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Why Elon Musk Doesn't Like Flying Cars (yahoo.com)
boley1 quotes Business Insider:
According to Elon Musk, the main challenges with flying cars are that they'll be noisy and generate lots of wind because of the downward force required to keep them in the air. Plus, there's an anxiety factor. "Let's just say if something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation," he said. "You don't think to yourself 'Well, I feel better about today. You're thinking 'Is it going to come off and guillotine me as it comes flying past?'"
He also doesn't like them because his company, The Boring Company, wants to provide a competing transportation solution.
He also doesn't like them because people will report on that, and then people will talk about his boring company. It's extremely profitable dislike.
On the other hand, I agree with him. Adding more air traffic is inefficient at best.
On the third hand, there's probably plenty of places where tunnels won't work. That's not a reason not to build tunnels where they will work, but we still need something which handles those situations. I still like elevated PRT.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One can hear a helicopter kilometers away. Now imagine having thousands of those in the air all the time. Unbearable unless they first pass a law to surgically make us deaf. Then it's OK.
they can barely keep out of collisions on the ground, which covers left, right, forward and backwards, if they get the added complications of up and down and crash landings from up high it will only cause more death and destruction on top of the messes the typical driver does already
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
They already are, if that's what you mean by useless. It's already possible to practice flying in simulation, then get some manuals and learn how to actually start up a plane, then stroll onto an airfield someplace and steal one since so many of them have basically no security.
You won't be allowed to control a flying taxi manually, and they will be totally dependent on their computers to fly so you're not going to be trivially overriding them from inside the cockpit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What brand of toilet paper Elon uses should make front page of Slashdot.
Most airplanes are circumscribed to landing and taking off in special areas called airports and their use is highly regulated. That diminishes somewhat the worries people have of seeing their neighbors (who they've seen driving into trees and parked cars) attempting to master flight.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
He does have a point in that anything owned and operated by the general public tends to be maintained to a lower standard than anything owned and operated in an industry which has rigorous maintenance standards and penalties for not following them, such as the airline industry...
Even with private aircraft and pilots, the pre-flight walk rounds can take more time than the flight - precisely because it is necessary to ensure some level of safety.
That is what terrifies me about the flying car concept - all the ideas are around private ownership and operation. Knowing that some people in the UK are more than willing to not maintain their cars to the level of passing a £35 governmental standard test (the MOT, once a year) and instead drive potentially unsafe cars around illegally, I don't want that situation when those cars take to the air...
Yes, because when people talk about flying cars, they totally mean manual piloting.
Um...
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
Naw, the flying cars won't work well enough to be a security problem.
Seriously, You're absolutely correct. I expect that once the problem becomes apparent, the use of Personal Air Vehicles will be SEVERELY restricted. Might still be some usage for taxis and delivery services -- if the vehicles can be made safe enough, if they can't land on people, and can really be kept out of restricted areas including military bases, public areas, parks, etc, etc, etc.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The problem with flying cars is... well they are flying. Which means they are in the air over our heads all the time. When a normal car malfunctions it is only traveling in two dimensial space and on a designated road, which means the damage is minimal given the cirumstances. When a flying car malfunctions he will not only crash into other flying cars in the same two dimensial space he will also fall in the third dimension and on other flying cars below him creating a cascading disaster and they will fall onto buildings, bridges, schools, stadiums e.t.c.
The only way flying cars will be a reality is that if they are treated exactly like airplanes, with all the pilot training, monitoring and security measures that comes with that or they will have their own "sky roads" which they follow, but in that case the point of flying cars are greatly reduced.
The real reason Elon Musk wouldn't want flying cars is because his [SECRET!] boyfriend Jeff Bezos would actually have to fly the car due to FAA regulations.
The real reason is because Elon is boring.
I am a major skeptic about the whole flying-car idea. For many reasons, but not the same reasons as Musk.
Here, I am disagreeing with one of Musk's points out of technical nit-pickery, but I DO agree with his overall conclusion that flying cars are not the right answer to personal transportation.
I agree they will be noisy. That will never be fully solved. (And expensive and unsafe, but that's off topic.)
But, Musk's wind objection -- I just don't buy it.
Yes, aircraft generate lift by displacing air downwards. Some inclined plane (either the wings, or the rotor blades) deflects air downwards, creating an equal and opposite force upwards. So yes, all flying machines "create downward wind". Some do it highly efficiently (at optimum cruising speed, a typical fixed-wing plane or even to a lesser extent a helicopter). Some do it a little less efficiently (a fixed wing plane at very low airspeed), and some do it horribly inefficiently (a helicopter or drone hovering).
The efficiency is largely a function of the craft's forward speed through the air, for a very basic Newtonian reason. F = ma.
The upward FORCE (which must counterbalance the aircraft's weight) must be matched by downwards ACCELERATION of some MASS of air. Acceleration is not velocity, it is rate of change of velocity. Therefore, lift comes from the act of imparting new or increased downward velocity on some mass of air. Absolute velocity doesn't help, only increase in velocity. Hold that thought, we'll get back to it.
An aircraft moving forward horizontally encounters a steady supply of new air that does not yet have any vertical velocity. OTOH, once an aircraft that is hovering, has imparted downward velocity on a column of air, it remains within that accelerated column as it tries to accelerate more mass downwards. The established downward velocity of the air doesn't help, only the acceleration (increase) in downward velocity of some part of that air. To solidify this concept, think of "swimming up a waterfall".
Hopefully this illustrates why hovering is highly inefficient, and cruising is much more efficient.
Enter simple economics. Any economically VIABLE system of flying vehicles spends the minimum time hovering and the maximum time cruising. This is the reason helicopters are used only for specialized tasks or by rich people, while fixed wing planes are used for general transportation. While I don't personally believe that flying cars will take off (bad pun semi-intended), if they do, simple economics dictate that they won't spend much time milling around close to their terminals hovering. They will rapidly get a move on along their course. Once they are moving en-route, their "downward wind" is over such a dispersed area that is is essentially immeasurable.
I don't know what exact means they'll use to transition from takeoff to cruise -- rotors, fixed wings, adjustable wings, whatever -- but they won't be concentrating their "downward wind" in one small place for very long. If one's vision of personal air transportation involves any significant time hovering close to the terminal, then economics dictate that it won't succeed. And downward wind during cruise is simply not a problem.
There will be some localized wind right at the terminals, but if you've ever stood nearby when a helicopter takes off, you know that it is windy very strong but very localized, and does not persist long after the helicopter moves away.
The bigger question is why we have to move around so much. Why does ever journey in modern suburban life require driving? I live in a city, and can walk to restaurants, walk to work, walk to the supermarket. I accept this is not for everyone, but suburban life sits at the other end, where getting a pint of milk requires driving. Add in congestion and parking issues and it is like a real-life rube-goldberg machine for living.
Stop this obsession with single use planning zones, and the need for humans to turn up in person everywhere and much of these problems can be fixed. It's not like we fixed the time it takes to deliver mail by having a fleet of hypersonic aircraft that can deliver letters anywhere in the world in less than an hour. We just used different technological solutions instead and got far better results. Similarly, the solution to traffic congestion is to stop this ridiculous need for the inhabitants of a city to shuffle back and forth between two areas everyday. The original argument for single use planning was that it would improve quality of life. It evidently does not, because the highest real estate prices now are for quality housing in dense urban areas where people can walk around their local communities.
Ehm, how is a "flying car" - which, in the current incarnations that actually are able to fly, really means a roadable airplane, including the requirements to have a pilot license and flight training - different from renting/stealing a Cessna from the nearest general aviation airport and smashing it somewhere?
The entire point of the IS calling for use of cars was because *anyone* can drive one and they are trivial to obtain. Neither of which is true when it comes to anything flying.
I somehow don't see this happening again since 9/11 - could that be because it is simply too complex, costly, risky and inefficient at actually causing mayhem?
But the terrorism bogeyman is so convenient for getting eyeballs and clicks ...
The tunnel is actually plausible. Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot. So a 20 mile stretch from San Jose to Palo Alto, with a tube in each direction, would cost roughly $2B, which is affordable. For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls. If the toll was $10 each way, that would be 30,000 round trips. Since it could draw traffic from both US-101 and I-280, that is plausible.
Flying cars for mass transportation, with existing tech, are a fantasy.
It does not matter, cars are involved in hundreds of thousands of minor accidents every year. Once you put the word flying into anything so the word minor disappears from the accident, no such thing as a minor flying accident, just how many died and how many survived and do that over a metropolitan area and add how many innocent bystanders died. The more flying vehicles the greater the number of accidents, done and finished.
Underground automated transport corridor, makes by far the most sense and is bound to be the future model. Most people wont ever bother with ownership, just call up a service via mobile at it comes right to your location and takes you were you want to go and the goes off to pick up some one else, all available 24/7, no drivers, secured in a control space underground (the hugely reduced number of private vehicles will drive up their price, the impact of hugely reduced production levels carrying large development costs).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen