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

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.

Comments

Flying car?

[Joce640k]

In what way is that a "car"?

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

Still a dream

[thegarbz]

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.

Energy is the problem

[captaindomon]

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.

Re:Yes still a dream

[captaindomon]

Case in point: Utah just dropped mandatory safety inspections for cars because people didn't like them. Eleven other states don't require any kind of safety inspection. That's somewhat OK in cars, where if something goes horribly wrong your car mostly coasts to the side of the road. With flight, if something goes horribly wrong you mostly die. So yeah, going from that to aircraft-level maintenance ain't going to happen normal drivers. http://fox13now.com/2017/03/26... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...