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No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes On the Flying Car (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the flying-cars dept.

Last year, Bloomberg reported that Google co-founder Larry Page had put money in two "flying car" companies. One of those companies, Kitty Hawk, has published the first video of its prototype aircraft. From a report on The Verge: The company describes the Kitty Hawk Flyer as an "all-electric aircraft" that is designed to operate over water and doesn't require a pilot's license to fly. Kitty Hawk promises people will be able to learn to fly the Flyer "in minutes." A consumer version will be available by the end of this year, the company says. The video is part commercial and part test footage, starting with a lakeside conversation between friends about using the Flyer to meet up before switching to what The New York Times says are shots of an aerospace engineer operating the craft in Northern California.

7 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Flying car? by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In what way is that a "car"?

    eg. Where do the kids/shopping go? If it rains you'll get wet.

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    No sig today...
    1. Re:Flying car? by pr0fessor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      it looks more like a flying jet ski... cool yes, car no.

    2. Re: Flying car? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's always the biggest problem. Cars make terrible planes. Planes make terrible cars. A hybrid car-plane makes terrible planes and cars.

      What needs to be targeted to something which can get you to parking, nearby to your destination, and then you use public transport to get to your destination. The whole concept of driving your plane on the highways is problematic. Not to mention, what about air safety when your car-plane has been involved in an accident? Do you trust that every potential fatigue issue has been resolved? Will you die 100-hours later because some minor thing became an issue from operational vibrations?

  2. Floating aircraft, roadable airplanes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is as close as we've gotten so far. Not that there's anything wrong with buoyant / water based aircraft or roadable airplanes - but they're not flying cars

  3. Still a dream by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with flying cars is neither technical nor financial. They will remain a dream. People can't even be trusted to move vehicles around on the ground without killing themselves or others. Flying cars will forever remain a dream even after they demonstrate a prototype, and even after they start offering them for sale.

  4. Energy is the problem by captaindomon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Energy is the problem, and it's pure physics so we won't be able to get around it. Burning energy to hover someone in the air against gravity, especially if they are mostly "hovering" and not flying 500 MPH forward, is going to be orders of magnitude more energy required than rolling them forward on wheels. The majority of the energy will be spent on the horizontal vector, not the forward vector. So unless we suddenly develop anti-gravity technology from aliens, or we want to increase the energy required for transportation by a few orders of magnitude, it's not going to happen.

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    Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
  5. We have flying cars... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...They are called airplanes. And there is a reason who don't just let people willy-nilly drive them around like we do cars