I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They're Here | Hacker News Reader

I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They're Here

wsj.com

34 pointsthm59 comments

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there's basically no chance that flying cars become a meaning part of life in America in my lifetime (I just turned 40).

Reminds me of how Popular Mechanics use to alternate between Flying Cars and return of the Blimps issues.

Scott is a sport pilot enthusiast and approached the evaluation from that perspective. I don't think there are many pilots, myself included, that believe we are on the verge of flying cars for mass transportation. They are expensive to purchase, maintain and impractical for many reasons.

I agree. In the US I have seen simple regional public transportation projects take decades and they are still not complete. A single on/off ramp (literally a quarter mile of road) will take 5 years.

There is just no way a public flying car infrastructure can be built in the US in the next 30-50 years you are alive.

Hope China floods the markets with cheap DIY drones big enough for people that will be impossible to regulate. A bit like e-bikes heh.

Isn't the point of flying cars that they don't need roads?

Airplanes don't need roads either, but airports do a lot more than just provide hangars to store them and runways for them to take off and land. There's all kinds of systems to help planes avoid collisions too.

You might think it'll be very easy for flying cars to avoid crashing because they can just fly above and below each other, but that's also more directions for them to crash into each other from, more directions the drivers might have to rely on potentially faulty sensors where their vision is blocked. There might have to be invisible "lanes", maybe even with something like traffic lights, rather than having cars just flying every which way without external coordination.

We would need a lot of landing pads free of nearby hazards (trees, wires, antennas). Those pads generally can't just be added on to existing buildings: most high-rise buildings weren't designed to support the necessary weight, plus roofs are already full of other equipment.

Assuming appropriate sites can be found, there will also be a long permitting process to get construction approval. The latest eVTOL aircraft are quieter than conventional helicopters but still loud so anyone living and working nearby is going to complain. I'm sure they'll also raise environmental impact concerns in many areas because the noise will prevent the endangered yellow-footed salamander from laying eggs or whatever so working through the mandated mitigation process also takes years.

Unless you expect that most people would be fine with an unbounded number of flying cars (presumably at least as noisy as existing ones) without speed limits in their neighborhood, there's going to have to be some sort of infrastructure. Just because they won't literally be roads doesn't mean that the same types of social dynamics won't apply.

Presumably they would need roads in the sense of arbitrary "surfaces" on top of one another, so that you could shift lanes vertically as well as horizontally. And then you would need at least a visual indicator of which lane you're in, maybe even force feedback similar to bott's dots.

In your opinion, what's more likely to mainstream first - bipedal bots or eVTOL's (flying cars)?

Super late to this but I'd take bipedal bots. That's not to say I'm particularly bullish on that idea though. Seems like it might be simpler to build purpose built robots for specific tasks. They'd probably be faster.

I'm not entirely convinced. On one hand for bots you pretty much need AGI which Tesla is near solving. On another hand you need massive battery improvement for flights to move from toy to actually useful. But also there are more than 1 eVTOLS that already been certified for flight.

Bots would admittedly be far more useful in helping with tons of various tasks (I'm sure each task will be a subscription), but eVTOLs would unlock new capability.

I agree with you, but keep in mind that's probably what 40-year-olds in 1903 said about planes after hearing about the Wright brothers. Sometimes things do actually change.

If we assume this means "in the next 50 years", they wouldn't be totally wrong. You could make the case airplanes were only on the cusp of being "a meaning[ful] part of life in America" by 1953 – planes only overtook trains for domestic US travel in 1955, and 1957 for trans-Atlantic.

https://airandspace.si.edu/explore/stories/commercial-aviati...

This company must have some sort of marketing push underway... here's a video yesterday from Scott Manley that's basically the same thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncRFPd69rg

They're one of the few companies actually delivering vehicles to customers.

Which doesn't rebut the point at all.

I hope not! There are far too many idiots driving who don't pay attention. Certainly don't need to put them in the sky.

Imagine a simple scenario. Take your $260,000 Helix to the grocery store to pickup groceries. While you are in the store a mother fighting with her kids accidentally damages your Helix backing up the car. Are you going to hop into that thing even with what might be considered minor damage? Probably not because you would not know how to evaluate whether it is safe.

A car. You'd just hop in to determine if it is drivable.

Not just after an incident, but what sort of maintenance requirements and burden will there be now? Can there be an equivalent to the beater for flying cars?

No, there cannot (at least not legally). Aircraft are subject to strict maintenance and inspection requirements based on both calendar time and operating hours, and a certified mechanic must sign-off on the completed work. Out in rural areas there are a few private pilots who fly poorly maintained "beater" light airplanes and get away with it because authorities never show up at the local grass strip but this is never going to be tolerated in urban areas.

Flying vehicles are fundamentally a different beast. They need to be light and are therefore more fragile. Also my car engine quitting while driving is not necessarily a life threatening situation. When you're a thousand feet above the ground just about any failure can be life threatening.

So no I wouldn't think flying a beater around is a good idea. People generally get away with flying unsafe planes now because they fly over unpopulated areas. They only kill themselves. Start flying over populated areas and you can wipe out a kids soccer game.

This is more or less my concern too. Imagine if every road accident was now it's own miniature 9/11. No thanks

Flying cars in Miami would be nightmare fuel.

Sentence is two words too long.

I think this is a case where I simply don't know enough, but couldn't auto-pilot be a lot easier and safer when adding a new axis? A lot fewer things to run into in the air, and if you could just rise or fall a couple dozen feet to avoid an collision seems safer.

The big limitation of autopilots is that they can't handle emergencies. By their nature emergencies are unpredictable so programmers can't reliably code for emergency situation handling in advance. An experienced human pilot at least has a chance to figure out a solution by reasoning from first principles and reacting intuitively to novel situations. These new eVTOL aircraft have a certain amount of redundancy built in but realistically if anything goes seriously wrong they're just going to spin and crash (or maybe pop a recovery parachute if so equipped and within the flight envelope for those to work).

Autopilots also can't handle VHF voice comms (with a very narrow exception for the Garmin Autonomí system in certain situations) or perform "see and avoid" traffic management in VFR.

Flying FPV drone is ridiculously easy. I can't see these being any harder, other than road rules of course.

Sure, easy until something goes wrong. Then it gets really difficult really fast.

Not sure about the autopilot part (even planes autopilots follow a flight path). I'm not an expert either, but with roads, there are clear lanes and markings. And ability to generally see around you, and judge distance.

Is what sets the lanes in the air are traffic controllers and flight plans? We're already short on traffic controllers. And there are already lots of near-misses (and not near-misses) even with the heavy regulation and control. Can't imagine having it as mass personal transit driven manually. There'd need to be a mass central system that controls everything, and in that case, might as well just keep it commercial

The energy efficiency isn't great either on personal aircraft

not an expert, just shooting the crap

Yup, there's a bunch of Chinese startups building that rn. EHang [0] is one of the bigger ones.

[0] https://www.ehang.com/

If it's autopilot you could probably also channel the vehicles to specific routes such that they maintain a road like set of channels where they're flying so the rest of us can not worry about random flying cars zooming around our yards and playgrounds.

We already do this with planes which have corridors they fly along.

Not that one. There's zero usable payload, extremely limited range, VFR only, and it's only "legal" is as a Part 103 (ultralight) exception.

This is, essentially, an aviation hobby toy and not remotely practical for anyone even doing a short-hop urban commute as they would be banned in dense urban (class B,C, and D) airspace too.

So basically its legitimacy and novelty is based on a loop hole? Nonetheless a cool hobby project, and usually will rally people behind this concept and we might see some excitment there.

It's not a loop hole: this was an intentional move by Congress and the FAA. Ultralights have been a legal category for decades. The operating limits in terms of altitude, speed, weight, and airspace are strict enough that when one crashes it usually only kills the (expendable) pilot and there is minimal risk to innocent bystanders.

The Pivotal BlackFly and similar aircraft are merely toys for wealthy thrill-seekers. Which is fine and could make for a viable niche industry. There is no viable path yet for "flying cars" to see widespread transportation use.

The aircraft looked sleek in Scott Manley’s video, but knowing it has only 20 mile range with the top speed of 60 mph makes it a little more than a toy.

60 really isn't a problem at all. I will drive a 1,000 miles going 60, if I can do it in a straight line, it would still save a large amount of time. The problem is absolutely that 20mph range. Not useful at all.

Part 103 vehicles can't be operated over congested areas. FAA considers anything more than sparsely populated as congested. A single church in the middle of nowhere might be sparsely populated.

I'm not even sure you can take off or land in your own neighborhood. Is a neighborhood a settlement? shrug

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-103.15

See Simmons (2010 legal interpretation from the FAA chief legal counsel. https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/FAA000000000L...

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Also, no operations in common types of airspace: no bravo, charlie, or delta (or class e surface area). This may not be difficult seeing as they tend to exist over congested areas which must be avoided anyway.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-103.17

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Part 103 ultralights are vehicles, not aircraft, therefore not general aviation. Therefore, I'm not sure who will insure these operations. It may be the realm of self-insured.

I can’t help but think of Mitchell and Webb’s “Jetpacks”. https://youtu.be/vDIojhOkV4w?si=_P8uS5dl4vu1TarQ

Does 'flying car' have its own FAA designation? My assumption is that it would fall under the already existing aircraft types and require the same license to operate.

It is a part 103 ultralight, according to Scott Manley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncRFPd69rg?t=1110

Corrected link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncRFPd69rg&t=1110

If you want an even cheaper more yolo version there's the Jetson One: https://jetson.com/

This seems worse than the Dubai quadcopter taxis in general, but it would be cool in niche situations. I wonder if it can be adapted to land on water with inflatable landing gear.

We had flying cars for decades. They're called helicopters.

Having a flying car would be nice, however I think if I had the choice which went mainstream, I would prefer a jetpack.

What does this do different from a small helicopter? What problem does it solve a helicopter can't?

We're 10 years late.

The future in Back to the Future part 2 was 2015-10-21.

Now we need to get cracking on Mr. Fusion, so we can produce 1.21 GW of power with beer cans and egg cartons.

I wonder how loud these things are...

That's not a flying car, it's just a small airplane. For it to be a car it would need to be able to drive on roads. With, you know, wheels and stuff.

That's a previously unheard-of definition.

Not only is it heard of, it exists, and is also the first line of the Wikipedia article for "flying car".

> A flying car or roadable aircraft is a type of vehicle which can function both as a road vehicle and as an aircraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car

Often times the ground capability is limited but it means your landing strip doesn't need to be next to your hanger - you can drive it down the road a few miles (usually after folding the wings in).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-V_Liberty

It's a combination of the definitions for "flying" and "car".

I hope they stay away from my home -- it's already too noisy with machines of various kinds.

Imagine this with current paradigm of forced software updates. Just the other day a bunch of cars got bricked mid-drive because of one of these.

You leave the baker's, having picked up a loaf of bread for the next couple of days, look both ways before crossing the road, suddenly car drops on top of you from above, killing you instantly. If cars are the mode of transport for those who can't tolerate others' presence, flying cars are for those who can't tolerate others' existence.

No they're not.

unpaywalled link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/i-test-drove-a-flying-car...

Please no. Most idiots on the road can barely handle two dimensions, let alone a third.

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