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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.