We should just bury the idea of replacing ground cars with their flying counterparts. Not that it is a bad idea to develop electric VTOL vehicle, on the contrary, but ultimately they are going to replace the existing flying fleet: helicopters and planes.
Moving people around cities is much more safe and efficient using trains, buses, taxis and bicycles. Moving people a bit less wouldn't hurt too, with more vertical development, more remote-working, next-door delivery and mixed-use zoning.
I think you're neglecting to think about moving people around in rural and or remote areas. Where I grew up (eastern NC) the ability to travel as-the-crow-flies would massively cut down on time to get places, many roads take 30-45 miles of driving to go what might be 15 miles in the air.
In that kind of area, there's not the population density to support any kind of mass transit (or even really taxis) and the distances are too far for biking to be practical. Readily available electric VTOL would revolutionize rural America. Not much to worry about in terms of air congestion, either.
Indeed, Alaska has this problem and worse. The region relies heavily on seaplanes and short-take-off-and-landing aircraft for logistics. These eVTOL aircraft would be great in Alaska and especially in places without lakes. Places without a lot of flat area for landing, places like Papua New Guinea, have no good options at all right now, so these VTOL aircraft will be transformative.
It’s not that difficult to learn how to fly a helicopter, you only need 20h with instructor before the first solo flight. While that’s just the beginning it shows getting the basic controls down is not the problem. Thus, these VTOL aircraft are only going to be game changers if they are vastly cheaper, which seems unlikely.
The real issue is unit sales being so low. The R22 is a popular and ‘cheap’ helicopter ranking #8 in total sales, but it’s sold less than 5,000 units worldwide over 40 years.
PS: Fixed wing aircraft are popular because they have a huge range of inherent advantages. VTOL sounds great, but the downsides are enormous.
VTOL share most of those advantages of winged aircraft. The reason eVTOL may well be cheaper is that they have a lot fewer moving parts than a helicopter (and much lower vibration, plus using cheaper, lower-maintenance electric motors instead of turbine engines) and much less (and cheaper) fuel. But it'll take good designs. The Lilium one seems non-optimal compared to the Heaviside.
And don't rule out eSTOL. I think we'll see more of that.
Helicopters have an operating cost per hour an order of magnitude higher than a comparable payload conventional aircraft. The purchase price per payload capacity is also nearly an order of magnitude different. It's not the operator cost that determines the difference in price between helicopters and CTOL.
Helicopters are VTOL, I don’t know what you think it means but it’s just ‘Vertical Take-Off and Landing”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL “This classification can include a variety of types of aircraft including fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters and other aircraft with powered rotors, such as cyclogyros/cyclocopters and tiltrotors.”
Similarly, an electric helicopter would qualify as eVTOL. People generally aim for something more efficient in flight, but that’s a separate question.
It's hard to claim they're cheaper when they have a fraction of the range of gas helicopters. It's apples to oranges, the flying cars now are equivalent to electric golf carts in performance.
But they last forever. For instance, there are still lots of single engine Piper Cubs (popular in Alaska for STOL capability) from the 1940s maintained, in use, and for sale:
You're right, they last forever, and so the market for new aircraft is tiny. Really a vicious circle: high costs lead to low volume leads to high costs.
I guess the article is actually about taxis specifically, but if the technology exists, they could definitely be sold as personal vehicles for travel along paths that are very long by road, but very short by air. Making rural less... rural, if that makes sense.
The market is probably there if someone could pull off a 1-2 seat VTOL that had maybe a 60 mile range.
I can't see such a vehicle being any cheaper or requiring fewer licences to operate than a helicopter. And helicopters are already available if travelling 20-30 miles in a straight line is a problem you need to fix.
Helicopters are much harder to fly than any of the flying cars in development. To become licensed for one, you're looking at spending around $20,000 in instruction and flying time. That's why so many helo pilots are ex military. Flying cars also put more emphasis on the noise reduction. Both of these priorities give them greatly reduced performance (speed and range) relative to conventional helicopters.
A helicopter is enormously complex mechanically, hard to operate, and either failure prone (piston engine) or expensive (turbine).
Sure an electric VTOL could be cheaper to operate.
You may be right, but I don't foresee the pilot being allowed to control the vehicle. I imagine governments creating laws before long that would require all drone type cars to use GPS, take off and land from designated areas and would not permit manual control unless you meet some criteria.
In which case unfortunately, again, I can only imagine it would be 100x easier to just automate a helicopter rather than make a "flying car"(whatever that means) and then automate it.
One imagines a similar middlebrow dismissal lobbed at those flying camera drones that started selling for personal use about ten or fifteen years ago... We already had UAVs; why would anyone think multiple tiny electric rotors were better?
I don’t know about the legal or other regulatory logistics cost of operating a helicopter, but the physical maintenance requirements for helicopters are likely far far higher than a potential electric vtol vehicle.
Why? Imagine a vehicle that in practicality performs the exact same job as a helicopter, has the same or actually worse failure modes than helicopters(helicopters can at least autorotate, most proposed "flying cars" can neither glide nor autorotate) and now tell me why would such a vehicle have any lower maintenance requirements? Sure it might use an electric motor instead of an engine, but surely safety would require the exact same maintenance regimen as an actual helicopter. This is not going to be a car that you can bring for an inspection once per year, pay £30, change some oil, cabin air filter and be done. It's going to be as costly as any other air-worthy machine to own, in which case any kind of comparisons to a personal car are frankly out of the window, and anyone who thinks they could build a business around one could build a business right now using existing machines. That's not to say that innovation shouldn't happen, quite the contrary - but the whole talk of "flying cars" for your Joe Shmoe is just a pipe dream.
Just getting rid of metal structural components would be a huge boost, that's why the Cabri G2 has zero life limited parts while the R22 has... many. The state of civil rotorcraft is analogous to that of commercial jets 25 years ago. All metal parts, little to no computerization. This isn't inherent to flying cars vs. conventional helicopter configurations, just due to the extremely risk-averse nature of the rotary-wing industry. Helicopters today are very under-optimized but still work pretty well. Think of how shitty old cars were in mileage and maintenance, but still got the job done, while new cars typically last over 100,000 miles.
Just to be clear, the VTOL in this article appears to be a light-sport aircraft (LSA) with a canard wing configuration. I assume it can glide like a normal LSA, though I won't swear to it. It is not an oversized quad-copter.
That said, if it is an LSA, at least in the US, it would have to meet the normal LSA or E-LSA regulations. Including the service schedule, which is less onerous and non-LSA general aviation, but still far more than a car.
They are mechanically simpler, but aerodynamically and electrically vastly more complex. These designs are only possibly due to modern engineering, otherwise they would have been invented before the helicopter.
The flying car designs I've seen have no true redundancies. They look like they would be dangerously unstable if they tried to run on fewer than all motors.
The Volocopter has 18 rotors (fixed, electric motor, with 1 degree of freedom - doesn’t get much simpler) attached to 9 battery packs, and at least 4 can fail (even more when they are “nicely” distributed) and it's still controllable and landable. And they could still throw in a ballistic rescue parachute.
Unless of course the power supply fails, in which case we're back to the point I brought up earlier - you have neither autorotation nor gliding to fall back on, the vehicle just falls out of the sky like a brick - the parachute would help but I'm not sure how feasible that is.
That’s a really interesting observation. Especially when it seems like all the automakers designs on selling subscriptions to an electric car on-demand fleet seems nonsensical for rural areas.
I mean, does anyone actually think flying vehicles will ever seriously replace ground transport? Flying will always be more expensive energy-wise than rolling along the ground; it will always have more dangerous failure modes; it will always require larger and more complex machinery, and it will always be more vulnerable to weather. I don't see any of this changing 5, 50 or 500 years in the future.
I'm with you in that I seriously doubt the idea can be made practical anytime soon. However, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed.
If the trip is much shorter in the air, it may bring the energy consumption closer to ground travel, but even then if we're talking electric energy, renewables are set to make that so cheap it doesn't matter compared to other factors like convenience (it's already that cheap, and dropping every year.)
Commercial air travel is far safer than most forms of ground transport , so it's at least possible that personal air transport could one day be safer than driving.
The big thing really is the advancements in materials science and energy storage density. I don't think we're there yet. But in the next 50 years, very likely in my opinion.
The one thing that may not be fixable is the noise. But this is primarily important for rural living. Air taxis could pick you up and drop you at the subway station outside the city, where the nose won't be that big of a concern.
This is correct. I find this excerpt sobering when looking at stats for private planes.
"""
Doing the math
In other words, take these comparisons with a grain of salt: In 2013, traffic accidents killed 32,719 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The fatality rate was 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled. Assuming an average vehicle speed of 50 miles per hour (a big assumption), the fatality rate for automobiles translates to 1.1 per every 2 million hours.
Taking the preliminary 2013 fatality rate in general aviation of 1.05 fatalities for every 100,000 hours of flight time and scaling it up to 2 million hours gives a comparison rate of 21 general aviation fatalities per every 2 million hours. This suggests that stepping on a private plane is about 19 times more dangerous than getting into the family sedan.
"""
renewable energy sources combined with electrically driven transportation never meant we would do less travel or use less energy over all. it means what all break through events in power generation and efficiency meant, more of it for more uses and more people.
clean easily obtainable energy is going to lead to an explosion travel and who knows what forms it will take
That would be true if cities didn't adapt to the capabilities of ubiquitous flying vehicles.
Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits. It means less environmental impact, less distance for people to travel, more efficient energy usage, and probably a ton more.
Imagine New York City with landing pads not just on every rooftop, but every few stories spiraling around the outside of the building. People could live without ever needing to travel to the ground level.
> Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits
While it's a popular image in near-future scifi that doesn't look too costly at details, flying taxis with any current VTOL technology don't plausibly enable this, AFAIK, because while they can fly over cities easily, close proximity to solid vertical surfaces substantially disrupts the stability and effectiveness of VTOL systems.
That's why helipads tend to be either on top of or a distance from buildings now; even with a smaller number of VTOL aircraft, pads aren't at those places because it's the most convenient place for them, but because it's the only safe place.
I think that has less to do with strange aerodynamics and more to do with the deadly whirling blades interacting poorly with the solid vertical surfaces if there happens to be, say, a gust of wind. A ducted-fan based system would be much safer, and could work in a constrained urban environment.
Since we're imagining things, how about a network of skybridges between the skyscrapers, perhaps combined with elevator-like automated people movers? To me, that sounds more viable than flying cars in a dense city.
Curious to know about the environmental impact. Does anything that fly spend more fuel to stay above ground compared to an object that rolls on the ground? Will it cause more global warming if successful and adopted widely?
I'm not sure why autonomous cars won't solve traffic someday.
Traffic causing problems like people blocking intersections, not moving when the light is green, or improperly merging, won't happen anymore.
Cars will be able to talk to each other and set up optimal routes. They'll be able to more efficiently match up users with carpools. I'm sure you can imagine more.
These things won't happen for a long time and definitely not with the first generation of truly autonomous cars. Once every car on the road is self driving though? Things will definitely change.
While autonomous cars might be able to reduce traffic, they cannot eliminate it entirely. There is a limit on the number of cars which can drive down a road in a certain amount of time. If more cars wish to use the road than capacity allows, then there will be traffic.
That can only be solved by increasing capacity, either with more lanes or more roads in the same direction, but this is typically not feasible.
