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It's Not a Flying Car - It's a Drivable Airplane
waderoush writes "Aviation enthusiasts have been dreaming of flying cars since the 1940s. But in an old machine shop in Woburn, MA, a team of MIT aero/astro grads is building what could be the first practical airplane that's also certified for highway driving. Angel-funded startup Terrafugia, headed by 2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Carl Dietrich, hopes to have its first full-scale proof-of-concept vehicle ready to show off at July's AirVenture aviation festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin."
Look at the accident and fatality rates with the masses and regular cars. I can't imagine how many deaths this would cause worldwide. A flying car is great in cheesy novels and movies, but horrible in reality.
Does that mean it's actually certified to drive, or just fits within the lane and all that? I'd feel kinda scared if there was a plane next to me on the freeway.
Not even the first post before the site was apparently slashdotted.
They're tackling the problem from another point of view, great
for the flying car
And I thought I knew you man...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
How is this different from any other crazy flying car? It's still vaporware as long as there isn't a working prototype, and as far as the difference between a flying car and a 'roadable aircraft'--it seems like a marketing gimmick to me.
steampunk web design
Almost as nice as that crazy scooter.
Please God, tell me it's a hybrid!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That whole ability-to-fly thing will come in handy when the first gust of wind you encounter blows you off a bridge.
A very light car with a huge side profile = the ditch.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
hopes to have its first full-scale proof-of-concept vehicle ready to show off at July's AirVenture aviation festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
From the "endeavors best left unrushed" department...
Seriously, rushing to meet unrealistic deadlines is what causes spectacular failure- and this is really something best left to perfect.
You don't want to hear "AAAAAAAH!" from the crowd, you want to hear "oooooooo"...
Please help metamoderate.
The skills needed to fly are a lot higher than those to drive. In addition, inherent probmels will allways lead to the result neither being a good plane/helicopert nor being a good car. The idea is stricly for incompetents.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Been there, done that - Volantor, aka Moller Skycar
The flying Pinto crashed and burned:
http://www.fordpinto.com/mitzar1.htm
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=84720&key=0
Code or be coded.
They are are not aero/astro grads, they are Course 16 grads.
I can see this catching on with ranchers out west. They can fly to town twice as fast as they can drive and still park in the garage. At least they won't have to worry about tailgaters with that open prop out back.
Invenio via vel creo
...it is painted bright orange and has a confederate flag on the roof, I'm down.
Here's how it's done, ladies and gents...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcusjb/440970636/in/photostream/
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
With its wings folded, it appears to have huge blind spots, so I can't see it as being considered fit for the road.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
This won't get very far. First obvious issue, the visibility available while in drive mode will make this thing a bitch to change lanes safely. Especially with people riding close up to gawk at it.
And I wonder how it will work with ethanol gas? That apparently is all you can get now for cars. The specs don't specify aircraft fuel.
And the useful load numbers are not that great. 550 lbs and 120 lbs of that is fuel. Today people are hitting the 200lbs mark very easily. I'll bet this beast is sluggish with two adults and full fuel load. And you would have to carefully calculate the CG on such a small plane. Moving 10lbs around in the cabin would most likely through the CG off. (Have seen that in other light airplanes.)
This will be a novelty if it ever actually flies. I doubt they will actually sell these as production aircraft.
Good try. I think I liked the other one from the 50's where the wings came off and were put on a trailer better.
This seems barely more practical than the scattered modified small planes I saw in airshows 20 years ago that demonstrated motor-powered wheels driving the plane that was no wider than a lane. Those planes, if I recall correctly from my youth, had wings that folded upward, meaning driving under an overpass with less than about 20 feet of clearance would be a disaster.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Who could ever forget this flying car from 1979?
And a couple years earlier, in 1977, there was a certain black Trans-Am that flew at least once.
Every year while the Oshkosh air fair is going on, the rest of Wisconsin wears helmets. You never know what, or who, will be dropping by.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I would be so funny if this was made by crazy German scientists... ...or am I the only one thinking about the Clerks2 promo about the Flying Car?
In all seriousness, it's not cars' fault that people drive themselves into lightposts, people kill themselves all the time in stupid accidents, car or not. Cars, however, make it quite common that one of these people who love killing themselves carelessly kill other people in the process.
I see a future with people with stories such as "I was drinking my morning coffee and suddenly a car came thru my roof and killed my family".
Giving irresponsible people a third spacial dimension to drive around makes them more dangerous.
I am all for anything that speeds up natural selection.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Not a lot of shared attributes between these two subclasses of class "vehicle."
Car: heavy suspension built to handle potholes and such; real-world roads still apply various nasty twisting moments throughout the body, which must be stiff enough to cope. Can ignore the occasional shopping cart dimpling the sides as irrelevant to operational safety.
Plane: built very VERY lightly. Undercarriage takes one good "whomp" on landing but time spent taxiing is a very small part of the overall life of the vehicle. Even a minor ding may result in it being flagged non-airworthy.
Executive summary: Cars make lousy planes. Planes make lousy cars.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Wow, listen to you guys. A crowd that usually embraces and welcomes new technology is cutting this to ribbons. Whether or not the concept is actually practical or not remains to be seen - there is certainly more than enough interest out there to continue to fund and develop and research the idea, regardless if the masses don't like it. It'll happen anyway - just give it time.
Ever since watching Back to the Future II, I was hoping that we'd have flying cars by 2015. So now all we need now is hoverboards, Gray's Sports Almanac, a few more Jaws sequels, and all lawyers must be abolished.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
This isn't the first Slashdot story about this exact vehicle. Try http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/10/1611216 for the exact same thing from last October. Deja Vu anyone? --The FNP
From the coral cache, it looks like all they've got are some pretty 3ds Max pictures. (and possibly notably, there is some clipping in there...)
But Moller has had a functional 2-seat volantor for about four years and "A FAA certified model is more than four years away." and has been for at least a decade.
Suffice to say, I don't think that this is an easy problem to solve.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If you can afford to get a pilots license and own a plane and store it, or rent a plane, then you can damn well afford $22/day to rent a car. When trying to combine the 2 you end up with a crappy airplane and a crappy car.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
If you haven't seen it:
The Flying Car - A short by Kevin Smith
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
As long as the weather isn't bad doing those things while flying would be easier than doing it in a car. Once you are in the air modern aircraft pretty much fly themselves.
I'm not a pilot but I had a job as a lineman at small county airport while in college. I used to fly all over the place with the pilots that worked for the company, either for fun or (no shit) so they could have someone to talk to and not fall asleep. (we did overflow for UPS, all the flights were in the middle of the night)
You take off, get clearance to fly a direct route to where you are going, enter in to the gps the code for airport you just left and which one you are going to, and wait until you get there.
Amusing story, The first time I ever flew in a plane was after I started working there. One of the pilots had just landed from a long flight, something came up and he had to immediately go on another flight. He knew I had never flown so he asked me if I wanted to go with him. We take off, he sets the gps up then leans back in the seat and says "wake me up if I fall asleep". Slightly disconcerting for your first time in the air.
I though that was pretty much true of any field. I know I've heard it said that the best way to make a small fortune in the stock market is to start with a large one, and I have a hard time thinking of any area of business where that isn't the case. Hence the age-old saying "It takes money to make money." (Well, it doesn't really, but it sure helps out.)
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Hmmm . . . nuclear fusion . . . yup, that's a household word nowadays. In use everywhere. Yup.
I'll bet the onboard computer comes with DNF pre-installed.
I think the idea is impractical for many other, technical reasons, but litigiousness and insurance are the deadly killers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
These numbers are meaningless without corresponding numbers on how much flying was done. With the soaring price of avgas I wouldn't be surprised if accidents were down slightly simply because people are flying less.
when pilots fly less often, both their flying skills and decision-making skills can get rusty and the potential for a pilot-error-induced accident goes up as well.
I don't know how this would affect the overall accident rate, but there's got to be a complex and intertwined relationship between accident rate going down simply because of fewer flights and hours flown... and accident rate going up due to pilots not keeping their skills as current and finely polished as they did back when we all could afford to fly our little spamcans twice a week for personal pleasure flights.
I'm a pilot and owner of a Piper Cherokee and my flying hours have been cut more than in half just due to the skyrocketing cost of fuel. I used to fly twice a week, now I fly maybe a half hour once or twice a month so I can save up my money to afford to fly to Oshkosh for Airventure at the end of July. I know I'll be sharing the skies on this long cross-country trek with thousands of other pilots in the same boat I'm in, and I wonder what the accident rate is going to look like for this year's Oshkosh period as all those rusty pilots take to the skies.
I hear you. As I mentioned in another post, applying avgas consumption to the raw accident numbers indicates that flying is going down and the accident rate is going up significantly. Which is exactly what I would expect from the situation, due to the problems with maintaining currency that you mention.
I hope you have a great trip to Oshkosh and that nobody gets anybody killed.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
"I'm a pilot and owner of a Piper Cherokee and my flying hours have been cut more than in half just due to the skyrocketing cost of fuel."
Aircraft diesels such as SMA and heavy-fuel engines like the Hirth can be far more efficient and burn cheaper fuel than gas engines. Too bad they aren't available (yet) with more HP.
http://www.smaengines.com/spip.php?id_rubrique=2&id_article=8&page=home
http://www.hirth-uavengines.de/
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This is not a flying car. This is not a flying car. This is not a flying car. THIS IS NOT A FLYING CAR.
THIS! IS! NOT! A! FLYING! CAR!
Let's go back to the Jetsons and think of what we saw in their cartoon. The concept of a flying car is a vehicle in which the general public can transport themselves in the air and start from and end at any point desired. It is currently unsafe, illegal, and HIGHLY not recommended for any such implementation to even happen. The general public would have to be trained on basic air traffic strategies. You'd be adding an entire new dimension to traffic control.
Directly from the creator's website:
Q: Can I take off from the highway?
A: No. In addition to power lines, billboards, overpasses, and other obstructions that make this idea unsafe, the Transition® will have to be parked with the engine off in order to deploy the wings and engage the propeller. It is also illegal in most states (emergency landings excluded).
This is a drivable airplane. This means it is able to be transported without additional equipment (i.e.: tow truck, etc) to a destination via public roads rather than be forced to stay at the airport due to its size, speed, fuel costs, etc.
HOWEVER to be honest, a majority of this is more dependent upon the law and intelligence/training requirements of the public rather than design limitations. BUT this doesn't mean the existing design can easily take off from anywhere you wish or land anywhere you wish easily. Still, it's CLOSER to a flying car than nothing.
tl;dr: IT'S NOT A FUCKING FLYING CAR! But it's CLOSER to one than nothing.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
They said they are looking for the maiden flight to happen by the end of the year. For the Oshkosh show, they are just going to have the proof of concept vehicle and it will do everything but fly.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
That box "thing" hardly looks aerodynamic enough to cut through the air with the aid of that little bitty propeller.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Must be late. I read that title as "It's Not a Flying Chair - It's a Drivable Armchair"
I was wondering if anyone else caught that fusion stuff.
..."
..."
... under Dr. Raymond J. Sedwick, a principal research scientist at MIT's Space Systems Lab. This opportunity stemmed from an efficiency improvement design Dietrich patented for a desktop-sized Penning Fusion Reactor ..."
From here:
"For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching inertial electrostatic confinement fusion
Okay, he built a fusor. Smart, but other kids have done that too.
"... for spacecraft power and propulsion
Okay, fusion powered spacecraft. You've got my attention now. Go on.
"
Efficient enough to finally make break even power or better?
"... following a research internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002. Dietrich credits this internship with sparking his initial curiosity about a distributed network of reactors that could potentially supplant the United States' strained power grid system."
Forget the flying cars, man! Get back on the fusion stuff. We needed that like, yesterday.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I can see the point of this vehicle. It's a plane that can simply be transported to/from an airport more easily by being roadworthy as well. However, the compromises do seem more than they're worth. Reliability concerns over folding wing joints, weight concerns and so forth. One thing that'd deter me for sure is the fact that you incur wear and tear driving on a road, well above and beyond what you experience in the air or on the airport tarmac - pothole shock, flying stones from a truck in front of you, etc. I wouldn't want to fly with the possibility of such hidden damage, nor would I want to have to incur the degree of inspection the vehicle would consequently require after each road trip.
Not true. The DARPA Grand Challenge is for a fully autonomous vehicle "capable of completing a substantial off-road course". There is a huge difference between designing a vehicle that can autonomously drive on a road system, and one that can do it off-road. Auto driving cars that are on-road is basically a 'follow the line' problem. The DARPA challenge is for creating vehicles that can be dropped into enemy combat zones, and can find their way around hazards that have been placed for them. Big difference.
Of course decent auto-driving being implemented would make our inadequate licensing a moot point. Not that I don't agree with you.
You can rent a car, but that's hassle-prone and expensive.
It is? I fly (passenger) and rent cars at airports all of the time - not many problems. In fact, I just rented a car from the private GA terminal in San Diego - couldn't have been easier, quicker or cheaper, IMO.
Rental cars are around $30/day - if you're flying a private plane several hours there and again back, $30 in order to do something once you've landed doesn't seem that excessive. Particularly given that the alternative, this car-plane, is estimated to cost >$150,000. That's a few thousand $ per month to lease/finance, more than enough to fund rental cars, or even a car service.
Although, from the article: "The third barrier was the fact that only about one third of the nation's small, general-aviation airports have rental-car facilities or cab stands--meaning that once you fly in, you're stuck."
You are stuck in that situation. But if you go to that airport more than occasionally, it'd be cheaper to just buy a used car and store it at that airport for you to use when you fly in, or timeshare a ground vehicle with other local pilots. Hell, even if you buy 5 cars and pre-place them at your 5 most-frequented airports, you'd come out ahead.
You're also stuck if a blizzard hits while you're at your destination, and can't fly home. But instead, you'd drive 3 hours on the highway in a blizzard, in a marginally-road-worthy car with airfoils strapped to it? I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that in a normal car, much less a lightweight body with folded up wings.
Nothing in this post contradicts the coolness of owning a flying car, though.
How high can this thing fly? Could you take it for a day trip over the mountains (rockies)?
I think most of us when we think about the flying cars "we were promised" think about something along the lines of the ones in Blade Runner. Since we don't yet have antigrav tech and don't really think it is possible anyway, I think the only way we could come up with a machine even remotely similar to the one in Blade Runner is by using helicopter/hovercraft tech instead. Fixed wing is impractical because it requires an actual runway and an extended wingspan to take off. A car/hovercroft/copter design with a ducted fan at the bottom or compact rotor blades at the top seems like the only way. That way it would be possible to take off in heavy traffic and land at your destination. Although this is probably impossible due to some very reasonable sound restrictions on public roads. 10 minute warning strobes and beeps could be required before liftoff so that the occupants of nearby cars could have time to put on their hearing protection etc, but that would seriously increase the danger for regular drivers and then there is the whole issue of landing. The landing issues could be mitigated by only designating certain allowed landing areas, maybe in the equivalent of highway rest areas, but the problem still remains. Of course such areas could also be required for takeoff which would reduce some of the dangers of that as well.
Another idea would be to just skip the whole flying car idea and build some additional infrastructure for ultralight helicopters like this one or powered paragliding or any similar small aircraft that can launch/takeoff from your driveway or from one of the newly built rest stop areas designed for such launches and landings.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Most private pilots fly in and out of tiny little airports in the suburbs or rural areas. No car rental places for miles, usually.
This space available.
It's not a Drivable Airplane - It's a Transformer
A Piper Cherokee is only like a $25-30k airplane typically.
There is no SMA diesel engine package for a Cherokee, but the engine retrofit package for a C182 costs about $90K installed. In contrast, a factory new Continental O-470 gasoline engine for a C182 is onlt around $35K.
Thielert made a 135hp diesel for the Piper Warrior, but it is heavy, underpowered, and the Thielert company just went "Tango Uniform" a couple weeks ago.
Most small airplanes such as cessnas are still running engine designs from the 50's. Fuel injection, to my knowledge, is not available on certified aircraft - only in experimental planes. The are almost all air cooled. They require specialized mechanic checkups at least yearly (I haven't had a checkup on a car in at least 10 years).
So yes there are things that can make it work, but getting it certified, in production and rolling out the door will likely not happen in the next 10 years. Also planes are already crazy expensive - this thing will easily cost 1M. For a crappy airplane/car.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Life must suck when you can't read more than three paragraphs at a time.
which is totally what she said
True, adding all of the bumpers, side-impact airbags, traction control to make it a good (and legal) car would make it a very bad airplane. However, there is another road-worthy vehicle that is very light, can only carry one passenger, and offers almost no crash protection. It is called a motorcycle.
If you thought (and regulated) it as a motorcycle on the road, and as a sports plane in the air, it might work. Remember, the road portion is only to get you to and from the airport. You are not going to be commuting in city traffic every day.
A better market segment than the typical "I want to get to Denver faster" business travel would be the boating crowd. Combined with heavy restriction of flying over populated areas, a person with $30k to spend on a good boat might by one of these to go the the ski resort/lake, etc
If I had a choice between a boat and one of these bad-boys, I would be a be getting my wings. Of course, my wife doesn't even let me have a Harley, so I doubt she would let me have one of these... :)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
probably shouldn't bite, but where exactly does life 'begin' then?
This is sort of what I was trying to say one post back. In the first trimester of human pregnancy any number of natural events will cause termination. High stress can do it! The flu as well. One more, the choice of the mother, isn't any more onerous, I don't think, and a lot less arbitrary or unfortunate then the natural ones. Especially when you consider the over all impact an additional life, that is not provided for or wanted, will have on a society.
It's neither a driveable airplane nor a flyable car. It's just the worst idea ever imagined. Anything that has to pass highway safety tests will be way too damn heavy to fly, and anything that can fly will be too incapable of surviving a roadway crash.
One of the only reason small aircraft even exist is because there is no requirement for the occupants to survive a crash. One of the only reasons cars are so heavy is so that they can pass crash testing.
The two are just mutually exclusive.
Most of the complaints about flying cars seem to revolve around the idea that flying is complicated, and trying to deal with 3D navigation is well beyond the training of people who can barely handle 2D. Most of the imagine situations I've seen with flying cars actually impose some sort of lanes on airborne vehicles. Presumably this would make the control of such a vehicle no more difficult than a car, but at least we'd be able to get all of the traffic off the ground, and add additional "roads" merely by updating whatever electronic navigation system would be used to automate the 3rd dimension. Flying cars aren't without other problems, of course. Any collision in the sky has a pretty real chance of crashing into something fairly important on the ground, so it either needs to be really safe, or you don't really get to reclaim the land use under the flight paths.
sig fault
...maybe when it becomes popular. I see a few people above making the "hmmm, lightweight, huge/high side profile" observation. How about leaving the wings at the airport. If the hangar space issue is such a biggy, wouldn't that be a reasonable compromise? Hanging wings alone up in a hangar has to be much more space efficient than leaving a whole plane. You could hire wings too, maybe last years ones that had had just a few light crashes would be cheap, and you could pay extra for a brand new set of delta wings to go lawn-darting at the weekend.
I am just wondering, isn't it really impossible, in principle, to make a flying car in such a way that it must not hit another flying object?
the concept is right but the idea is not.... the car is meant to be driven on road. just m thinking of making a mini airoplane in a car shape??
Okay, good points. Even though I'm religious - and therefore probably expected to be fanatical about this stuff - that sounds fairly reasonable (meaning that I wouldn't be sure if God is going to hand out a soul to something that only exists for a week due to the mother having the flu, though if you asked me yesterday I probably would have shrugged and said yes). You are still left with the conundrum of when 'life' actually begins though, would it perhaps be when the heart starts beating? Personally if I didn't believe in a 'higher power' then I'd say it was fine to get rid of it in the very early stages, I'd still think it was unacceptable later on though. I've not seen statistics but not all abortions will be rape victims and mothers whos life is somehow in danger because of the baby, and I think people should just be more responsible before and during conception rather than only considering the consequences after the fact... it's kind of like running Windows without a firewall!
which is totally what she said
You are still left with the conundrum of when 'life' actually begins though
Why? I accept the completely reasonable position that life starts with conception. It is not reasonable to think otherwise. If we found two cells on mars that were reproducing, we'd call that life.
To me, when life begins is less important a question than when it is a fetus "viable." IMHO, and there are a lot of people who will idealistically cling to rights, but I'd follow natures lead. If you're religious, you must accept that "god" created nature and set the rules. Correct? So, in the first trimester, what we'd call trivial trauma can cause a spontaneous abortion. I would allow full "choice." In the second trimester, that's much harder because we really are talking about a human, not a potential one. In the third trimester, hell babies have been born premature at that stage.
So, here are the rules;
1st trimester: full choice
2nd trimester: life of the mother, health of the baby
3rd trimester: Life of the mother
I'm an atheist, so, I ask you as a religious person, would that be a compromise that people could live with?
3 miles is only a 1 hour walk and could be done in 20 mins on a foldable bike.
Oh wait , I forgot this is america , ok 3 miles is a 5 hour waddle. Forget it.
Well, yep I think it's the mother's responsibility, though if I were a doctor I probably would still prefer not to be involved - certainly in situations where abortion is just seen as a get out clause for not practicing 'safe' sex.
Just as a random thought, my sister and bro-in-law are trying to have a baby right now, I can imagine that hearing of people having abortions at any stage would be pretty sickening to couples who are having that kind of problem.. not the fault of the person having the abortion of course, but it's just sad that some people are desperately wanting to have a baby and others are treating the whole thing almost like a game.
which is totally what she said
certainly in situations where abortion is just seen as a get out clause for not practicing 'safe' sex.
That is the fundamental (no pun intended) problem with the debate about abortion. When you make it a moralistic argument, i.e. the notion that someone *should* have done something based on *your* values, otherwise *they* would not be in this position, it becomes righteous to deny it.
Regardless, there are *reasons* that all but the most zealous fundamentalists could not deny would justify an abortion. Now that we've established a rational basis for "choice," we have to take the moralistic punishment motive out of the debate and focus on the benefit/cost to society of the policy.
I'm not even thinking so much from a moral standpoint as from a practical standpoint. It wastes a lot less time on everyone's part (apart from maybe the guys) to wear a condom for example *shrug* If they take appropriate precautions and she still ends up pregnant then that's fine. But in the same way that I'd prefer my computer just not to get infected with a virus in the first place rather than have to clean it out at some point, it's surely better to be proactive than reactive when trying to avoid pregnancies too. That's not a moral judgement (though of course I do have an opinion on the 'morality' aspect too), just good sense. It doesn't seem likely that a lot of people are being stupid just in the knowledge that they can have an abortion, and there are more reasons to practice safe sex than just stopping pregnancy, but personally I'd prefer if it wasn't such an easy option. It's fine in the US where people pay for medical care, but over here we have the NHS, and if people were more sensible in the first place then it would free up some resources. It's obviously not going to happen though, people are people and will do what they do best (stupid things!)
which is totally what she said
I don't believe the article claims this is "the first practical airplane that's certified for highway driving," the article even mentions and has a photograph of a previous craft, the "Aerocar." Here's another one: http://collections.nasm.si.edu/code/emuseum.asp?style=browse¤trecord=1&page=search&profile=objects&searchdesc=A19500086000&quicksearch=A19500086000&newvalues=1&newstyle=single&newcurrentrecord=1
Not that we expect slashdot editors to, well, edit.
I wonder how many nitwits would be tooling along the highway, hit the switch and take off. Imagine you are about to be pulled over by a cop... pop the wings and shazam, freedom.
Here at Xconomy we were pretty surprised by the overwhelmingly negative, skeptical tone of the Slashdot community's comments on our article last week about Terrafugia's drivable airplane, the Transition. We decided to boil down the comments to about a dozen commonly-voiced criticisms and put them directly to Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia's CEO. Today we've published Dietrich's responses to the criticisms. It's a worthwhile read for anyone seriously interested in the future of general aviation.
well I hope no one gets there hopes up. When we conquer the power to weight ratio problem that is needed to make a true flying car, (and not a drivable aircraft), no private citizen will be allowed to have one.
power to weight ratio is crawling along at less then a snails pace.
computing power is the opposite, and moving explosively.
100 years from now when the first truly flyable cars, with vtol, that are cheap and mass producible...you won't be allowed to have one.
the potential for drug trafficking, terrorism, and just about any vice will be deemed "too great" by our government.
"it's for your own good"
I wouldn't want to waste expensive aero-engine run time on a highway. A 500 hour service is expensive, and on the road you'll get less than half (probably less than a fourth) of the mileage you would in the air. Road operation of this craft would be the exception, not routine (unless the owner has much more money than he knows how to spend).
Have you thought about getting the STC for MOGAS and installing digital fuel flow and temperature monitoring? MOGAS is cheaper than AVGAS, and with more accurate cylinder head temperatures, you should be able to get high burn efficiency without risking detonation.
:)
My old '76 Cherokee would cruise at a nice 8 gallons per hour with MOGAS. Of course, the problem with MOGAS is that it stinks very much bad and is not available everywhere, so your mileage may vary
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
With the 'plane' being so short, it will be extremely unstable in air. It can only fly with a help of computer system, much like the one on F19.
You do not design this kind of system in two years. Especially when chief designers are idiots who came up with an idea of flying car.
As for me, I'll quit driving my 300hp car when my wife leaves me, the kids die of starvation, and the oil cartel prys it from my cold dead hands.
J/K, I'll bury it before the cartel gets it.
In all serioiusnes though, probably about $8/gallon. Hey, I got a 6mi. comute thats done on a bicycle when the wether is at least 1/2 way decent. Gas Prices just don't affect me yet.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
To hell with oil. Electricity is the ultimate flex fuel.
4-500hp is a really nice spot for a car. 300 isn't bad by any means (I paid $13,500). Grats on the Tesla, it's my dream car too. If I could afford a Tesla, I would have it in an instant. What do you do, and how do you do it?
I just have a nice cheap '00 Firebird Formula. With a small amount of $ (about 4k) in handling/brakes, and stage 1 weight reduction (removal of spare tire/jack)
I COMPLETELY AGREE on e- for vehicles. An e- car w/ 1/2 that performance (acceleration wise) would be an amazing car to drive, and suit most people just fine.
I can't drive a weinie car though, I have been a speed/handling addict since I was 13 and drove my 1st motorcycle. My wife has a civic HX that gets 34-40 mpg (non-hybrid w/cvt). We use it if we are going around town and what not, but anytime I have to drive over 15 minutes, I don't want to be in the car, it's loud, can't pass quickly, and for a car as small as it is, it feels like it has the body roll of a minivan.
The nice thing about it though is that if you're using premium in it, it accels to 60ish pretty good for a 1.3 L engine. The CVT makes the engine just sit at 5.5K RMPs and it's 0-60 is about 9 seconds or so. (a touch less than 2x my car though 8')
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
The comment before my post on this thread should intrest you...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.