Slashdot Mirror
Flying Car Prototype Ready By End of 2017, Says Airbus CEO (venturebeat.com)
Airbus plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year, the aerospace group's chief executive said on Monday. From a report: Airbus last year formed a division called Urban Air Mobility that is exploring concepts such as a vehicle to transport individuals or a helicopter-style vehicle that can carry multiple riders. The aim would be for people to book the vehicle using an app, similar to car-sharing schemes. "One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground," Airbus CEO Tom Enders told the DLD digital tech conference in Munich, adding he hoped the Airbus could fly a demonstration vehicle for single-person transport by the end of the year. "We are in an experimentation phase, we take this development very seriously," he said, adding that Airbus recognized such technologies would have to be clean to avoid further polluting congested cities.
Prototypes have been around for years. Production on any of them never really gets any closer.
I don't see these being marketed to the masses any time soon - Moving rush hour into the air seems like it would be inviting chaos. Ambulances, however, seem like a perfect fit for this - Skipping traffic could save lives.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If yellow is the only color choice...
Elon Musk is unwittingly and unintentionally behind the rise (pun) of flying cars.
Elon is partly and significantly behind the rise of electric cars.
Electric cars threaten the manhood of the fossil fuel industry.
Fossil fuel executives wonder how to save their beloved industry and provide a superior smog choking experience to everyone.
DING! DING! DING! DING!
I know! I know! Says one executive. Flying cars! They will use even more fuel. Provide more pollution. And they won't be powered by electric any time soon.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Only flying cars were supposed to be available by Y2K.
The predictions for fusion power are remarkably accurate. 30 years ago, they told us it would be 30 years away, and indeed, 30 years later, it is still 30 years away.
I don't see an autonomous flying car in neighbourhoods, except in locales where there aren't:
- Power lines
- Trees
- Pets (and children) that will be blown around lift jets
- Shingled roofs (see previous)
- Anything that can be blown around
- Anything that could come into impact with the flying vehicle
Don't these "futurists" know that their creations won't be allowed to fly/land anywhere aircraft can't fly/land now?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
With the way I see so many people driving, this is good news for the makers of bandages and burn units.
Seriously, take a short trip down the freeway and watch people drive...then ask yourself, "Would I want these people flying a car near me??"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's not but there are fully autonomous helicopters being used by the military. That said, there is hopefully still some substantive differences between your typical upscale American suburb and the backwoods of Afghanistan. Noise, the acceptance of a half ton of wrecked aluminum in your back yard, more noise - I just don't see it here in the US.
Not to even get into the limited capacity that air corridors have compared to roads. That could possibly change as autonomous flight allows for closer aircraft spacing, but it's not going to happen quickly.
And that noise... If you think the weeny little Phantom-class drones are going to be shotgun targets, wait until this thing tries to land in your neighbor's yard.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So is there an actual picture of what they're going for with the prototype or just a meaningless stock photo for space filling purposes?
Which can carry multiple riders? You mean like a helicopter?
Airbus plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year, the aerospace group's chief executive said on Monday.
If it doesn't drive on the roads then it is not a flying car. It's basically a form of a drone that happens to carry people.
I'm curious how they think they have repealed the laws of physics sufficiently to allow a car that is robust enough to survive travel on normal roads AND still remain airworthy. All the so-called flying cars anyone has come up with so far lack power plants with sufficient energy to avoid massive compromises in design. A car that is light enough to get off the ground is too fragile to survive a collision of any consequence. I'm not aware of any breakthrough in propulsion technology that would enable a normal car to get aloft or a single person aircraft to drive like a normal car.
Wake me up when one costs less than $50k.
Or sooner. If it were really "helicopter style", it would feature autorotation in case of an engine failure. If anything goes wrong with the depicted aircraft, it becomes a brick at too high altitude.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Lets go back a few short years...
This whole idea that all electric cars are ever going to be practical or affordable is a pipe dream. I can see hydrogen powered cars being practical in a few decades though. And self-driving? Won't we have to repave all the roads with sensors and put sensors all along the shoulder? That's just dumb, that's just dumb because you can't make a car smart enough to navigate daily traffic with all onboard sensors. What's next, first stage rockets that can fall back from space and land vertically? Right... let's throw in an autonomous electric powered flying bus while we are at it.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Between zoning, permits, licensing, environmental impact reports, HOA restrictions, FAA overreach, liability, NIMBY, and a myriad other issues, this is highly unlikely to happen in the modern USA within our generation. Most potentially society changing inventions are not feasible to test or deploy outside of closed corporate labs in this regulatory environment, at least not without the support of some Congress critters and the DOD...
I thought April 1 was still a couple months away.
I didn't read this article, but I read one from a different source. What I got from that was not that they were targeting casual residential owners, but rather fleets used as mass transit. I think they're targeting places like New York, Hong Kong, etc. Dense population centres where they would be used as a flying autonomous taxi. Cities where the added noise pollution might not be noticed all that much. I don't think they're even targeting having these flying over your peaceful house in the suburbs.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We have issues with a 1 pound quadcopter and now we are getting flying cars that will be several hundred pounds. And look how some people drive and are unable to see in two dimensions to see what goes on around their car. Now you add a third dimension. And all this in an space that is not regulated/overseen by the FAA.
So it might be possible that they are allowed to fly on some places. I can imagine that they still need to drive to the airport, take off and land at another airport and drive again with a licensed pilot while in the air,
So it will take a while till we see Fifth Element situations in NYC if that will ever happen.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If you think the noise of a jet engine won't be noticed much in a dense population center like NY or Hong Kong, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Turns out 150 dB is noticeable in pretty much every environment. You can tell by when blood starts coming out of your ears.
We don't have flying cars for a number of reasons.
Actually we don't have them primarily for one reason. We don't have an energy supply of sufficient power to weight (including fuel) to enable a robustly built vehicle to get off the ground and travel. Basically we need something like Tony Stark's fictional arc reactor to make a flying car feasible. We can build a "car" that flies but with the state of the art in power plants there are simply too many engineering trade offs to make something more than a crude prototype.
All the other problems you mentioned are to a large degree already solved today. They would require large economic investments but they are possible. The only problem that so far is intractable is the power supply for the vehicle. Our current ones are FAR too heavy even if you don't include the fuel.
Cities where the added noise pollution might not be noticed all that much.
Take another look at the picture. Those tiny little fans will drown out the gunfire.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I am working it in stages. I have the first part done: Converting matter into energy. Now I just need to work out how to send it someplace and re-integrate it and no one will need these fancy flying cars!
I didn't read that, but it's the same, held-aloft-by-four-fans design that Moller has been hawking for decades, which means that just like Moller's "Skycar", it's going to fly just slightly better than a grand piano if even one of those engines goes out. Not over my neighborhood, thank you.
A flying car is also called "an airplane," and light aircraft have been around for a century. Curtiss never flew his Autoplane, but given that he was Glen Curtiss, there's no reason to believe he couldn't have if he hadn't been distracted by World War I. The Pitcairn PCA-2 was a production aircraft in 1923.
The History of Flying Cars.
The reasons this will be a non-event, like all previous attempts are as follows:
1. Flying vehicles must be built to higher standards for safety reasons - not just of the pilot and passengers, but if everyone. This means they are a lot more expensive.
2. Flying in three dimensions is more complicated than driving in two, and requires far more training. Most people simply can't handle the demands.
3. Ground traffic can be monitored and governed by simple rules and automated systems, like traffic lights and signs. Air traffic requires human controllers, and there is a limit to how many planes one controller can monitor. Automation can increase that limit, but not replace human judgment. The cost of replacing traffic lights with millions of air traffic controllers is . . . not feasible.
4. Self flying cars are even more ridiculous than self driving cars, given that self driving cars cannot handle streets that have not been mapped to millimeter precision, or road constructions, or bad weather, or any of a million other real life conditions. Flying is geometrically more complicated than driving, and there's no reason to believe anyone alive to day will live to see true self driving cars.
This is, in the end, simply an announcement that Airbus is going into the personal aircraft business with a high-tech helicopter for the obscenely wealthy. But I'm happy they're getting a lot of free publicity for it.
Might even save some lives if it distracts the shooter.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Highly unlikely for this to happen (at least in any meaningful numbers for the average person).
If you think about the level of safety performance required for aircraft today to be approved, and the inspections that have to be conducted before every single flight ---
Just imagine, those same regulations that govern aircraft would permit a road vehicle (which gets beaten up by road hazards, rattled around by potholes, and is built to consumer automotive safety multiples of reliability) to just fly at a moment's notice? With people at the wheel who get driver's licenses by barely missing some traffic cones?
Nice idea, but never going to happen. Or at least the sci-fi future that people envision with a car extending some wings and taking off from the highway -- laughable.
No company has more experience with computer controlled flight than Airbus. The A380 is already capable of tarmac-to-tarmac autonomous flight, treating the human pilots more as a fail-safe than as real pilots. (For example, if the human pilot tries to do something stupid, like fly upside down or intentionally crash, the autopilot is designed to fight back).
"If I'm flying somewhere I want a human pilot" "and if I'm driving somewhere, I want to be in ultimate control of the vehicle."
You don't trust a vehicle with 20+ sensors that can react 100 times faster to all those concurrent inputs, but you do trust a random cab/bus/train/plane/blimp driver to always make the right call? Those same people who are at fault in 99% of fatal accidents. Those same people who tend to fall asleep, show up at work drunk, have emotional issues, have undisclosed health issues, etc?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Don't fly in an Airbus A380 then, because they are already autonomous.
It's all about energy density. Has been ever since Orville conned Wilbur into riding that damned fool contraption back in the twentieth century. You need to carry enough juice to continuously counter the weakest of four fundamental forces and have a highly reliable power plant that's efficient enough to release that energy fast enough while not being so heavy as to ground yon flying death trap. Oh, and not running into stuff along the way would be nice to have, too. AI might do the stunt, but your average automobile driver can't even manage a groundcar safely. Who's going to insure these things?
they are talking about using it like a taxi service.
I could see designated skylanes for a limited sectors and city departments like fire and ambulance services, along with taxies. I can actually see this being insurable if its limited in that capacity. And maybe just like planes if you complete a certification you can you have your own private version but im guessing the inital cost would be so prohibitive that not everyone is going to be able to do it, just like a commercial pilot's license.
With designated skylanes that avoid densely populated areas I don't see how flying cars are that much of a fantasy. If you don't follow the rules I could see an emergency override to automatically safely land and shut down by the computer. Which doesn't sound to ridiculous if you're several miles from the nearest house and you have 20 seconds to comply or something.
These wont be traveling through a city but rather around it.
Hold on son! Let's just swoop over and take a peek!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
They're late. Moller has been at it for 50 years. I'm really late, but why not? I promise to release my flying car prototype next year too. I plan to take a different approach.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The 3d image shows a vehicle with small ducted fans for lift, and minimal aerodynamic lifting surfaces.
Helicopters use very large blades because (for very basic physics: momentum goes as MV, power goes as MV^2) it is more efficient to move a lot of air slowly than a little air quickly. So it will need more power than a helicopter which will make it less efficient, noisier, and the down-wash will be more damaging.
There may be a few applications where the lack of exposed blades will help, but not many. Even if the blades are enclosed, the very high power downwash will prevent landings near anything even slightly fragile.
Helicopters look the way that they do because that is the best design.
Small quad-copters make sense in applications where efficiency and noise are not critical.
Self flying is great, but that technology is mostly available now anyway
http://www.airbusgroup.com/int...
Most of what's in the (originally) Reuters blurb is in the airbus link, except the 2017 date to get a prototype in the air, and doesn't contain that silly Shutterstock photo that has nothing to do with the Airbus group at all.
If I could afford one of these, I'd definitely get on, even if it had limited takeoff/landing allowables. Now, that's partly because the nearest gen aviation airport is ~1 mile from my house, and partly because I live in the mountains where the air miles to a mid-range destination (30-100 miles) can be less than half the road distance. But, alas, not being in the 0.1% means it's likely I will not be able to afford one.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
what altitude do they work from?Oh, that's right 1000ft. So, your ridiculously heavy solution wouldn't work most of the time a taxi style flying car was operating
Somebody in Qatar will order a 380SUV, but there won't be a lot of places wher eit can land.
If they are for mass transportation, they'll probably have to be computer controlled. And they'd need some redundancy such they can land in a controlled manner if something goes wrong.
Table-ized A.I.
He's also a target of the Republican party... which I have NO idea why. I mean, aren't we supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs?
Yup, I'm sure I read somewhere that the Moller Skycar was coming out in 2017 too.
Funny you mention Hong Kong. It's where I live.
I don't see flying cars/buses/whatever here any time soon. The reason: high-rise buildings (most city blocks here are anywhere from 50 to 480 meters tall) and mountains (the tallest being over 900 meters tall). With those high-rises there is almost no place for any aircraft to land safely, it's just too dense. There's a heliport at the harbour and a few super luxury hotels have helipads on the rooftop. That are about your only realistic options.
Add to that the sheer volume of people that want to be moved. Trains are the more efficient way to go for that - the busiest line is operating 12-coach trains, 20 trains an hour, and it's actually not enough to handle rush hour traffic. The train network is being expanded steadily, with more lines being added. Mostly underground, out of the way of everything. Currently the trains handle some 3.5 million passenger trips every day, road public transport (buses, minibuses, taxis) handle at least that number of trips between them.
Other dense population centres will have the same problems. Huge numbers of people that want to move around, basically limiting any air transport to just a fancy premium service. No space to land on the ground as you're always too close to buildings, one of the main issues after noise would be the unpredictable winds tossing your drone around.
Um, then we must already be living in a "Tony stark's fictional arc reactor" universe then since there are droves of flying car prototypes out there
"Droves of flying car prototypes"? Hardly. There are a few light airplanes that technically can be driven on a road in good weather at modest speeds. Get in a fender bender and they instantly are no longer air worthy. None are safe to drive in bad weather. None are practical in any sense of the word. None have ever become viable products that could be sold in meaningful quantities because there are WAY too many engineering trade offs. None are operable without a runway and a pilot's license. None are going to be sold to the general public in quantity any time soon because they are utterly useless in real life. It's more economical to have a car and a plane than a single vehicle that does both badly.
There are even a few prototypes in the works that have some short runway/vertical takeoff capabilities.
There always are "a few prototypes in the works". That's a LONG way away from saying they are actually viable products. We don't have a power source of sufficient energy density to make a useful flying car. End of story. Until we do a flying car will remain a mythical beast.
He's also a target of the Republican party... which I have NO idea why. I mean, aren't we supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs?
Is he? I can't recall ever hearing a Republican say anything cross about Musk. I will occasionally see libertarians roll their eyes at Musk fanboys because Musk relied so heavily on government subsidies, but that's about it. What are you talking about?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think the key phrase is "Self-driving".
Self driving isn't equivalent to accident free. Self driving vehicles will still get in accidents. They MIGHT get in fewer accidents but the number will not be zero. And the fewer accident notion is a very big IF at this point. Until we get such vehicles on the road we won't know if their accident rate is better or worse under real world conditions.
If there's any significant collision risk, the car could simply go straight up to avoid it.
I think you've been watching too many movies. Real world physics doesn't work like that. Some obstacles simply cannot be avoided. Some road conditions will prevent collision avoidance. Good luck going up when you have power lines overhead for instance. Sometimes obstacles appear faster than it is possible to maneuver to avoid them.
Here is a guardian article.. basically, they don't want green energy. I have no idea why they give a shit. This is capitalism at work. Of course, energy sector is old energy, and they got plenty of lobbyists who know how to grease politician hands, maybe green energy hasn't figured how to do that?
Well from the article, "they" being Republicans, don't give a shit. The article is about one fabricated online journalist from someone with a grudge against Musk, who appears to be trying to shill to get Republicans to oppose Musk, but I've seen no evidence it's worked. I am a Republican and general right-wing nutjob and on all my right wing blogs/sites/forums etc I don't think I've ever seen any significant negative sentiment towards Musk. If I had to gauge the general opinion of Musk among conservatives/Republicans, it would be "neutral to positive." The only negative things I've ever seen are some sidelong glances from staunch libertarians because subsidies, but since Elon has been so successful at making so many things profitable in the long run that argument has little traction.
So I would say the idea that Musk is a "target of the Republican party" is pretty much false.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.