLA
Might be a bit of a stretch to call these "taxi"s but anyway here's your futuristic flying car from China...
Counterpoint: no they're not.
These sorts of very large drones may well become more popular, but they're not gonna become widespread enough to impact traffic congestion. The realistic target is becoming a moderately more popular version of helicopters for the sufficiently affluent.
I think it remains to be seen whether they will ever be a viable mode of transport. Helicopters have been used, usually by the very rich, for quite a while. They need serious infrastructure and have very high associated costs.
A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now. The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. In comparasion, the streets of SF, one of the crown jewels of the US technosphere, are just so "normal" I find it hard to believe.
It is the same feeling I had decades ago walking into a then-modern metropolis in the US for the first time. All the cool tech, the convenience, the upscale atmosphere, the extravagance of it all were striking. I have not felt that again for a while and I just think it can't happen again with what I am already used to now. Incredible that China managed to evoke that sense of awe in me again.
Actually I'd argue that Chinese IT is slightly behind Kazakhstan, because their localization is so bad. Baidu maps does not provide English translation at all, and that seems the only proper maps for China. Most WeChat apps I tried also were Chinese-only. I'm pretty sure that every major website and application is well translated to English in my country, Chinese people seems to care very little about English, which makes it particularly hard for international visitors. I literally had to screenshot some app over and over, pasting it to Google Translate to be able to register in the some metro app, so I could actually buy tickets with app and not cash.
Also motorcycle people were absolutely crazy about road rules, like they don't care at all about anything. Auto road, pedestrian road, red light, opposite direction, anything works for them. I was seriously concerned about someone hitting me, which didn't happen, but few times it was close. Car people, on the opposite, were pretty disciplined. May be cameras don't work for motorcycles?
Yes, the english localization is trash. But I mean, I am in China, I am happy enough they even have some english available. I speak some other Asian languages and not sure if it was obvious, but the US also have trash translation to those languages here too.
Maybe that was the biggest difference. I can read a bit of chinese so my experience was more "the way it was meant to be" I guess? I assume it can disappoint if you expect just an upscaled Western experience there. China is big enough they don't need to cater to rich foreigners. I knew the feeling well enough when I first came to the US so I am not surprised. But maybe it is a novel experience to Westerners.
This sounds so horrifying to me.
Some Chinese Cities may try to "integrate" tech more like in Shenzhen with drone delivery, flying taxis here, or qr-code scanning or whatnot, but that's just more of gimmicks for a select few rather than fundamental lifestyle changes. Far as I would say, Tokyo is still likely the most "developed" of cities in terms of quality of life.
Do you mean North America? Because cities in Europe and Oceania are wildly different from the cities in North America and definitely not 'objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world' (which includes cities in Africa, which honestly aren't amazing).
If anything that's more of an American problem rather than a Western one. There's plenty nice cities in Europe.
How are they ahead in this regard? Tech is one thing, but social credit scores and the level of censorship seem regressive rather than progressive to me.
I can't stress enough how you need to do your own research on this stuff. American propaganda has depicted China as a ruthless peasant state for decades, and it's only in recent years that news like this has opened peoples' eyes to the fact that that all was a cover for the fact that they've passed us in recent decades.
https://merics.org/en/comment/chinas-social-credit-score-unt...
tl;dr: The "social credit score" is mostly myth. From the article:
>By 2019, China’s central authorities were stating explicitly that they were not happy with the idea. They issued formal clarifications that scores could not be used to penalize citizens and that only formal legal documents could serve as grounds for penalties.
Compare this to the US, in which things like DUIs on your background can be used to deny you Constitutional rights. There's no nothing exceptional about how they're doing things over there when it comes to this.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here?
The status revocations are sudden and opaque. The students do not have an opportunity to appeal nor explain. They immediately become illegals once the decision is made and thus become subjects to detainment without due process. In practice they must immediately make arrangements to leave the US or they will risk future visa bans as them being in the country without status can also be considered violating immigration laws.
So, hypothetically, someone who came to the US for a bachelor and decided to go for a PhD, spending about 10 years here, can be forced to abandon everything in matters of days. A tricky situation, yet completely overshadowed by the tariff news and ignored by the masses.
(I'm all for treating DUIs seriously, but using a one time offense as justification for such serious consequences seems over the top to me; obviously the lack of transparency and due process make the whole thing much more troubling as well.)
Is that a fair sample. Foreigners tend to visit the best bits of anywhere and China is a very big and varied country.
> The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable.
Also dystopian as it enables government control and monitoring. In many ways China is ahead in things I do not want to happen.
To be fair, it's usually easier to build state of the art, when you start from scratch. Western countries have a big legacy they build decades ago, which has to be used and maintained for decades to justify the investment.
And as a visitor, it's also more likely to only see the fancy parts, and not be confronted with the dark parts, especially when you have a strong leader who's dedicated goal is to sell a positive view of the country.
I also notice you're mentioning SF without mentioning that this city - like so many others - has been driven into the ground by decades of mismanagement by so-called "democrats". California is on a road to nowhere while building high-speed trains to nowhere, the streets in SF only get cleaned up when the leader of the Chinese Communist party comes to visit, the place is a dump and people are leaving it in droves. It wasn't when I was there for the first time in 1979 - people on roller skates, some left-over hippies, disco really made it - but the last time I visited - 2003, for the IETF conference - the signs were already clearly visible and I was warned that the hostel I stayed in in the Tenderloin district was 'not in a safe area' and that I should not walk around the city (which I did anyway, I'm stubborn).
California should kick the "democrats" to the curb for a while, try to repair the damage they did to the place and its reputation and maybe, just maybe the "Golden State" can once again become the place of dreams it once used to be. This is not so much an endorsement of Republicans but simply a statement of fact, a single-party system nearly always leads to decline. To slightly paraphrase MC5: Kick Out The Dems! [1]
I will just say this: the issues with the US are beyond *partisan* politics. In my opinion, it is a social problem much deeper than what is shown on TVs and discussed in election campaigns. Changing the party in power will not change the situation. Until the US acknowledged these matters, it will continue on the same path it has been.
Most large US cities have, "bad neighborhoods." It's not specific to blue states.
The US cities with top highest violent crime rates are more likely to be in red states:
https://www.police1.com/community-policing/articles/where-ar...
I am no fan of the two-party system but your view of the parties is almost 20 years out-of-date and is ignoring some pretty glaring issues.
Red states with blue cities, an important distinction. I looked it up - https://ballotpedia.org is a good place to start - and would be interested to see this disproven.
In what way is my view of the parties out of date?
I like interacting with nature, people more than swiping in an app.
I like old tramways in Lisbon more than flying taxis. I like small Greek buildings and even baroque and neoclassical architecture more than glass and metal buildings and skyscrapers.
Personally I think Singapore is the most futuristic city-state in the world.
Sorry, I should have been more clear, this is what I was referencing. I have been to SF recently and would agree it's not hard to make a lot of cities look better in comparison.
You have to visit a top tier East Asian city to understand just how good they have these things running, safe, clean, reliable, always on time. Like, it's amazing. Uncomprable to anything I've experienced in any major US city.
I think if a New Yorker went to Tokyo they'd be amazed how far ahead they're public transport is.
There are also health benefits to using public transport which I think we will see play out with self-driving, people will just become slobs when a car comes to their door, picks them up and drops them at the next door. Using a subway is actually a bit of healthy exercise.
It used to be the other way round.
I hope America goes back to its previous innovation cycle
That said, maybe they can optimize for size:volume. it would actually be pretty good to displace delivery network from ground level. Maybe even straight to 40th storey balcony / living room delivery sometime.