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Transportation

'Dozens' of Companies are Now Trying to Build Flying Cars (msn.com) 193

Posted by EditorDavid from the meet-George-Jetson dept.
The New York Times shares footage from a flying car's test flight in California — "a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas — essentially a private flying car for the rich — that could start selling this year." (You can read the text of the article here.)

"It may look like a strange beast, but it will change the way transportation happens," they're told by Marcus Leng, the Canadian inventor who designed the aircraft (which he named BlackFly): BlackFly is what is often called a flying car. Engineers and entrepreneurs like Mr. Leng have spent more than a decade nurturing this new breed of aircraft, electric vehicles that can take off and land without a runway. They believe these vehicles will be cheaper and safer than helicopters, providing practically anyone with the means of speeding above crowded streets. "Our dream is to free the world from traffic," said Sebastian Thrun, another engineer at the heart of this movement.

That dream, most experts agree, is a long way from reality. But the idea is gathering steam. Dozens of companies are now building these aircraft, and three recently agreed to go public in deals that value them as high as $6 billion. For years, people like Mr. Leng and Mr. Thrun have kept their prototypes hidden from the rest of the world — few people have seen them, much less flown in them — but they are now beginning to lift the curtain...

Others are building larger vehicles they hope to deploy as city air taxis as soon as 2024 — an Uber for the skies. Some are designing vehicles that can fly without a pilot. One of the air taxi companies, Kitty Hawk, is run by Mr. Thrun, the Stanford University computer science professor who founded Google's self-driving car project. He now says that autonomy will be far more powerful in the air than on the ground, and that it will enter our daily lives much sooner. "You can fly in a straight line and you don't have the massive weight or the stop-and-go of a car" on the ground, he said...

The next few years will be crucial to the industry as it transitions from what Silicon Valley is known for — building cutting-edge technology — to something much harder: the messy details of actually getting it into the world.
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'Dozens' of Companies are Now Trying to Build Flying Cars More

'Dozens' of Companies are Now Trying to Build Flying Cars

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  • What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:36PM (#61484616)

    "Our dream is to free the world from traffic," said Sebastian Thrun, another engineer at the heart of this movement.

    No, your dream is to shift traffic from the streets to the air, making accidents and traffic jams infinitely more dangerous.

    • Yeah. Still haven't seen any significant conversation about air traffic safety. Seems like an unspoken assumption that everyone will be naturally VFR aware and we will all just get along fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anonymous Coward

        most likely will be autonomous, autonomous flight is much simpler since it can be more easily regulated and mandated than autonomous land vehicles on public roads

        • Two things:

          - "autonomous" is not even being considered by most of the flying car start ups unless you mean simply that the flight controls can be let go of without the vehicle crashing and burning

          - we don't have the required autonomous flying technology to deploy widespread use of flying cars. It just isn't available and the development of the tech is hard. Very hard.

    • Some people don't understand the words "this doesn't scale" whether they apply to cars that cost $140k, juice squeezers with a $30/use subscription fee, or personal aircraft.

      Then there are the people who understand the words perfectly well, but understand that even better that there is a buck to be made selling the dream to people who have more money than brains along the particular dimension of interest.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well yes. And find some stupid rich people to drain money from.

    • The only way to free the world from traffic is to significantly reduce unnecessary travel.
      The single biggest cause of travel and thus traffic is commuting to work, and covid has shown us that a lot of this is unnecessary.

      If you eliminate unnecessary travel, and spread out necessary travel (ie try to avoid having lots of people going to the same place at the same time) then that's the best way to free the world from traffic right now.

      • Around here, the biggest problem is people making journeys off under two miles. Most of those do not need a car and so are unnecessary. Walk or cycle and be happier for it.

        • If you can live somewhere that most of your journeys are under two miles that's great. But there are still cases where vehicles are necessary, for instance transporting of goods. I usually walk when i can, and get deliveries for heavy/bulky items.

          There are also many cases where people are not able to live within 2 miles of their workplace, and thus require vehicular transport on a daily basis.

          • In a big city, you might not wanna live anywhere near where you work. Whether crime or because you like rural or suburban life where you drive everywhere for convenience.

            The long term solution is the same as the short term one: ever more energy, just not so polluting.

        • Unless both your friggin' knees have arthritis.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          Around here, the biggest problem is people making journeys off under two miles. Most of those do not need a car and so are unnecessary. Walk or cycle and be happier for it.

          I assume you either live in a city of 2+ million people, or you live in an area with low traffic. If most traffic is for journeys under two miles then you mostly only have traffic from people who live in a two mile radius. That isn't many people unless there are a lot of skyscrapers.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Seems more the recommended approach here is
        "you don't need to fix traffic jams if you can give wealthy people a way to avoid them".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          That seems to be the approach all around... Make driving increasingly expensive until only the super wealthy can still afford it.
          Then you've solved the traffic problems and significantly reduced emissions, at the expense of the quality of life for the vast majority.

      • "The only way to free the world from traffic is to significantly reduce unnecessary travel."

        What we learned from COVID is not that people would avoid unnecessary travel, but they would avoid unwanted travel. WFH people stopped commuting (which was a boon to those whose essential work required on-site presence) but they kept getting in the cars and driving to Starbucks instead of STFH and make their own coffee. Buncha' idiots.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          In some countries you can get stuff like Starbucks delivered very cheaply. Like in Japan they have "morning Mac" which is the special McDonalds breakfast menu, which is delivered for 300 yen (about $2.75). When you factor in driving, wear on your car, your time etc. it's a pretty good deal.

          The key is to have the restaurants mixed in with residences so that the deliver area covers more houses, rather than at some out-of-town mall. There used to be a Subway about 2 minutes walk from my house, but it closed du

          • It truely is a shame that the ‘corner store’ disappeared from residential USA. Need a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk? Get in your car and drive half an hour. Where it used to be just down the street. I get that it was driven out of profitability by big box stores and people doing all their shopping in one big carload trip, but it really is to bad. Part of its demise probably was also zoning laws for commercial/residential, and ‘nimby’ attitudes, because many people dont want to li

        • Stop listening to that crap. That was some bitter troll post. The future is more energy for everyone to do what they want. It just needs to be cleaner.

          "So the rich can avoid traffic", good god, how comically class warfare.

          "So the rich can avoid a horse pooping in front of them!", the same bitter guy 120 years ago.

    • Yeah. There are a lot of reasons why we have traffic. But one of them is too many people trying to go to the same place at the same time (concerts, sports events, work). How long does it take to land, deboard, and take off again? I don't see landing directly into vast parking lots as being very safe, with people walking around and whatnot. I think there will be rooftop helipads. And even with autonomous vehicles the congestion could be even worse than it is now with cars.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • These companies seek to replace this situation with robotic vehicles which will travel point-to-point, which reduces the opportunity for collision by 1) drastically reducing transit time, and 2) adding a third dimension for avoiding traffic.

        This entire passage is fantasy, especially 2. Planes are not given the opportunity to decide which "third dimension" to use, they're told which and collisions and near misses *still* occur. Now multiply that by a million.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Planes choose their own altitude all the time.

          Midair collisions are incredibly rare, particularly under air traffic control, which is the situation in which you don't get to choose your own altitude.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      What would insurance be like on these?

      For aircraft you need a pilot licence. Are they going to require a pilot licence for these flying cars? If not it seems like the insurance would be a lot higher, or they would need to be largely flown by autopilot with some very strong guarantees about its safety.

    • Like some other plans to "solve traffic", it only works if a small minority of people take it up, and it only works for them and does nothing for the ones left behind.. Musk's Boring tunnels also come to mind. Still, a wealth barrier always makes a good filter.

    • Computee control in the air will make it less dangerous. You can have an emergency chute as well as avoidance and a nav system. Tell it where to go instead of "driving" it.

  • These aren't flying cars (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:43PM (#61484626)
    they're air taxis for the very, very wealthy. It's going to suck hard when they have them too. They'll stop allowing us to maintain the roads since they don't need them. Well, even more so.

  • Market isn't clear (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:45PM (#61484634)
    Any sort of flying car will be quite noisy and blow a lot of air around ( a car's weight worth), so they will need special takeoff and landing zones roughly similar to helipads. Its not really clear how these will be different from electric helicopters (which presumably could be constructed). Helicopters use very large rotors because that is the most energy efficient way to generate thrust.

    If wheels are added to make them road-able, then that adds weight and reduces flight efficiency.

    I've heard it claimed hat helicopters are difficult to control but control technology is one thing that IS advancing very rapidly so that feels like a solvable problem. Difficult to imagine that the control problem can't be solved.

    So its not clear to me why these will have lower operating costs than helicopters ( or at least electric helicopters) which are expensive enough that their use is pretty limited - they are only used as commute vehicles for the extremely wealthy.

    Maybe that is a big enough market to be profitable, but I don't see these as transformational in any broad sense.

    • Maybe that is a big enough market to be profitable, but I don't see these as transformational in any broad sense.

      Work and business at home are more transformational in that they alleviate some of the need to moving things around in the first place (these vehicles domain) The rest as far as this class of vehicles is recreational.

    • Helicopters are usually pretty complex machines, which makes them expensive to build and operate (except perhaps the Kolibrie [wikipedia.org], a low sticker price but still expensive to fly. I've seen one of these up close and it's almost hilarious in simplicity). Controlling them doesn't have to be an issue anymore; you can already buy control systems for model helicopters that make them as easy to fly as quadcopter drones. But maintaining them still is murder on your pocketbook.

      These flying cars should be reasonabl

      • These flying cars should be reasonably cheap to build: electric motors are powerful and very reliable these days

        The TL:DR...
        The problem is that batteries are not all that energy dense. The best batteries on the market have 1/100th the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels. That's two orders of magnitude. We can get electric aircraft airborne, that's not a problem. The problem is getting any meaningful range. A problem not easily solved.

        The long story...
        Everything we consider a battery today suck at energy density, they can't compare to hydrocarbon fuels. Air breathing batteries, which are not really a battery any

    • I've heard it claimed hat helicopters are difficult to control but control technology is one thing that IS advancing very rapidly so that feels like a solvable problem. Difficult to imagine that the control problem can't be solved.

      It was authoritatively solved before 2004 for the RAH-66 'Comanche' attack/scout helicopter, which has a "hands off" control system. If you take your hands off the controls, the aircraft will come to a relative stop and maintain altitude. The whole thing is flown by wire. They shitcanned the project in favor of drones.

      But it's much, much easier to control a multicopter, and that job can now be done by literally a few dollars in hardware at retail costs. It's hard to imagine that doing it even properly and s

  • Not flying cars (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:50PM (#61484648)

    They all fail to be reasonable cars. These are basically "human transport drones". The challenge will be to get them autonomous enough, because most humans are not able to pilot such a thing and the others would not invest the time needed to learn.

    • I dont want people flying them, that will be a bad idea

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I agree. But this has all sorts of implications and also causes a lot of problems. For example, no human pilot means no way to talk to the current ATC system.

      • I dont want people flying them, that will be a bad idea

        An autonomous flying car is a bad idea. We already seen examples of terrorists using aircraft as weapons, mass produced autonomous aircraft capable of carrying a half ton or more of cargo would be immediately used as a guided missile.

        Guided missiles already exist, but their production and trade are restricted in any nation with a functioning and sane government. Unguided rockets are cheap and easy enough to produce, and if there is a functioning and sane government in charge their production and trade is

    • Re:Not flying cars (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @11:17PM (#61484700) Homepage Journal

      I think the idea is not that they will do the same things a car does, but that they address some of the same needs cars do for providing personal mobility. The problem I see is not getting the things themselves to work, but getting the systems that would have to exist *around* an entire fleet of flying car/drones to work.

      The piloting software for the first examples of these things is bound to be simpler than autonomous ground cars, because of the Big Sky Theory [wikipedia.org]. If the thing can take off and land vertically and make its way to designated altitude and heading, it should be relatively simple, provided it doesn't have to worry about anyone else.

      There's something like 200,000 light planes in the US, but most of those spend most days on the ground, and when they do fly they fly between airfields, which are extensive facilities designed to accommodate air traffic. And if you operated these "flying cars" the same way it's probably not so far-fetched. Maybe even to get you from helipad to helipad; that's not hard to imagine. But trying to use them like cars -- endpoint to endpoint transportation ... it's hard to see how you'd make that work.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        True. You still need an ATC variant for these and vehicle-to-vehicle communication that works. And given that the other system has evolved over a long time and is decidedly not ready to include robotic participants, that is a tall order.

  • Don't the rich already have private flying vehicles?
    Last i checked private jets were a thing, as are private helicopters and private light aircraft.

  • Most if not nearly all of them are building glorified helicopters. Except for Terrafugia and very very few others, the vehicles are not drivable on any roads. If itâ(TM)s a flying car it better be drivable on a highway legally (without extensive manual disassembly.)

    • If you can't just land (or take off) and go without having to do anything manually it's not a flying car, it's something else. Probably a roadable airplane. Several of these have been produced by hobbyists. Literally none of them would be practical as a product; they're not good cars, and they're not good planes.

      The whole idea of making a flying car is silly. It just don't make no sense.

  • Money in developing without delivering (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @11:20PM (#61484704)
    All the "for the rich" comments. So many things started out for "the rich" like automobiles, air travel, or ABS only in expensive cars. People will still whine about something being too expensive and say nothing about the early adopters who funded the development and subsequent price reductions.

    Which beings up development. I agree with others that nothing in this article would be considered a flying car. Small personal aircraft maybe. Like autonomous vehicles, there are people making a fair bit of money "developing" these things without actually delivering. Makes me think of companies working for decades working on a cure for cancer. They made a nice living, but don't usually deliver a cure for cancer.
    I'm grateful for people throwing money at these companies. While maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually something could come of all of this. Wrapping up the rich people bit, I hope it's rich people investing in these companies and not someone expecting massive profits to carry them through their retirement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Helicopters have been around for 80+ years with passenger service helicopters for 70+ years. If they were going to have a cheap mass market option then that would likely have happened already. And helicopters have a nearly 100x higher fatality rate. And their carbon footprint stinks, which would likely be true for any flying vehicles for decades to come.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Do we want flying cars to be mass market though?

      They are a lot less efficient than ground cars. Even if they could be operated safely and on 100% renewable energy that would be a hell of an extra load on the system for not a huge amount of benefit.

      Most of the problems that flying cars solve can be fixed with better planning and more people working from home.

    • A 'flying car' will always use more energy to move a given distance than a terrestrial one. It will always be less safe as weather worsens. It will always be more restricted in where it can land in built-up areas. It will always be less safe in the case of minor failures, and even most major ones.

      These new human-scale drones are just helicopters for the merely wealthy instead of the rich, because their cost will always be greater than you can justify compared to a regular car.

    • So many things started out for "the rich" like automobiles, air travel, or ABS only in expensive cars. People will still whine about something being too expensive and say nothing about the early adopters who funded the development and subsequent price reductions.

      Unlike roads cars and aircraft when they were invented, the things this article is about are not a radical new form of transport. Helicopters and light personal aircraft have been around a long tim and being electric is not a radical change as far as usage is concerned. But light aircraft and helicopters remain far out of the reach of the vast majority of the population and will stay that way. Where I live (a G7 nation) young people are increasingly less able to afford even road cars.

  • helicopter upgrades (Score:3)

    by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @11:26PM (#61484712)
    These will ultimately replace helicopters, because the maintenance on electric motors is much cheaper than large gas engines. But, from a safety standpoint, there is little difference. A 100 kW propeller is pretty much just as deadly as a 1000-hp one, and there will be at least 4 of them on an electric copter. Perhaps if you have 6 or more you have enough redundancy to survive the loss of a rotor?

  • We haven't got the battery capacity for that yet.

    And in a few years we have to stop using fossil fuels.

  • Nothing new here (Score:3)

    by taustin ( 171655 ) on Sunday June 13, 2021 @11:49PM (#61484770) Homepage Journal

    Including the business plan.

    Flying cars have been around for over a hundred years [autofoundry.com]. The first design was by Glenn Curtis, who built a prototype in 1917. A few have even reached commercial production over the decades. And most of what's being talked about today, are not, in fact, "flying cars," which can fly or be driven on the highway, they are planes or helicopters, with no road driving functions (and none possible, under current highway safety standards, because the practical weight restrictions on airplanes make it impossible to meet those standards).

    All have been, and will continue to be, expensive toys for rich people. And anybody who says different is unlikely to ever have anything to sell other than stock certificates.

    • Flying cars have been around for over a hundred years. The first design was by Glenn Curtis, who built a prototype in 1917.

      Except that was never either a flying car nor a roadable aeroplane. It was just a plane with a car body, since you couldn't stow/remove the wings, and it therefore couldn't operate on a road.

  • not suitable for rush hour . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Monday June 14, 2021 @12:03AM (#61484780)

    In a crowded environment, cars have certain advantages. While they can't go up and down gracefully, they can accelerate, stop and turn quite abruptly, unlike flying machines.

    It is to be assumed that flight over populated areas would be managed by a central computer system to avoid collisions. These flying blobs with various characteristics of mass, power, agility and remaining flight time would be difficult to manage safely. Sort of like herding cats. Rush hour in the big city may seem unwieldy but with flying craft it would be quite unmanageable.

    On the other hand, such flying craft in a rural area would be hard pressed to prove worthy of their cost. Herding cows? Spraying insecticides? Taking the kids to school?

    • While they can't go up and down gracefully, they can accelerate, stop and turn quite abruptly, unlike flying machines.

      Also, they and their passengers, can survive minor crashes. You might survive the fender bender in the air but the coming to a halt will kill you.

  • Have you ever tried to get a permit for a drone that weighs 5lbs? I can only imagine the red tape to get one of these off the ground.

    New line from the FAA: "If you thought a small drone would bring down a plane, just imagine a two ton soccer fly-van."

    As much as I'd love to have flying cars, there is no way in hell that the FAA is going to allow flying anything without the kind of licenses that most folks could never get.

    --
    I'm a dreamer. I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I

  • Thrun and Done (Score:5, Informative)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Monday June 14, 2021 @12:23AM (#61484808) Homepage

    IMO Sebastion Thrun is a poor-man's Elon Musk wannabe, with an extensive track record of claims to world-changing hype, and a failure to date to deliver on any of them.

    Among his projects while leading Google X, leaving in 2012 [cnbc.com]:
    - Google Self-Driving Car Project [wikipedia.org]: Couldn't execute, promises long delayed ("In 2012, Brin stated that Google Self-Driving cars would be available for the general public in 2017. In 2014, this schedule was updated by project director Chris Urmson to indicate a possible release from 2017 to 2020.", Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
    - Project Loon [wikipedia.org] to provide internet by hot-air balloons, announced in Jan 2021 it would shut down with no success.
    - Google Glass [wikipedia.org], which was discontinued from public availability in 2015.

    Also:
    - UDacity [wikipedia.org], which was initially claimed would put all brick-and-mortar universities out of business, and is now a site for little-in-demand certifications for niche corporate products. (Consider this review [madmath.com] of one of Thrun's half-assed courses, previously noted on Slashdot [slashdot.org].)

    So if S. Thrun is once again claiming he'll revolutionize the world next year or whatever with a "dream is to free the world from traffic"... well, it's simply a bad bet.

  • Do they accept crypto as payment?

  • ... free the world from traffic ...

    Literally, that means no travel. No traffic-jams means keeping the number of vehicles/vessels much less than available travel space. That means only the taxi industry has flying cars. Taxis having dedicated lanes means owning a road vehicle is less attractive. Democratization of air lanes means cities consume more resources to 'save' time and crashes become more dangerous to everyone.

    In the beginning, this will be for the wealthy but everyone having a flying car puts urban sprawl and its pollution, in

  • so what are you gonna do with all that noise? You know that magnetic roads and "cars" are the future, right? Oh except it can never happen because we're not gonna exhaust the earth's entire supply of magnets for insane bullshit such as this.. Hey, what about multi-level roads? Crazy thought huh?...

  • 1. Flying cars will always be transportation for the few, not the many. Any utopian vision stating that the future means flying cars for everyone is misleading. Thatâ(TM)s not to say that I am against flying cars, but Im also not naive enough to buy into the grandiose visions. However, this also works to the advantage of flying cars infrastructure legislation, because the ones who have the most influence are the ones who stand to gain the most utility from flying cars.

    2. The winners of the flying car c

  • Good luck with that (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Monday June 14, 2021 @04:14AM (#61485134)
    Good luck. Moller has been trying to build a Skycar for centuries now and still hasn't been able to do it.

  • Will be the new headlines in your local paper.

  • free world from ALL traffic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by khqjdrvrtyq ( 7682478 ) on Monday June 14, 2021 @06:43AM (#61485352)

    "Our dream is to free the world from traffic,"

    --> if it's true (which is not (*) ), then work on how to kill the need for unwanted travel and inefficient travels. Think home-work, think public transports, think living near workplace.

    Think society.

    Think.

    (*) obvisouly your dream is to make money selling flying cars)

  • The NYT wants to be the provider of news to all, but wants all to pay, when they never did before. Meanwhile they want to play journalists without caring about facts, like when they promoted their anti-tesla fraud writer to editor. But they lack credibility.

    Who's paying for this shit?

  • This is a bit like Leonardo trying to come up with a method to transmit images over long distances - while it was theoretically possible to do so with the means available to him at the time, without electronics it would have been an incredible slow and impractical system. We are little better in the flying car department: we have the technology to manufacture light planes with folding wings, pseudo-helicopters and self-styled drones. Flying cars, as in Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Star Wars, etc.? Not e

  • While getting a lift home with a friend, we got stuck in traffic. Looking at the automatic gear shift, I pointed out that what you really want in such a situation is an UP gear. Just lift off by a few meters, and pootle around the corner to get out of the traffic jam. Regardless of technical feasibility, this modest ambition is fraught with difficulty. Everyone in the traffic jam will put their car in UP, and then we have a 3D traffic jam instead of a 2D one.

    There is a more serious point that traffic tends

  • The amount of energy to keep a vehicle with payload in the air far exceeds that of a ground vehicle so if you think we have an energy shortage now, just wait till this becomes available to the hoi polloi.

  • "it will change the way transportation happens" (Score:3)

    by thomn8r ( 635504 ) on Monday June 14, 2021 @10:57AM (#61486208)
    That's what they said about the Segway

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