Larry Page’s startups working on flying cars

There are a number of potential issues they solve:

1) Efficiency. A flying car can theoretically take a straight line to its destination instead of having to follow a complex road layout. It might be less efficient to fly per minute, but if you're flying less minutes, it could be a net gain.

2) Reduce congestion. How much fuel in a car is burnt in traffic? With flying cars, congestion will largely be a thing of the past, you have effectively unlimited road just by changing altitude.

3) Reduce urban sprawl. You can get rid of a lot of the roads that plaster the countryside. There will still need to be some obviously. But less.

4) Reduce national infrastructure costs. As above, you get rid of the roads, you don't need to maintain them anymore.

5) Convenience. You don't need a driveway or garage on your house when you can land on the roof ;)

All in all there are quite a few decent reasons for it. Just depends on whether you can beat that efficiency level.

It would be interesting to see if anyone has done calculations factoring in the cost savings from reducing sprawl and the miles of road that are maintained each year.

Cars and trucks are relegated to the 2d grid of streets. They consume an inordinate amount of space, and require that all travel occur in series down a road. When an accident occurs, this disrupts the flow of traffic down that path, and also frequently disrupts the flow of surrounding roads as drivers seek alternate routes around the problem. Roads wear down over time, and require maintenance to repair. Salt and chemicals placed on roads to melt ice and snow can have adverse impacts on the local water tables and have other negative ecological impacts.

Air-travel doesn't have those same constraints. Travel could be more point-to-point. An accident by one or two aircraft doesn't need to inhibit the travel of all other crafts flying in the general vicinity. Air space, while regulated and crowded in some urban areas, is largely under-utilized and expansive. It's also not a space that is shared with foot traffic, so pedestrians could reclaim some of the space currently allocated to roads since the volume of vehicular traffic would likely drop.

That's not to say that personal air travel doesn't introduce an entire set of new problems and challenges - it absolutely does, but there are many problems that cars and roads cause which air-travel avoids by-design.

Think of air-travel in the context of this cartoon:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/24948/to-a-pedestri...

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Yeah, ok Bloomberg.

Your first point makes sense, but if the flying cars are fully electric then I'm not sure how much of the work to make existing small aircraft totally reliable would be applicable to such a different machine.

I guess that leads on to the question of, why not start by making an electric self-maintaining self-flying Cessna?

I work around dozens of pilots. Most of them used to own, co-own, share, or lease a plane. Only a few of them actually have a plane they could go fly right now.

Maintenance, upkeep, costs, and regulations are obvious reasons why some would be deterred from owning and using a private plane.

But most everyone of the pilots said, if you want to go to the beach, in general, the best way to get there is a 6 to 8-hour drive in a minivan. The faster you go in the plane, the faster you burn fuel, and the more likely you'll have to land to refuel. Even if you don't refuel, loading, landing, unpacking, and rental cars are all unpleasant time sucks at a small airport in a small plane which saves you maybe 2 or 3 hours on your commute.