161–170 of 242 posts
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Long after they're blocked by swarms of delivery drones.
I'm skeptical about delivery drones for this reason. Between the noise, security concerns, and visual pollution it will be hard to implement mass adoption of UAV's for delivery.
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You're thinking too narrowly. - Solve traffic - Live in Santa Cruz, commute to SF - Buy a mansion in Modesto, commute to Palo Alto - The views! These will be VTOL, electric, autonomous air taxis, not road-drivable cars.
Do people really believe that flying cars would solve traffic? Now all the traffic is in the sky! And thanks for ruining everyone else's view with your cars. Not to mention flying cars would be extremely hazardous depending on the height. You'd pretty much be required to create specific airways and means of signaling at busy locations. Congratulations, you just created another layer of roads.
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Electric is a game changer for popular aviation. Why? Because aviation has (fortunately) very strict safety standards. So the aviation version of common car engines are vastly more expensive than their car counterparts. They also require expensive maintenance regularly. Electric engines are mostly maintenance-free, and the biggest point is, you can have any number of electrical engines on your aircraft - the common d…
People put common car engines on aircraft all the time. The problem is that "certified" aircraft engines are expensive due to that designation (think regulatory capture). There are several cheap auto-engine options for homebuilts. Maintenance can be done by the builder for homebuilts too. The costs are almost completely due to the small market size. I agree with you that electric motors are awesome (they're what I do…
Joby and Zee are using wings plus VTOL. They shut down the VTOL rotors for level flight.
The cusp of their argument is that several technologies are coming together to make VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) feasible within the next decade. VTOL aircrafts are theoretically much more energy efficient than helicopters, and a lot of the cost associated with planes is due to their low production volume. If a company like Uber started to use VTOL aircrafts, the price would rapidly decline to closer to what cars cost now, and the cost of a flight would be low enough that more than just the wealthy could use them.
A lot of the critical comments I see here are addressed the Uber paper ( https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf ) which is a really interesting read. The cusp of their argument is that several technologies are coming together to make VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) feasible within the next decade. VTOL aircrafts are theoretically much more energy efficient than helicopters, and a lot of the cost associated with planes…
Uber showed that they are not willing to comply public agency on regulation-related restrictions. VTOL vehicles, they are more dangerous than cars. Uber's attitude, when handling such technologies, make me scared.
How's the Ehang 184 coming along?[1] That's an electric flying car, essentially a big 8-prop drone, announced last June. They're targeting short-distance travel within big, crowded cities in China. China's 1% will be able to get across Beijing in 10 minutes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4nDFgVx2o
There's enough open source information laying around on the internet to figure out the power draw of the Ehang in flight and from there you can figure out roughly how much the batteries on it weigh (spoiler: it's many 10s of kilograms for the 23min flight time they claim [1]).
Don't forget that these batteries will degrade with time, especially in such a high-load performance regime. This will further limit your flight time until you replace them. On top of that, having 8 tiny props is always going to be less efficient than a fixed-wing or helicopter-like design.
If you're a Chinese billionaire, you don't care that your "flying car" has these limitations, but these same limitations (among many others) preclude the Ehang from becoming an actual practical method of transportation.
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^ This. Think about the capacity constraints during your typical commute. All those times you have ever been held up in traffic could be massively diminished thanks to increase short-hop flight commutes.
Why do you think the airspace won't have traffic? You want to end traffic with modern accessible tech? Build ten layer freeways.
Today only the Uber-rich can afford short haul flying. With a airtaxi/flying car scenario, just about anyone could fly across their metro area for some special occasion.
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You're thinking too narrowly. - Solve traffic - Live in Santa Cruz, commute to SF - Buy a mansion in Modesto, commute to Palo Alto - The views! These will be VTOL, electric, autonomous air taxis, not road-drivable cars.
> - Live in Santa Cruz, commute to SF Or we could be more ecologically and energy conscious...
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From the article: "This kind of design wouldn’t work with conventional aircraft engines because 10 engines would be way too heavy. But electric motors can be made extremely small and light, allowing even a car-size vehicle to have 10 of them."
But batteries are a significant source of weight.
You also can't put combustion engines in the end of small actuators, like it's on the article.