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Larry Page Is Secretly Working On a Flying Car (bloomberg.com)
Google co-founder Larry Page is personally investing in flying cars. Page has been secretly bankrolling Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, two California-based startups working on developing a flying car, reports Bloomberg, citing 10 people familiar with the matter. From the report: Better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have convinced a growing body of smart, wealthy, and apparently serious people that within the next few years we'll have a self-flying car that takes off and lands vertically -- or at least a small, electric, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it appears, are the companies Page is quietly funding. "Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlying technology," says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who's spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. "What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible."
Well, it's about time. But will this really make commuting easier?
Well, gee, it's not much of a SECRET now, is it?
Larry Page Was Secretly Working On a Flying Car
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Well that's nice and all, but this is just rich people with ego vanity projects...
It only takes some basic math of the energy required to lift a pound into the air, then move it forward in the air, to see the problems with this.
This has been tried over and over for years, by people who either don't understand the issues, or don't care and assuming magic will happen.
The whole thing is beyond absurd... As Homer Simpson once said, "Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!"
This is slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it weird that we are on the cusp of all these radical new technology breakthroughs, yet we can no longer build enough new houses each year to keep up with population growth?
Imagine telling someone in the 1960s, when houses and transport infrastructure were being developed at record pace, that in the future we would indeed have the wrist watch phones and flying cars, but a high income family wouldn't be able to afford a rundown victorian era worker's cottage within an hour's commute of their job.
Something has gone very wrong with our economy if it is delivery these sorts of toys, yet basic needs go begging.
Everything that has been touted as a flying car is in reality a Driving Plane.
These devices have to meet much stricter regulation (via entities such as the FAA) than any car would need to meet to be roadworthy. I can take a s ledge hammer to my car and still legally be able to drive it on the road, but try that with a plane and see how far that gets you.
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Flying cars... because "Larry Page Is Secretly Working On an Airplane" just sounds boring.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You know what it means when someone says that, don't you, Slashdotters? It means it's just an idea they had, and they have a vague idea how to do it, but none of the details are worked out yet and they don't even have a proof-of-concept yet. It's basically clickbait for investors who have more dollars than sense.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The article briefly mentioned a few of the competitors.
My favorite of this whole new 'class' of flying machines is the Velocopter.
It has 16 outrunner brushless DC electric motors on fixed prop blades. All flying is done essentially through the software and a single joystick (no rudder pedals or separate throttle).
The fact that it has no actuated flight surfaces, and the blades are in a fixed position, the build complexity of this machine is waaay simpler and to lower tolerances than just about any other flying machine out there.
Of course, right now on battery alone the range is pretty poor (prob like 15-20 min of flying time, tops), but with a gas turbine generator it should be extended quite significantly.
While it isn't exactly the most efficient at flying compared to even helicopters, I think its simplicity, safety (very redundant), and relative quietness makes up for that.
YES! Monorails, flying cars and emu farms! Maybe even some backyard fusion - 1953, here I come!
Flying cars will (almost certainly) never be a significant thing within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Yes it technically it is possible to build a (crappy) car that will fly with current technology but not in a way that has any meaningful utility. To have a genuinely useful flying car there would have to be a massive advance in compact energy sources and there is no reason to believe that will happen any time soon. There also would have to be substantial advances in automated piloting because there are relatively few trained pilots and even fewer with the financial resources to buy a frivolous vehicle like a flying car. A huge portion of the driving public can barely operate a car safely and competently. Anyone who thinks these people can handle a plane is delusional.
Building a flying car necessarily means you end up with a device that can't fly very well and can't drive very well and fills a nonexistent need. Someone else rightly pointed out that they are really driving planes, not flying cars. To make it light enough to fly necessarily means sacrificing durability and crash-worthiness on the road. Even minor fender benders would render the vehicle unable to fly safely. Driving one in bad weather (especially snow) seems like a terrible idea. Handling will suck and it will be hard to make it comfortable and quiet. Even if you do manage make one it's going to be outrageously expensive because the market is tiny and the vehicle is needlessly complicated. So it doesn't work physically and it doesn't make sense economically.
Well, it's about time.
About time for what? A fragile, expensive, complicated, inefficient vehicle that won't fly or drive very well, that few people can actually operate safely and that nobody actually needs? What problem does a flying car actually solve for anyone better than what is available now? To fly it you have to drive to an airport anyway in most cases where there already are planes available. How is a flying car any more useful than driving to an airport, flying in a real plane and then renting a car at your destination? The number of use cases where a flying car would provide an actual advantage is vanishingly small.
But will this really make commuting easier?
Not even a little bit even if we presume that it is technologically or economically feasible. Which it isn't.
Electric, V/STOL, automated so there's no real skill required. Sounds useful to me as long as it can safely land in a parking lot.
We don't have an energy source adequate to do electric flying propulsion - not even close. V/STOL is very expensive - you're basically talking about a helicopter or tilt-rotor - and very complicated. The maintenance alone would be prohibitively expensive. We don't have anywhere close to the level of automation required for fully automated piloting and we don't have appropriate infrastructure either. You can't just land in a parking lot safely. Prop wash is a real thing and you have to design landing pads or runways to land safely.
Doesn't sound feasible to me, but then self-driving cars didn't either 5 years ago.
Not the same problem at all. Self driving cars are a problem of sensors and routing and logic. Flying cars are problem of physics and infrastructure in addition to the problems of sensors, and routing. Getting something big enough to carry people to fly takes a LOT of energy even if it is very light. A flying car is a FAR more difficult problem to solve than a self driving car and we aren't in any danger of solving it anytime soon.