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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.
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
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.
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.
The significance of that depends on how quiet they've gotten it. If you can have a helipad in your neighborhood, there's no need to "drive down the road". Generally, however, noise, pollution and safety constraints render that prohibitive.
There's been some good research in reducing prop noise, however. One of my favourites is the use of props with an even number of blades, with the number of pairs at least two (aka, at least 4 blades), where the pairs are balanced within themselves but not evenly spaced around the axis. Normally, a prop with perfectly spaced blades sets up a wave where pressure rises as a blade approaches and declines as the blade leaves, with each subsequent blade passing at the exact same rate and amplifying the signal in a resonant fashion. But when pairs of blades are unevenly spaced, you're adding power at two or more different frequencies, so you don't get that buildup, and to the contrary, the waveforms disrupt each other.
That's just an example (this craft doesn't appear to be using that specific one, as all of the props are just twin bladed - although they might achieve a similar net effect by offsetting the various props from each other). But there are a lot of different ways to reduce noise. It sure sounds quiet in the video. Obviously, since it lacks an ICE, that noise source is missing.
Pollution obviously doesn't apply to it, as it's electric.
As for the safety side, this craft looks to already be hitting all the right buttons. It could lose several motors / several props and keep flying just fine. It's battery powered (probably from multiple independent packs), too, so maintenance needs should be low and failure modes tame.
I'm not saying that it's ready for prime time as a vehicle that can take off and land in a neighborhood. But at least some of the checkboxes appear to have been ticked. If it really is as quiet as that video makes it sound (which could just be how they edited it), and they've tackled safety correctly, it might well have all the boxes checked.
(That said, I don't expect that, at least initially, to be their main market)
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
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.
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.