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People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?

This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.

As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.

> People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?

Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.

Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.

(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)

> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people

Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.

> If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.

We will see what happens the first time one of them crashes.

Obviously there are a lot of variables but helicopter and city bus crashes happen so we’ll have some idea what to expect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Hudson_River_helicopter_c...

https://abc7ny.com/post/mta-driver-injured-bus-crashes-store...

> Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.

... Eh? The very successful Nissan Leaf (for quite a long time the best-selling electric car in the world) came out the year after the Tesla Roadster. The Renault Zoe (again, quite successful) came out about a year after that, if you're really hung up on the 'west' thing.

> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else.

Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.

> Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations

Is that still true once you control for capacity? A modern single-line station is handling, what, 150 people alighting every 2.5 minutes? How many helipads would you need to match that?

> $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan

Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly. They might spend it occasionally for an urgent trip, but how often is that going to be to/from an airport? For someone making $50k any flights they're taking will have been planned and booked months in advance, they can't afford to fly spontaneously/last-minute. (And if 80% of the population did want to use it, would it even be possible to build enough enough helipads? There isn't room for anything like 80% of the population to park in Manhattan, and these things look to be bigger than cars and I don't see anyone putting them in a multi-storey garage).

> Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly

They don’t fly regularly. I picked that number because it puts $200 into the reasonable splurge bucket, and that’s the lowest income of a friend I know who has taken one more than once.

If $50k doesn’t do it, take it to $80k and still understand that covers quite a bit more than half of Manhattan. Plugging these services as top 0.1% is wrong—that’s private jets.

> They don’t fly regularly

Right, which is why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster. (They might splurge $200 occasionally to get home from a late night out or something, but this isn't serving that route). They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend. They're not cutting it close on the timing knowing they can always buy a replacement if they miss their flight. They probably don't even have precheck, which tells you how much saving 20 minutes the rare time they fly is worth to them. This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle.

> why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster

“Slightly” faster from where they live is like an hour.

> They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend

I’ve taken Blades quite a few times. This describes zero of their clients. It’s folks who want to fly out of EWR without having to deal with New Jersey’s infrastructure, those splurging and a very small number of regulars.

> This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle

Agree. But it can and does on occasion. That makes it categorically different from purely plutocratic services. Also, use $80k if that works better for the example. That’s half of New Yorkers and a commanding majority of Manhattan residents.

Helicopters and eVTOLs are relatively accessible in a city as rich as New York.

I live in NYC and make quite a bit more than $80k and would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport. JFK by car (when I'm in an emergency) is already $100 and I get irrationally angry at it. Not to mention I'd have to actually get to a helipad, which are only on river fronts, an basically no train goes to those either, so I'm still in a cab.

> would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport

Would you splurge $200 on anything? There are 8.6 million people in New York and 1.7 million in Manhattan. Some fraction of those can call this their cup of tea.

Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege. eVTOLs have lots of downsides that are worth debating. Only solving "problems for the 0.001%" is not one of them. That designation belongs to private jets.

I think many people reflexively assume that this in the same cost tier as a private jet. I wonder if it could eventually get to somewhere on the order of uber per mile, since a mile takes much less pilot time, and the maintenance requirements are presumably lower on these than on traditional single engine piston aircraft.

I'd absolutely splurge $200 on a lot of things (a date just the other day for instance) but there's many options at least as convenient, remembering you still have to get to the helipad, as this.

As a New Yorker I don't want these things with zero failure ability anywhere near me. At least a helicopter can autorotate.

> Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege.

Doesn't it? It feels like it to me, like that $70 coffee with gold flakes that was doing the rounds a year or two back - sure, it's technically an amount of money that a regular person could spend, but it's absolutely not a product for them.

People making $50K a year are not dropping $200 to save even 2 hours of time, not to mention 15 minutes. Even if they paid zero taxes $200 is an entire working persons day at $50K a year.