71–80 of 242 posts
I hope they fly themselves as well. Humans can barely manage to safely pilot a car in 2 dimensions. I don't want to think of the carnage that would result if we took existing traffic and moved it 10,000 feet up in the air. Every fender bender would become a multiple fatality.
Automatic flight is much easier than autonomous driving. Not much to run into up there :).
I hope they fly themselves as well. Humans can barely manage to safely pilot a car in 2 dimensions. I don't want to think of the carnage that would result if we took existing traffic and moved it 10,000 feet up in the air. Every fender bender would become a multiple fatality.
Automatic flight is much easier than autonomous driving. Not much to run into up there :).
So far. In a future where people commute in flying cars while delivery drones descend from some flying warehouse I'm not so sure this stays true.
The saving grace is probably that up there we don't have to accommodate legacy vehicles. We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.
I'm saying it now. Flying cars for the general population is just not going to happen until the repulsor lift is invented, and ubiquitous with all aircraft. Many, many years into the future. Long after those of us on HN are gone. There is just zero need for this right now, and is just silly nonsense. Work on making our ground systems 100% safe, efficient, and reliable first.
Why not? With self driving, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than autonomous cars. Any point in a 30 mile typical travel radius is a <15 minute flight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely it would be simpler than dealing with the complexity current '2d' autonomous car systems face? As long as you have designated drop zones, everything else becomes mathematically simpler.
But their entire path would require a drop zone. So in effect, there would be these long strips on the ground mirroring the flight paths of these flying cars. You might even run out of space on the ground for drop zones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely it would be simpler than dealing with the complexity current '2d' autonomous car systems face? As long as you have designated drop zones, everything else becomes mathematically simpler.
But their entire path would require a drop zone. So in effect, there would be these long strips on the ground mirroring the flight paths of these flying cars. You might even run out of space on the ground for drop zones.
Since ground-based cars will in all probability continue to be a thing, roads are not guaranteed to be empty, but are guaranteed to be plentiful and nearly everywhere. Autonomous cars can be signaled as some road strip is reserved for emergency landing, and within seconds they can vacate the road strip and block it from conventional vehicles (assuming a sufficient portion of ground vehicles becomes autonomous).
Do we actually want flying cars? They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity, they are probably going to be pretty noisy, falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode, ... Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the s…
Forget electric. That's just a gimmick that allows these companies to say "in five to ten years because batteries." Prove it. Make a gas powered one to prove your concept. The simplest flying machine is probably an autogyro. Automate that for point to point transport, show the automation, redundancy, and safety for urban use. Solve those real issues and then we can talk about fancy designs.
Why only 4, 8 or 12 rotors? Can a group of much smaller rotors replace the thrust a single bigger one produces? Would add a lot more redundancy and limit the costs.
Do we actually want flying cars? They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity, they are probably going to be pretty noisy, falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode, ... Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the s…
I certainly think "flying buses" should come before flying cars.