Slashdot Mirror
Japan Wants To Bring Flying Cars To Its Skies (bloomberg.com)
Japan is making a push to develop flying cars, enlisting companies including Uber and Boeing in a government-led group to bring airborne vehicles to the country in the next decade. From a report: The group will initially comprise 21 businesses and organizations, including Airbus, NEC, a Toyota Motor-backed startup called Cartivator, ANA, Japan Airlines, and Yamato, according to a statement Friday from the trade ministry in Tokyo. Delegates will gather Aug. 29 to help chart a road map this year, it said. "The Japanese government will provide appropriate support to help realize the concept of flying cars, such as creation of acceptable rules," the ministry said. Flying cars that can zoom over congested roads are closer to reality than many people think. Startups around the world are pursuing small aircraft, which were until recently only in the realm of science fiction. With Japanese companies already trailing their global peers in electric vehicles and self-driving cars, the government is showing urgency on the aircraft technology, stepping in to facilitate legislation and infrastructure to help gain leadership.
Most people cannot handle the 2d that driving entails.
Adding a 3rd will make it so much worse.
I rather not have one of those crash into me.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Glenn Curtiss built the first flying car over a hundred years ago. There have been many others since.
There has never been a technical obstacle to flying cars. The obstacles are
1) Cost, since airplanes must be built to much higher safety and reliability standards because when they break down, you don't pull over to the shoulder to wait for a tow truck so much as fall out of the sky and explode.
2) To have flying cars, you have to have pilots, and a pilot's license is much more demanding to get, and needs to be, because again, if something goes wrong, you don't pull over to the shoulder to wait for a tow truck so much as fall out of the sky and explode.
3) Traffic control in three dimensions rather than two is at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
Yeah, in theory, self piloting flying cars will eliminate 2 and 3 (while making 1 that much worse), but the technology doesn't exist and no one alive today will live long enough to see it. We can't build a ground car that can drive itself in the rain, at night, on an unfamiliar road, past a construction crew. Again, adding a third dimension adds an order of magnitude more complication. To both driving the thing and traffic control.
And right now, traffic control is still run by human judgement, with a few thousand planes in the air at any given time. Increase the number of vehicles by three orders of magnitude, with a minimum of a thousand feet required between them at all times, and remember, most of them will be piloted by someone shaving their armpits and eating breakfast at the same time, and you have a good pitch for a sit-com, or a prospectus with which to fleece investors, but not something we'll see any time soon.
Oh damn,,, just damn... I'm sorry... you're suggesting that the average person will find it easier to pilot a vehicle in three dimensions than in two?
Just OMG... do you realize that instead of left and right, the driver of the vehicle would be responsible for managing yaw, pitch and roll?
I was stuck behind a learner driver (in the middle of a city during business hours no less) the other day. She nearly drove onto the side walk several times... which is extra impressive since there was a bicycle lane that was at least a meter across between a fairly wide normal lane and the sidewalk. She will need months to simply master turning the vehicle without endangering the people around her too much.
I absolutely refuse to imagine human operators in three dimensional space.
Now, self piloting vehicles, that could be a real option. Especially if all cars are tied into a single centralized traffic management system.
To be fair, I pretty much would simply be happy if we could just eliminate human drivers and if The Boring Company works out, we can still have the third dimension without the massive amount of energy waste required for lifting an American sized human in a VTOL traffic environment.