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Larry Page's Flying Taxis, Now Exiting Stealth Mode (nytimes.com)
Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page's autonomous flying taxi company Kitty Hawk on Tuesday unveiled its "fully electric, self-piloting flying taxi" called Cora. Since October, Cora has been seen moving through the skies over the South Island of New Zealand. It looks like a cross between a small plane and a drone, with a series of small rotor blades along each wing that allow it to take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane. The New York Times reports: Now that project is about to go public: On Tuesday, Mr. Page's company and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, will announce they have reached an agreement to test Kitty Hawk's autonomous planes as part of an official certification process. The hope is that it will lead to a commercial network of flying taxis in New Zealand in as soon as three years. The move is a big step forward in the commercialization of this technology, which even the most optimistic prognosticators had recently bet would take another decade to achieve. The decision to embrace the commercial use of flying taxis offers New Zealand an opportunity to leapfrog many developed countries in this area, and perhaps give it a head start over Silicon Valley, where much of the most innovative work has been taking place.
Excellent!!
I WANT MY FLYING CAR ...even if I have to go to New Zealand to get it.
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New Zealand's not a realistic testbed, they only have two destinations, hobbitown and mt doom.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Isn't it a bit too bold? I for one see great opportunity for things going wrong very fast.
I had a discussion on another flying car on the AvWeek website a year or so ago where a company is testing their design in Southern California where there's no wild temperature swings/rain/snow/fog and they were hoping to get it certified but really didn't think about the weather elsewhere on the planet (or even the United States where the North East is getting it's third Blizzard in two weeks).
I thought the weather in New Zealand was fairly benign, which I would think is a good starting point, but doesn't really help with certifying the aircraft for the rest of the world.
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Those are expensive to operate, as the energy requirement to keep something afloat without it being as or less dense than the surrounding environment is quite big, they are incredibly noisy, need really good maintenance, as any incident can cause death of passengers and people around, which is expensive, and they cannot carry much, and this machine specifically has some limbs chopping propellers, which are just asking to be a major safety hazard with children and drunk people.
We already have "flying cars" called helicopters, and they absurdly expensive and complicated machines, that only work for very wealthy people or business like offshore oil exploration, because the alternative is either very inconvenient, takes a lot more time, or can is even more expensive.
Technology was never the issue with flying cars but safety always was. After all if a car stalls you can pull over, if a plane stalls there's a real risk of you dying and crashing onto someones house or building. The other issue is efficiency. I'm sure VTOL designs use a tremendous amount of power to lift or and to land which means even if these were viable, they're going to be super expensive taxis.
Well, at least all those billionaires will have the necessary convenience of flying taxis when they flee to their boltholes in New Zealand after sucking America dry.
Where's Dr Charles Luther when the World really needs him?
MNZGA!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Its clearly an aircraft with non retractable wings that would get about 10 foot down a road before the wings collided with part of the scenery.
Awesome. I can't wait to fly to work so I can snooze and occasionally push my one huge button.
One had a low wing, one had a high wing. One would hope the high wing model will be the one to go into production if ground safety issues have anything to do with it. I really don't think many people will want to work around an aircraft with a dozen unsheilded lawnmower blades at waist height as there's always a small chance some kind of hardware or software error might make one spin up by mistake.
What a monstrous thing is that. There is a reason that helicopters have big main rotors: they are way more efficient than multiple smaller ones. Off course, the small quadcopters can get away with it because they are so small (the Square Cube Law: scaling down an aircraft decreases the weight faster than the wing or rotor surface that holds it in the air).
The only positive thing is that in normal flight it uses wings, so it can glide in case of emergency, but it looks extremely vulnerable during take off and vertical landings, as I cannot image these upward propellers to provide any useful autorotation. If the thing is autonomous, will there be controls in case of emergency? And if not, how can they ever hope to get a permit for these things?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
sifting through flying car jokes in the comments section is whimsical, but as a millennial I wasnt promised flying cars in my future, i was promised a dystopian cyberpunk pesudo-utopia run by evil megacorps.
i wont be happy until an army of these things are deployed to relocate cybernetic self-aware corgis to robo-france as part of an effort by UN-Bot-3000 to quell unrest surrounding the birth of a telepathic, 6-legged mario plumber from a haunted cyber-womb.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Technology was never the issue with flying cars but safety always was
While I agree that safety was/is a huge issue with them, the technology is a show stopper issue too. Since we lack Tony Stark's arc reactor we really don't have a power source with a power to weight ratio adequate to make a flying car a practical reality. There is no technology that is not science fiction that is going to make flying cars a reality nor is there any reasonable prospect of such a technology any time soon. This issue alone makes flying cars literally an impossibility.
There also is the fact that our infrastructure is utterly unprepared for a flying car. Our parking lots and roads were not designed with 3 dimensions in mind. Even full autonomous control doesn't solve this problem. We'd have to completely rebuild our infrastructure to make flying cars practical even if it were technologically possible to make them. I think Elon Musk is correct that it's a LOT more practical to dig than to try to fly if we want to add a third dimension to our routine travel. We still have the technology to fly but trying to make a flying car is like putting a rocket motor on a cement block - even if you get it in the air it's still a dumb idea.
Great, just what we need. Stealth flying bombs.
Hail one of these flying taxis, load a bomb in the passenger seat, tell it where to go. Smartphone triggers the bomb when GPS tells it "you have arrived at your destination".
Implicit in the distinction of 'flying cars' is the idea that they have the ease of use, maintenance, and safety of cars with the added ability of not needing roads
None of which are realistic. People can barely handle cars safely and we're going to allow them to fly? No thanks. Plus an aircraft has to be MUCH safer than a car, otherwise it is a huge danger not just to the occupants but to whatever they hit when the inevitable crash happens. More safety = more maintenance and/or more expense.
And if you don't need roads then it isn't a car now is it? Then it's just an aircraft.
If it has all the qualities you mentioned: expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, loud, etc, then it's not a 'flying car.'
Well, cars are expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, and loud so it's puzzling to me why anyone would thing a flying car would somehow be less so.
I actually thought the rather large vertical stabilizer was probably there so it could pitch up and auto-rotate down in the case of total failure (the inertia of the out runner motors might even allow a landing flair). I also wonder if it uses those rotors to provide some auto-rotation lift during normal operation (essentially reducing the wing loading). That would be quite smart, as otherwise they are just massive amounts of appendage drag.
There are a lot of redundancy paths in this project. For rural transport where you don't have to be so smart about where you land in an emergency, and if weather patterns are stable, then I actually think it could work quite well. But yeah, I don't think we will be flying these to work anytime soon.
'Autonomous' vehicles of any kind
Utter and complete stupidity.
WE DO NOT HAVE 'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE'. At best we have 'pseudo-intelligence', ersatz, the illusion of 'intelligence'. Meanwhile your dog or cat is more intelligent. You're fools if you set foot in ANY vehicles of this type.
Hopefully Page keeps this company independent from Alphabet. I think it sounds really promising, but I would hate to see Google continue to expand its reach. Keeping this venture independent would allow more market diversity. This is what made me uneasy about Google's autonomous vehicles. By allowing them in every facet of our lives, we're allowing for some scary data mining, especially when governments compel them to share those data.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
In New York, you can't even fly a drone (allowed in parks). Why would anyone allow an obvious hazard like a copter. Whether accident or terrorism, this has the capacity to cause lots of death and destruction, and in areas where people are currently safe. You can die crossing the street, but currently you are pretty safe in your home. No more. At least if these things don't mass much they can't take out a whole house (unless loaded with explosives of course).
More of the usual nonsense: a ridiculous, tiny airplane with folding wings. That's not a flying car. Flying cars, as they are generally envisioned (think Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, etc.) obviously rely on technologies that we do not currently have, and that we are not likely to have this century. By insisting in calling these silly things "flying cars", the manufacturers are bound to Segway themselves - those of us who have been around for a while remember the Segway, a device that was bound to revolutionize transportation. We also remember thinking, "This piece of junk is going to revolutionize transportation?" as it was unveiled.
If you want to know just how ridiculous a flying car for the masses is, just go take an introductory flying lesson.
Quite so. Even fully automating a vehicle's navigation and controls doesn't solve the problem. For aircraft to safely fly they have to have a rather rigorous level of inspection and maintenance, well beyond what most people are capable of (including myself).
Then there is the ridiculous energy cost to flying. Trying to lift something the size of a car into the air will suck energy at a enormous rate.
I get that the idea of a flying car is appealing but if you give it a few moment's thought it's a really dumb concept. It doesn't solve any burning problems, it's hugely expensive, the technology doesn't exist and likely never will, it's terrible for the environment, our infrastructure isn't designed for it, and it's dangerous.
Until they build several hundred copies that rack up at least a few million miles and a few hundreds of thousands of hours.
Don't be the dude shaking out all the bugs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We keep giving more money to a handful of lucky winners. They've run out of things to spend their money on, so we get nonsense like this and Elon Musk launching a car into space (yes, I know it was a test launch, but do you honestly think you couldn't find some scientists that couldn't come up with the cash to put something better than a car into orbit?).
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I can't wait for these to come off lease, or start showing up for sale at Goodwill.
If you have explosives and wish to destroy a home, an aircraft would probably not be your first choice of delivery mechanism. However, if you were so inclined, you might profitably study the explosives research performed in the 1950s and 60s by one W. E. Coyote.
Then it's a good thing that the term "anti-gravity" barely escapes being a complete oxymoron in the context of modern physics. It's about as sensible as an "anti-geometry" device.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The FAA requires flights in the US to be planned to have a minimum of 30 minutes of fuel remaining at the end of the flight for Day VFR operations. 45 minutes for night or IFR flights. The requirement is there for a reason, as running out of fuel is a consistently high ranking cause of accidents. In my Zenith Zodiac 601XL, which has approximately the same performance as this vehicle, it is generally around 15 minutes between arriving at an airport and getting it on the ground. Setting up in the pattern for a coordinated landing with the other traffic actually takes time.
This thing cruises at 93mph, and has a 62mile range....somewhere around 40 minutes of flight time.
To fly across the city, say 20 miles, there is going to be several minutes of climb out, and something on the order of 15 minutes of en route time. Every landing would have to be an emergency declaration disrupting any traffic pattern.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
So true. Trying to get out while I still can. Who the hell modded this down?
I am certain the reason they are testing here in New Zealand is the complete lack of regulatory control around drones. The very same reason that the Chinese launch low orbit rockets from here. So what may work here probably wouldn't fly in other countries.
Perhaps someone who has the guts to logon with a name logged you down?
Do you need a lift to the airport? I am always willing to help dumb-asses like yourself leave Godzone.
Go to Australia and raise the average IQ of both countries (my apologies to ex- PM R D 'Piggy' Muldoon for mangling his quote).
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
It's not difficult to imagine personal multicopters being much safer than the average car is today.
Only to those who have no clue about real engineering, physics, and economics that goes into such devices and their reliability. Modern cars have had over a century of development to get to their somewhat pathetic safety record. Let's not pretend that a far more complicated flying version is going to be better without a lot of people dying in the process.
Personal flying cars are a stupid and unrealistic idea. Let it go. It isn't going to happen without some massive and unforeseen technological advance.
It will do all kinds of self-tests and if it detects a fault, it will refuse to fly.
If it were possible to do that sort of comprehensive self testing economically, commercial airlines would already be doing it but that's not how real world safety systems work. Back here on planet earth things are a little more complicated. There is a reason that pilots and ground maintenance to this day do walkarounds and have extensive checklists before flights. It's not because of a sense of nostalgia.
As for who's controlling the aircraft...
It doesn't matter. Physics and economics make flying cars impossible as a practical concern. Until you can present us some real world version of Tony Stark's arc reactor at a deeply unrealistic price point ALL your arguments about flying cars are moot. The closest thing you'll see are some planes and helicopters with automated piloting.
Nope. If you RTFA you'd know that these things are autonomous.
If you'd read the discussion thread you'd know we weren't talking about the vehicle in TFA. We were talking about a more generic flying car.
Yes, unsurprisingly, they've planned an end-run around this most obvious show-stopper; no pilots' licences are required.
Fancy autonomous controls of flying vehicles is hardly news these days. Drones are not exactly a new thing including those of the self piloting variety. Modern aircraft essentially fly themselves and are controlled electronically. The pilot basically directs the computers which actually fly the plane. It's a comparatively short hop to making the computer make all the decisions. None of that is remotely in the category of making a flying car. Autonomous control of an airplane is not the same thing as an autonomous flying car.
Personal flying cars are a stupid and unrealistic idea. Let it go.
I say over and over again in this discussion that A) these are NOT flying cars and B) that flying taxis are a non-starter. However, the particular objections you raise are unfounded and unthought, and are actually setting the conversation back because they are so very wrong.
Physics and economics make flying cars impossible as a practical concern. Until you can present us some real world version of Tony Stark's arc reactor at a deeply unrealistic price point ALL your arguments about flying cars are moot.
I did not make any arguments about flying cars. I state over and over again in this discussion that there are not and will not be flying cars, because a flying car is something that can VTOL from your driveway or at least from the highway. I am making arguments about your arguments about flying vehicles, which are completely wrong. We are already using flying vehicles and we are absolutely, positively going to be using electric multicopters to make short hops, just like traditional helicopters do today. And they absolutely will be making more flights than those helis do now. That doesn't make them flying cars, but it does negate literally every single one of your objections to electric multicopters. And you're using nonsensical arguments against flying cars while only one matters.
You are completely, utterly, totally and in all other ways wrong about needing shipstones for electric flying vehicles. There are already electric multicopter prototypes capable of making flights of useful duration. The only thing you can't reasonably do is combine that vehicle with a roadgoing car, because you can't have crash safety and the necessarily light vehicle weight in the same package. You are also completely wrong about whether you could let people control them, because it's simple enough to take away control when they are doing something stupid. I don't understand why you would defend these completely wrongheaded, unfounded arguments, especially when there are already ample counterexamples which disprove your conclusions.
TL;DR: I don't think we're going to have flying cars, probably ever, because they don't make sense. But the majority of your arguments are complete nonsense, and you should know better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Awwwww.... a little butt hurt Kiwi, how cute.
You're nothing but a vassal state to Australia, and you know it.
The significance of that depends on how quiet they've gotten it.
It ain't the noise. It's the debris, including parts of neighborhood pets and various other critters, being flung around with each takeoff.
But that's not why you should forget it.
You should forget it cause there is no way in the world for an "autonomous flying taxi" to know if its passengers are carrying flammable liquids and explosives in their bags, waiting for the "autonomous flying taxi" to fly over a large gathering of people or a building of some significance.
Even 9/11 hijackers had to go to a flight school - and still they were completely ignored despite active disinterest in learning how to land a plane.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And China and the USA. We are an equal opportunity Vassal state and will lie down with any dog and do not mind fleas.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
Why are you so obsessed with Australia? Egads I would never move there.
Funny though on your response sticking up for this marxist ridden oppressive shithole. Wonder why the brain drain is back in full swing.