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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.'"
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
What brand of toilet paper Elon uses should make front page of Slashdot.
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.
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.
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.