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Uber CEO Sees Commercialization of Flying Taxis in 5-10 Years (reuters.com)
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on Tuesday he can see commercialization of the Uber Air flying taxi service happening within five to 10 years. From a report: The U.S. ride-hailing app maker has said it expects flying vehicles to eventually become an affordable method of mass transportation.
HAHAHAHA
NO.
translation: please stop talking about homicidal Uber Eats drivers on the loose and start picturing flying cars.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
points to Crypto currency Article
Lets be real here. It will take that long, just to get past the regulations after the technology is proven. Self Driving cars are used in a very limited conditions, A flying taxi, will be much further along...
Unless they are just doing something with Single engine airplanes. Say someone with a Cessna license. Can make some cash giving personal flights. Then yea 5-10 years to get the legal mumbo jumbo work done.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why?
If I could actually read the article I could confirm that I believe they are talking about private planes hiring themselves out via Uber and NOT "flying cars".
It's not a bad idea - I've got several friends with planes and they'd love to fly more but can't afford the fuel/maintenance costs to fly more often and this would be one way of getting around that. (maybe, if Uber doesn't shortchange them like its other drivers)
Plus there's the convenience of avoiding the TSA lines and crowds in general.
I wonder if Lyft planes would have to put a moustache on their plane...
Maybe he plans to bring back 50s style tail fins and add 80s style ghetto hydraulics, so Uber's cars can actually get a fraction of a second of air time.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Translation: Uber CEO wants everyone to think he is cool, like Elon Musk. So he makes random predictions about the future. It isn't realistic, though.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-strategy/uber-ceo-sees-commercialization-of-flying-taxis-in-5-10-years-idUSKCN1G40J3
It's illegal to take money for flights in private planes. Even having someone pay for fuel is a grey area, careful how you phrase the transaction.
The extra licensing/maintenance to operate as a charter is a big expense. Not going to happen.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The summary is the article, nigh verbatim:
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
One thing is certain: with autonomous blockchain AI along with SpaceX rockets into LEO, we are on the verge of flying taxis. It is inevitable.
Once Siri, Alexis, Google Assistant, et. al, form their super hive mind, they probably won't let us do anything as fun as flying cars.
Too dangerous, and an activity such as flying might remind the humans that they were once free.
Check your premises.
Drivers are largely idiots on a 2D driving surface. Can you imagine feckwits that ignore traffic lights, pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers operating in a 3D space? Nope, nope, nope.
Get fully-autonomous cars working well first. Once that's nailed down, if the technology even exists for 3D vehicular travel, make sure there's zero chance of any meatbags getting access to the controls before making it a reality.
It was (and still is in some places) illegal to act as a taxi service in many cities without having a medallion.
There's also far greater safety concerns too.
But I don't think it's insurmountable and probably why they're saying 5-10 years out - probably to hash out the legalities and not the actually DOING it part.
No.
It's 5-10 years out because it's _bullshit_. Uber lives on hype.
Taxis are hailed on the street. Uber is a car charter service. There are no such hairs to split in aviation. Take money for a flight, carry a commercial pilot's license and charter company license.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It will take that long, just to get past the regulations after the technology is proven.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means it won't happen in America. Just like in biotech, America's overregulation means technological leadership will occur elsewhere.
Flying taxis have been a thing for years. It's done with airplanes. These days there's even websites dedicated to it. Just like uber didn't invent the regular taxi, they didn't invent the flying one either. Apparently Dara has never heard of google. Here's one of many: http://www.linearair.com/
Whats gonna come first, flying taxis or a profitable uber?
I think you are confusing license/certification types with aircraft types. Taking money or other payment for providing the service of flying requires a commercial pilot or airline transport pilot license. There are multiple types of licenses from sport pilot, recreational pilot, private pilot, to airline transport pilot and a couple obscure ones in-between.
It is possible to accept payment for transporting a passenger in a Cessna single-prop aircraft. However, the licensing and certification requirements (commercial pilot) would be excessive for the type of person who would own and fly such an airplane. That is why it is rarely ever done in practice.
source source.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
This CEO is looking dumber and dumber. First he thinks he can just turn on the profit spigot by twisting a few knobs (I don't think he understands his market or his business) and now he thinks we'll have viable flying cars/taxis in the next 5-10 years when there is practically no working prototype in existence. Right now, in today's world of automobiles, the hottest stuff is electric and self-driving. Electric is getting pretty close to polished, but still has a lot of room for improvement. Autonomous cars haven't even fully exited the birthing canal and are not even in diapers yet. In 5-10 years we still won't see more than 20% of cars on the road being fully electric. We won't be seeing even 5% that are fully autonomous. Maybe, just maybe, in 5-10 years, 5-10 people (out of billions) will have seen a real flying taxi in person.
This guy is totally and completely out of touch with reality. We are a minimum of 50-100 years from seeing flying taxis in any regular fashion and even then, unless some true "hover" /anti-gravity technology comes to be we won't see it on any regular basis ever. 1000s of cars blowing air around, making a ton of noise to fly isn't going to be a solution anyone wants.
This CEO sees Uber as bankrupt in 5-10 years.
I don't respond to AC's.
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2018-02-20/uber-ceo-sees-commercialization-of-flying-taxis-in-5-10-years
he's short on details, meaning there are none, just a dumbass statement thinking there will be flying taxis in 5-10 years. Sorry buddy, it's not going to happen, and it's not going to happen our lifetime, maybe if you were born after 2000, maybe. What this guy lacks in knowledge he sure makes up for in imagination. If I was sitting on the Uber board, I'd be clamoring for his firing.
Other than the sci-fi appeal, I don't see that flying cars being more practical than regular cars. First of which is that they are less fuel efficient. You can go anywhere in a flying car which is a problem as you'll see them crashing into homes and lawns, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
A charter Cessna has to be maintained/inspected to a higher standard than a private Cessna. They do exist, mostly in Alaska.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, that will not happen.
Nice try, fly guy, but we all know how to take those down.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is just attention-whoring from Uber.
NEWSFLASH: regulations don't matter due to the fact that flying cars don't exist. You cannot possibly be this naive.
Wishful thinking maybe but 5 to 10 years? How about double if ever. Trouble is the FAA has been very much resistant to drone flight and I am certain flying taxi's won't fair much better with the FAA. Especially around big cities where commercial flight are in play. Frankly the liability insurance and cost of such a vehicle would probably price itself out of business anyway. Except maybe for the one percent trying to get somewhere. This is even accepting that Uber will even be around in 5 or so years?
That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means it won't happen in America.
It won't happen in Murica for a good reason.
However, I can see it happen in locations where they place little to no value on human life; Shanghai for example.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
It will take that long, just to get past the regulations after the technology is proven.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means it won't happen in America. Just like in biotech, America's overregulation means technological leadership will occur elsewhere.
Pray tell, which abhorrent regulations do you think should be swept aside to allow for the speedy development of flying taxis. I mean what could possibly go wrong with a massive increase in air traffic, at low altitudes above major population centers.
Translation:
Uber CEO sees opportunity for sound bytes in the press.
Uber. Uber. Uberuberuber. Uber. Let's talk about Uber. UBER. Cows say UBER. UBER says the cows. UUUUUUUBER. Uber luddites.
the faa will not like uber independent contractor system when it comes down to responsibly for safety and upkeep.
So he's solved the liability problem by requiring all the flying cars that fall out of the sky be owned by other people, so he doesn't get sued personally? I'm sure making them safe will be a much higher priority than corporate profits!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As far as flying taxis, yes there are proofs of concept on this, one person super lightweight vehicles, that can fly short distances. But the energy it takes to power these is quite high. The noise is ridiculous, the areas available for take-off/landing are unavailable in the cities where this is supposed to make sense. And I assume the tech will need to be much better in the 3D environment than the 2D one. It will not ever be mass transportation.
Also, it only takes one of these https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to set the whole process back decades.
autopilot software has a high level of testing and fail safe modes that drives up dev costs.
since when has uber let regulations and laws stop them??lol
Jack of all trades,master of none
soon after pigs fly.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Other than the sci-fi appeal, I don't see that flying cars being more practical than regular cars. First of which is that they are less fuel efficient. You can go anywhere in a flying car which is a problem as you'll see them crashing into homes and lawns, etc.
Flying cars would allow stacking of lanes so that we could have 50 lane highways without needing to build the highways. It would allow several orders of magnitude more traffic and eliminate traffic jams and the need to build highways. That being said, I don't see flying cars ever happening until we have the ability to defy gravity and position a stopped vehicle vertically in space. Our current technologies of jets, planes, helicopters, and hovercrafts wouldn't work well with stacked vertical lanes like seen in Fifth Element and similar. Some sort of dirigible might work but I don't see that happening without being able to manipulate gravity or some major improvement to dirigibles or some other major technological breakthru.
More steaming bs from the halitosis infected gaping maw of the Uber troll. The FCC already shot down the "ride share" option for private pilots. Commercial aircraft require years of testing, redundancy, and certification - none of which has an ecosystem what-so-ever. Not to mention, in order to be commercially viable and affordable to the average user, the price point of aircraft acquisition needs to be close to the price point of a used Prius. good luck.
It was (and still is in some places) illegal to act as a taxi service in many cities without having a medallion.
Except that there's no big authority that cares when big company ignores it. Like for most other normally established rules that are not valid for big corporations. Trying the same with planes, there is an aviation authority that will watch whatever happens closely, and take appropriate action in a very timely manner.
Is the Uber CEO seeing flying pigs? Tim S.
I feel confident that, based on the observation of history and with a fairly decent grasp of engineering and the legality surrounding flying, that in five to ten years time I'll be vindicated when I say: nope.
Right, flying cars, but with or without a human driver?
The FAA, an organization that is nothing more than a huge pain in the ass, is the primary reason why the number of licensed pilots has been declining. This hasn't been going on for just years, not just decades, but for _generations_.
The FAA does everything it can to prevent people from earning a living using the pilot licenses that take years and tens of thousands of dollars each to get. People wonder why general aviation is dying out. Meanwhile, the FAA thinks everything's fine and won't even acknowledge that a problem exists.
The general aviation community wanted the FAA to drop the requirement for a 3rd class medical certificate for private pilots. This is mostly because of the statistical fact that less than 5 percent of all general aviation accidents involve medical problems that occur during a flight. The FAA dragged its feet for over _ten years_ to finally regurgitate a new bureaucracy and a new set of rules called "Basic Med". The government grew larger instead of getting smaller. Government regulations increased instead of decreasing.
The crux of the new rules is not that they got rid of the requirement for the 3rd class medical certificate. The new rules let pilots complete a checklist with their doctors. The checklist signed by a doctor substitutes for a 3rd class medical certificate while also shifting the financial liability from the FAA to the doctor that signed the Basic Med checklist and his or her malpractice insurance. Doctors would have to pay higher malpractice insurance premiums as a result. No doctor in his or her right mind would ever sign such a thing. So, in traditional fashion, the government took a request from the governed that would have been a good idea and ruined everything for everybody instead.
Given the mentality of the FAA, if Uber thinks it can make the FAA change, they are just plain stupid. If they think they can get pilots to fly as airborne Uber drivers and simply ignore the current regulations and then fight it out in court after somebody gets arrested, well that won't work out either. Uber appears to be betting that pilots are just as stupid as the car drivers who simply accept whatever pittance Uber pays them. Unfortunately, that simply isn't the case. Pilots are some of the highest quality and intelligent people there are. I doubt very much that any pilot will be willing to risk his or her license and create a criminal arrest record just to be the sacrificial lamb needed for Uber to initiate their lawsuits.
*cough*BULLSHIT *cough*
Again I don't question theoretically you can "stack" them. I question that with cars fixed to the road, today's drivers have a habit of hitting things not on the road. Like homes and lawns.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Eat cock slashmodwhores.
Real flying cars have existed in the USA since author Gore Vidal's dad Eugene was running the predecessor of the FAA (the Bureau of Air Commerce) in the 1930s. If you scour YouTube you can probably find newsreel footage of the younger Vidal posing in one of those craft with his dad in Washington DC back then. That was not the quadcopter type system most envision today as a "flying taxi", but the point is that even the simpler 1930's style non-VTOL sort of flying car has not yet matured enough to make the FAA accept it in all these decades.
The problem for the past 80 years is not that the idea is unworkable; the problem is that the federal regulators love the idea as a flashy image of progress and of the future they dangle before the public (as government and regulatory progress), but they despise the reality and will do everything they possibly can to retard the effort. To the extent that the regulators can forbid required elements, they do. To the extent that they cannot block the elements, they hyper-regulate them so that they become far to expensive and this renders the complete vehicles to expensive for anybody but a billionaire. The FAA is frightened of that many independent vehicles and operators in the airspace. They would prefer to ban everything but large commercial aircraft and only have to regulate a couple huge rich manufacturers and a handful of airlines, but that annoying congress keeps making them accept private planes and model airplanes into "their" airspace.
Add to that all the regulations, time, and costs for driver traininng and licensing.... or in the case of an unmanned system the design analysis and code approvals, and the costs go through the roof. Incidentally, having worked on the code for an autopilot system, I can pretty safely say the FAA will not within the next century approve a self-flying manned vehicle. The FAA will only approve self-flying cars after it approves crewless airliners, whose manufacturers, systems, and procedures are well-understood to the FAA and thus give the agency far more comfort. The FAA does not exactly trust microprocessors and is still arguably happier with the safety record of vacuum tubes. Some of the agency's software and hardware requirements for avionics demonstrate a certain level of paranoid ignorance and a preference for things certain regulators believe to be safer while actually being more dangerous (sadly, in this case ignorance is not bliss). Some of the things they demand actually make things less safe, and they are not actually equipped to argue their side with data, but the people they regulate just have to roll withi it because they need FAA approval. Their treatment of modern avioncs regulations and the effect that has had on keeping certain capabilities out of avionics for small single-engine aircraft cause me to feel they are partly to blame for most of the incidents of such aircraft stalling on approach to runways.
Obviously nobody has RTFA because the link is wrong.
This CEO is looking dumber and dumber.
His product is his company, not the services it provides. His customers are the future IPO investors, not the riders. And the more ridiculously ambitious you make a project, the more money you can demand for it during your IPO.
And by the way, small commercial jets and helicopters do exist already. For instance, you can jump on a small scheduled shared jet from San Jose to Los Angeles without having to go through a huge airport and without having to deal with all the TSA bullshit.
https://www.jetsuitex.com/dest... Or if you're in the middle of nowhere in Canada or Alaska, small airplane taxis are already hugely important to you as well.
And now, it's just a matter of making jets and helicopters as easy to fly as drones to make the price of the pilots as low as possible (that is, until those pilots can be fully automated and replaced down the line).
But even if that market doesn't really materialize for Uber, that doesn't matter. Their main goal is their IPO. And if they mention flying taxis, that means they'll get lots of free publicity from everyone and that also means they can ask for an extra x number of billion dollars, which will inflate their market cap even more.
I can't think of any regulations, but I can think of a particular law that keeps getting in the way, and if we could get rid of it, flying taxis would be here far sooner. I believe it's called the law of gravity.
Seriously, the number one reason none of this will never happen is cost, plain and simple. You'll never have flying cars for the same reason we don't have them now. The whole idea of battery powered aircraft is laughable unless there is one hell of a break through in battery tech. You need hydrocarbons or something even more energy dense, otherwise the weight issues will keep them from ever taking off. Also, most drivers can't handle 2-D movement, so to handle 3-D movement (actually more like 5-D when you consider pitch and roll), you need true self driving vehicles, and we can't even handle that in 2-D right now.
This is a non-starter before we even get to thinking about regulations. I doubt the Uber guy is thinking about typical light aircraft (and weather capability immediately makes doing that completely impractical outside of places with 350 VFR days per year), but probably on the lines of scaled-up quadcopters that can carry people, flying around cities - no doubt based on the recent prototype seen at CES.
It works fine for small RC drones, but the thing is: quad/hexcopters (etc) basically brute force themselves into the air. They are tremendously inefficient and scale badly. To keep the rotor inertia down low enough you can use simple fixed pitch propellers (rather than complex (expensive) collective pitch rotors like a helicopter) they are going to have to be small and high RPM.
The racket will be unbearable. If you think city noise is bad right now just with road traffic, it will be ten times worse if you had even just hundreds of quadcopters big enough to lift people flying around. There will be no refuge anywhere in a city from the unbelievable and annoying racket these things will make - due to the differeing rotor rpms on just one vehicle, there will be an annoying set of beat frequencies generated by the lift systems to add to the ungodly racket from the fundamental frequency.
Today you can go into a city park, even in a big noisy city, and get away from the noise. Walk a couple of minutes into any of the big London parks and it's pretty peaceful. This will be a distant history if there are hundreds of people-carrying quadcopters (or indeed any -copter type vehicle) flying around the city. People living and working in the city just won't stand for it. To add to that, most people don't like flying to start with and only do so because it's the only practical way of crossing an ocean or going somewhere 2000 miles away. In a city, given the choice, a lot of people would rather take a metro system than board some kind of absurdly noisy automated flying machine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Again I don't question theoretically you can "stack" them. I question that with cars fixed to the road, today's drivers have a habit of hitting things not on the road. Like homes and lawns.
The most obvious solution is to not let humans control their own flying vehicles anywhere they might cause a problem. You can fly over water, or over a desert, but you're not going to be allowed to fly over populated areas without an actual pilot's license.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The most obvious solution is to not let humans control their own flying vehicles anywhere they might cause a problem. You can fly over water, or over a desert, but you're not going to be allowed to fly over populated areas without an actual pilot's license.
That would require AIs to be extremely infallible. It's on the level of sci-fi FTL drives but not seemingly practical anytime soon.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That would require AIs to be extremely infallible. It's on the level of sci-fi FTL drives but not seemingly practical anytime soon.
What? Existing video game-level AI is capable of doing this job. Granted, not every video game is a good example, but there have long been simulations with enemy AI that doesn't fly into the ground, other planes, or into buildings.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Very true. No 'self driving' car company has even _started_ developing to FAA standards.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'