![]() Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. This vision of the future is driving the Japanese government’s “flying car” project. That, as a somewhat less boosterish panel of experts warned last year, is going to be a struggle.Ĭorrection: an earlier version of this story incorrectly gave the year of the first manned flight of the Opener BlackFly as 2017.Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air. If flying cars are licensed and flown under the same rules as other aircraft, they could start to appear in a few places pretty soon, but managing large numbers of them will require a whole new approach to air traffic management. Is that plausible? Assuming a big leap in battery capacity, the biggest hurdle is likely to be regulatory. So how long before flying taxis are a common sight in major cities?Įstimates on the panel ranged from “two to five years (but more likely five)” to “10 years.” A bigger question will be whether individual cities decide to allow them in their airspace. VTOLs and their pilots, on the other hand, could be certified for safety much like regular aircraft, so existing regulations might not need to be modified much. ![]() Since drones are cheap and anybody can buy one, regulators must stop people from doing malicious or stupid things with them. 95) showing that for certain routes at least, it will actually be much cheaper, as well as several times faster, to take a flying car than a wheeled one.Ĭountries are already going crazy trying to regulate drones how will they regulate flying cars? In a 2016 white paper, Uber had some sunny projections (pdf, p. Still, our panel speculated that a trip of a few miles might cost passengers as little as $40 or $50-a bit more than a ground taxi, but in a congested city you’d get to your destination much more quickly. The real cost problem might be the pilots (while we still have them, at least). Mass production should eventually bring down the prices of the vehicles themselves. An electric VTOL vehicle’s energy use per mile is theoretically comparable to that of an electric car. (There’d also be chargers or battery-swapping stations there.) That’s how we’ll deal with the problem of finding space in crowded cities .Īgain, most of these aren’t helicopters but winged aircraft, so all the propellers’ energy goes into pushing them forward after takeoff, not keeping them aloft. Rural or intercity travel probably won’t make economic sense.Īt “vertistops” and larger “vertiports” on the tops of buildings, which will bring the building owners some extra revenue. Places where demand is high and road traffic is bad-within large cities or from city centers to airports. Still, existing laws and public fears mean there’ll probably have to be pilots at least for a while, even if only as a backup to an autonomous system. An automated air traffic management system in constant communication with every flying car could route them to prevent collisions, with human operators on the ground ready to take over by remote control in an emergency. Autonomous flying is an easier technical problem than autonomous driving: obstacles in the sky are few and can be detected with simple radar, whereas a self-driving car needs multiple sensors and heavily trained algorithms to recognize people, other vehicles, traffic signals, lanes, and so on. Ultimately, they probably will be human pilots are expensive and might not be reliably safe in a really crowded sky. ![]() Why are so many flying cars launching in the next few years? * Where known, first flight of a pre-production model
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