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Transportation

Xpeng Unveils a Flying Car That Also Drives on Roads - Plus a Bionic Horse (cnbc.com) 65

Posted by EditorDavid from the when-horses-fly dept.
"HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Inc., launched a new flying car on Sunday that it says can also drive on roads," reports CNBC (in a story shared by Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid ): The company says it plans for a rollout in 2024. The car is not commercially available right now. And HT Aero said the final design might change. HT Aero's vehicle will have a lightweight design and a rotor that folds away, the company said. That will allow the car to drive on roads and then fly once the rotors are expanded.

The vehicle will have a number of safety features including parachutes, the company said.
Elsewhere CNBC reports that Xpeng also launched a new charger for its electric cars. "The company says that with just five minutes of charging with the new charger, the car's battery will have a range of 200 kilometers [123 miles]." And Xpeng also makes an assisted-driving system, Bloomberg notes, and "will also partner with others to explore robo-taxi operations starting from the second half of next year."

And in addition, Bloomberg adds, the company also unveiled its prototype for a ridable robot horse, "equipped with bionic senses and multi-mode recognition technologies."
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Xpeng Unveils a Flying Car That Also Drives on Roads - Plus a Bionic Horse More

Xpeng Unveils a Flying Car That Also Drives on Roads - Plus a Bionic Horse

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  • Don't all "flying cars"... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...by default drive on roads, and as their primary use. Otherwise it's an aircraft.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Flying cars have been around for over a century. The first one was designed by Glenn Curtis in 1917.

      Some have even gone into production.

      They will never be anything more than toys for rich people, because they have all the drawbacks of an airplane and all the drawbacks of a car, and all the expense of both, plus you need both a driver's and pilot's license (and the latter requires regular medical exams, and mental skills a lot of people can't muster).

    • Yes, that's how you would think it would be, but in the last few years some electric vertical takeoff vehicles (e-VTOLs) have been running around claiming they are flying cars when they can only do point-to-point air taxi no better (actually in many aspects worse) than a helicopter.
      Worse, many blogs and "journalists" have been buying their expanded definition of flying "car" that cannot be driven on any road. Heck they can't even taxi on a runway.
      References of fake "flying cars" that cannot be driven on roa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        The Lilium concept is the only thing I'm following because it could actually work (as an air-taxi, and that's what they're branding it). The other two - at best they're flying motorcycles.

        • How is Lillium any better than a helicopter?

          • It has wings which helps with lift when it's at cruising altitude. That makes it more fuel-efficient and (hopefully) quieter between take-offs and landings. Probably has a higher top speed and greater range too. Also: a lot less complexity: no jet engine nor lots of nasty mechanical linkages, which will make this thing a lot cheaper to build and operate.

            • Lilium has eensy weensy wings. Gliding to an engine out landing with those will be pretty much a controlled crash at best, even on a prepared runway. It's also going to have a whole lot of drag with all those motor nacelles. Lilium does indeed have some attractive engineering points, but it suffers from the same problem most evtol planes do: it's an unholy mashup of a suboptimal airplane with a suboptimal multirotor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      ...by default drive on roads, and as their primary use. Otherwise it's an aircraft.

      No. It depends.

      There are cars that fly, and aircraft that drive on roads, though the latter are often referred to as "roadable aircraft".

      It depends if they start with a design that was for driving on roads and made it fly, or if they started with an aircraft design and made it drive on roads.

    • Not all cars drive on roads. Cable cars and railroad cars don't

  • that either Peng has no balls....or won't admit it if he does.

  • robot horse that will save the racing industry

  • I wanna start riding a robot horse to work! I wonder if I can get them to install a hitching post, though?

  • The main reason most people don't own "flying cars" (aka, airplanes) is that it's insanely expensive to own and maintain an airplane. I don't foresee that ever really changing, because the general public is never really going to be okay with flying jalopies falling from the sky every so often. Some things are just destined to always be expensive because they're resource and labor intensive to build and maintain, like housing.

    That's also not even getting into all the red tape the FAA makes you go through b

    • The main reason most people don't own "flying cars" (aka, airplanes) is that it's insanely expensive to own and maintain an airplane. I don't foresee that ever really changing, because the general public is never really going to be okay with flying jalopies falling from the sky every so often.

      Perhaps. But I think the idea/fantasy (in general, not what we see in this particular case) is that someday they will be fully automated, and that the user will not be required to know how to pilot it or maintain it. There would be a maintenance schedule that occurs where it "drives/flies home" for service to your designated service station down the road. They will be networked as they operate, so that every vehicle is keenly aware of its surroundings and other vehicles, and AI and predictive algorithms wil

  • Robot horse ? (Score:3)

    by mrclevesque ( 1413593 ) on Sunday October 24, 2021 @08:22PM (#61923327)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Unicorns are cool but Flying Donkeys are the masters of the universe.
    Would be a plus if it could also dive 100 feet and hop on one of them Elon rockets into outer space.

  • Here's a link to a video of the latest Xpeng flying car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • It seems too mechanically complicated, the foldable locking propeller blade in particular seems like an engineer's nightmare. Are there reliable and advanced enough materials and actuators to enable that sort of locking reliably without being weak?

      • Apart from a vehicle parachute, they also need to provide full body armor to all people standing around the thing. Apart from the safety issue with low slung rotors, the aerodynamic problem is that multiple rotors are less efficient than a single main rotor. So as soon as one starts to look at maximum range and wants to optimize a multirotor craft, it ends up looking like a regular single rotor helicopter.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      A video of a computer animation that doesn't show any of the details.

      Has anyone seen the actual car actually fly? Until we have a video of that, there's no news.

      • I can almost guarantee it doesn't end up looking anything like that picture in the article, assuming it ever gets built at all.

  • Two (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Wow... a whole two rotors. I'll definitely fly home using one if the other fails mid-flight. Take my money!

  • No wings, small rotors - any issue and that thing is a brick. I've just got to ask this too: if the thing is genuinely VTOL then how can you justify carting all the dead weight of road tires and miscellaneous compliance around on those tiny rotors and precious energy?

    • It has a parachute man. Do you guys read articles?

    • Mod up. Missing in this hairbrained concept, was A) Vehicle mass and B) Lifting thrust. Anything like that would have to be build like a solar endurance 'Car' that are really ultralight bicycle frames and a plastic shell. If the vehicle Take off weight including pilot and luggage was one ton then the rotors would have to be?
  • Cheap
    Safe
    Light

    There's a fundamental issue that has made flying cars unviable so far.

    Cars are designed for safety in crashes. They are heavy.

    Aircraft are designed to be light and *exactly* as strong as they need to be. They are not designed to crash into each other.

    Formula 1 race cars are designed to be light and safe. They are anything but cheap.

    A car/aircraft would need to be all three.

    It would be more expensive to maintain than a car, and probably even than an aircraft.
    You would not (by law in the us a

  • I looked at the CG rendering an immediately noticed a serious problem with their 2024 goal: they don't have a design. To make the contraption in the CG image, it would require the strongest and lightest materials we've ever made and it would likely still break apart after a few runs.

    I'll be impressed if they ever make a functional prototype that looks remotely like what they propose. They don't have a design.

    • This is starting to be a common thread for companies trying to one-up tech of any type. Hand a graphic designer a laundry list of wishes and tell them to go to town. Guaranteed no engineering was wasted on this CGI concept. Because any engineer worth a shit would have had a heart-attack at those tiny folding rotors attempting to lift an entire car.

      I'm sure there's some rich suckers willing to toss money at them for the concept though. So they'll get what they're actually after in the end, and nobody wil

  • Bionic means robot parts put into a biological (usually human) being. If it's all robot, it can't be bionic!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      This is almost exactly what I was thinking...

      It's my understanding that the word "bionic" is itself a portmanteau of biological and electronic.

  • I didn't think "unveiling" meant only posting a 3D drawing and a vague idea of how it "works". Looks more like the Chinese took an old idea and "invented" it. Again.

    Besides, people were building flying cars in the late 70's. Mostly Pintos with slap-on wings if I remember correctly. So, color me unimpressed.

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