No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes on the Flying Car

damm, then we will get a subscription model flying car!

More damage for the occupants, but a box that falls out of the sky has a much lower chance of hitting something meaty than a box that moves fast in the same plane as all the others. The damage zone on the ground of a flying car would be point-shaped, that of a rolling car is line-shaped. Shifting risk from bystander to occupant, that's something I could get behind.

But that's all just theory given the prototype depicted: with open blade horizontal rotors like that I could never think of those things as anything but killing machines. Even if accidents never happen, the mental image is just too powerful.

There is a mention of Ehang in the article. However, I cannot put this more succinctly: The Ehang is an abortion of aviation.

Instead of going into the idiocy of an autonomously piloted passenger aircraft (which will never be legal under any sane civil aviation laws), I'm just going to go over why the current Ehang 184 doesn't make any sense.

The Ehang 184 is an octocopter, with two rotors stacked on top of each other. It looks like a quadcopter with single person pod in the middle. So far, so good. However, on every aircraft ever, there are red nav lights on the port side, and green navigation lights on the starboard side. The Ehang places green nav lights in the back, red in the front. This makes sense if it always flies sideways. There are no anti-collision lights on the top or bottom, and therefore there's no way to tell when it's safe to approach the aircraft. Keep in mind, that's just the lights. There's far more wrong with this aircraft.

The battery life is 23 minutes, and the FAA requires 15 minute reserve under VFR conditions. That leaves eight minutes of actual flying time round trip. Since the Ehang needs to get back to a charging point, you're always four minutes away from your destination. Since the speed is 100km/h, the maximum possible distance the ehang can fly is about three miles, less if you account for slowing down, speeding up, and landing. Just walk it at that point.

The mere mention of the Ehang 184 in the NYT piece deserves shame. It is not a product, it has no basis in reality, and its place in history is alongside the old-time stock footage of 18-winged planes collapsing in on themselves. It is an idea so supremely idiotic the inventors and marketers of this device should be shunned.

Is there any company that develops something similar to an ornithopter [0] ? I skimmed over the list in the article, but couldn't find anything. The wiki suggests a greater efficiency than other methods, which with a limited battery pack would play a role in extending range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter#Aerodynamics

TL;DR: rich people with big ego.