The lengths Americans will go to to not build trains is astounding.
It isn't even that dramatic.
Statistically close to all trips are within a couple of miles of home. US average vehicle miles traveled per person per day are a staggeringly high 25, yet still, nearly all trips people make are very close to home. Good pedestrian and bike infrastructure is enough to cover virtually all of those trips. You don't need roads for cars. You don't really need trains. You don't need personal aircraft for sure. You don't need autotaxies or any other weird techbro drone solution. You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes where you won't feel like at any moment you may get mowed down by a F250 SuperDuty. But we deliberately design spaces to be unpleasant and unsafe for anyone outside of a car to stop people from walking even though designs like that are WAY more expensive for the taxpayer.
High-speed rail and intercity mass transit are super neat and I'd love to see more of it. And that's definitely the kind of trip a "flying car" is primarily confronting. But it's not even the real problem that needs fixing. Trips to a park, grocery store, and bar are the trips that need fixing, and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
and bar are the trips that need fixing (...) and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
It's utterly baffling to me that bar culture is so alive in America where we have to drive everywhere. It seems like a fucking obvious problem that everyone just ignores. Under what circumstances is a person driving themselves to a bar, parking there for a while, then leaving unimpaired? People should be protesting this in the streets; why does no one seem to care?
It's worse than that. I would venture that in nearly all US places where a new bar can be built there is a required mandatory minimum number of parking spaces to build next to it to ensure it's "easy" to drive to. Which doesn't even work, but that's a separate screed.
Most civil engineers and urban planners don't even think about it because that's not the job as they see it. The professions surrounding urban planning and development largely just consider the codes and manuals to be received wisdom and so carry out their teachings uncritically.
You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes
Weather, though. Not every place is California.
Other countries mange this with proper clothing and a variety of alternative public transit options.
Rain Capes are a popular solution for rainy weather when cycling.
Or you chose to avoid the bike that day and take the bus/streetcar/metro/etc.
I live in NYC and by far my favorite aspect is being able to decide between a variety for transit options that best suit the specific trip I’m making. For example, I typically commute by bike, but if it’s raining I can easily switch that trip to be on the subway.
There's very little correlation between cities with good bikeped culture and cities with good weather. The only factor that's highly correlated is quality of the bikeped network. This idea is a flat-out myth.
Someone should design an armored train that can be used by the military.
First, the US would need to have more locomotive manufacturers than you can fit in a single sprinter van. We've abandoned rail so thoroughly that we have to have foreign companies manufacture most of our rolling stock these days.
We’ve abandoned passenger rail, but not freight rail. The USA consistently ranks as one of the top users of freight rail (and by many metrics it is the top user of freight rail). The issue is that most American cities outside of the northeast corridor tend to be far enough apart that you are going to be better off flying. High speed rail hasn’t really caught on yet, but I suspect in another 15 years it’s going to be lot more common now that it’s starting to look commercially viable
Just in case you're not aware, armored trains are (or were) a thing. In the US they were used from the US civil war to early in the cold war (at the end there to transport nuclear weapons).
In the rest of the world... the most recent use is by Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.
The US has loads of trains. This is a huge misnomer. The US has one of the most complex commercial-industrial train networks in the world. The problem is the commuter one uses the same tracks and is massively underfunded.
America has one of the worst run freight rail networks in the world. Plighted by decades of deferred maintenance and destruction of existing infrastructure in service of the all mighty operating ratio.
Amtrak would be far more reliable without the American freight rail industry clogging up the lines with massive super trains and refusal to make capital improvements to the network.
Agreed
Their biggest investors are people who think they’re “smart” for not buying the Brooklyn Bridge from that guy they met in a bar.
Do they speak in an unnaturally deep voice and wear black turtlenecks?
Not to mention people are bad enough drivers when limited to two dimensions. Could you imagine adding a third?!
Yea, I'm having a hard time believing those claims. Beating gravity requires a lot of energy, and oil still has a very high energy density, so that's why no one's really talking about electric planes. Driving range of 200 miles and flight range of 11 miles would've been plausible to me.
The company, founded in 2015 by Dukhovny, Konstantin Kisly, Pavel Markin, Oleg Petrov in Palo Alto, California, has been test driving and flying the car's prototype since 2019.
"The constraints were: it has to be a real car (driving in driving lanes, parking in parking spaces), it has to have a vertical takeoff (otherwise it is not a real flying car), it has to be affordable for most people (not just the rich)," Alef said.
The following year, the first sub-scale prototype was built, and in 2018, the first full-size “skeleton” took to the skies.
It's for real this time. Whether or not it will be a Tesla lemon, time will tell. But the FAA is generally EXTREMELY safety-conscious.
I remember a video we watched in an engineering class back in the early 2000s about a guy who was making "flying cars" that were tested and "flyable".
They still don't have a practical prototype.
There's a suspicious lack of real photos and video of this soon-to-be-ready vehicle that's set to ship to consumers in just 2½ years. Surely they're not still in the very early R&D phase, right?
The best actual photos I can find is of an oversized drone with a basic frame the size of a car, a "cockpit" in the middle that will barely fit 1 person, 8 propellers where the entire "car" would normally be in a car, and some light-weight foam side panels slapped on. No car engine or car wheels (except some small castors to roll it around).
Along with the (paraphrasing) "it's supposed to be a slow-moving vehicle while on the ground" comment in the article, I guess they're building a big drone with a small lawn mower motor to move you around on the ground.
There are strict rules about flying. If it is an airplane then you need pilots license, which involves a lot of training. I'm comfortable with someone who has a pilots license having one, but it isn't easy to get a pilots license and you need to follow strict rules of where you can fly. Large parts of most cities have complex rules on where you are allowed to fly, so most trips will not be practical in the city as you can't get close to where you want to go.
Either that or it is an ultralight, which doesn't need a pilots license, but has strict rules on where you can fly (no cities, or something like that), and even stricter max power rules, also pilot only no passengers.
Either way, it is only practical if you are a farmer, fly to inspect your fields, then fly to the nearest 'big' city for shopping. (Big city may be 30k people). The slow ground speed and limited flying area makes it a toy for most people, not 'practical transport .
The above assumes that it actually goes on sale, that is not a scam.
If it works then I can see it being used how you say. I'm ... skeptical (at best) that it will work though.
It looks like it's a giant quadcopter with wheels and a car shaped shell. It's hard to believe it has the lift to lift multiple people anyways...
I'm betting on ultralight. And toy for rich people, not for practical use.
Maybe lazy rich people will want one so they don't have to get off the plane or out of the car when traveling. Between a state or two.
Will you also need a pilots license to purchase? I wonder where you would even be allowed to transition from driving to flying...
Aside from the $300k price tag, sadly….
The car will be a Low Speed Vehicle, meaning it won’t go faster than about 25 miles per hour on a paved surface. If a driver needs a faster route, they will be able to use the vehicle's flight capabilities, according to Alef.
People's driving senses are so fucking bad, I can't imagine them flying. It'll be in the news often I guess "car crashes into building while trying to back up." "car flies into power lines thousands without power" well I guess that's fairly typical already.
What the hell is the point of a car that can't do more than 25 mph? This thing can fucking fly, but it's as capable as a golf cart on the ground?
I'll believe this when it actually exists (the thing they're promising, not a skeletal prototype), and I'll believe that the FAA is cool with flying cars when I see them on my commute. None of this currently passes the bullshit check.
I imagine that it's supposed to be flown and is only temporarily used on the ground. Same way airplanes don't have a higher ground speed
I think it's mostly an expensive toy. They made it VTOL so it does not have to go fast enough on the ground to become airborne. That's ok, it doesn't need a runway to take off, but VTOL is way to make things fly that really have no business flying. Airplanes have a certain shape because they have to. This thing looks like a bar of soap in comparison. I'm sure it uses a ton of energy to stay airborne, it would have the glide coefficient of a rock.
This is a ridiculous comment. Are you intentionally missing the point? Why are you applying airplane design principles to a car? It's not a plane...it's a car.
Glide coefficient? In what scenario do you imagine this car gliding? Do you see wings? They didn't "make it VTOL" because they couldn't design a functional airplane, they designed it as a VTOL from day one because a flying car that isn't VTOL capable wouldn't be viable. The very concept of a flying car is based on VTOL. It can only work as a car if it's VTOL. A fixed-wing flying car would be asinine, where the hell do you expect people to take off?
Look I am not a supporter of this thing. It has too many glaring issues, like the fact that it doesn't currently exist. You cannot, however, criticize this vehicle based on its merits as an airplane, because it's not an airplane.
What about insurance flying low over populated regions? Air traffic control? I don't think the physical flying capability is the problem with flying cars
yes. flying cars have existed already. basically they're treated like planes.
I bet these will sell like NFTs, and be just as useful.
Yeah, no way that thing is real.
I don’t even trust people in the current two dimensions they drive in, why in the fuck would I want them in a third dimension. Seems like a bad idea.
BREAKING NEWS! Flying car piloted by CEO Jetson Bankroll and 5 others crash into the Empire State Building! Over 2000 people reported dead or injured, passengers still missing and efforts to find them in the rubble are underway.
People can’t navigate safely in two dimensions, and y’all want to add a third?
People can barely drive in 2D, let alone manage 3D travel
I'll just leave this here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fcWOivJ6bs
I thought we were done beating the dead horse of flying cars.
Hey guys... Did your article only have renderings and no actual footage of thule "flying car"?
Also ending your article begging for speculative pre-order deposits and a promised production date within 2 years with "backed by a tesla investor" isn't the trust builder that you think it is...
Am I the only one saying "FINALLY!!!" about those premium tier pre-order deposit for extra special double secret important people? We can lose money SO much faster now!!!
Every 3-4 years, for at least the last 25 years, the WSJ has run a story like this where someone has finally solved all the problems of flying cars. Lots of people throw money at them; nothing ever happens. If you give two seconds of thought to the horror that would result with thousands of people rising into the air every morning to make their commute, you'd realize how absurd this notion is.
With how regulated small drones are I imagine a flying car would be a nightmare to regulate. Also if you thought car crashes were a problem now wait till one crashes into the ceiling of a house or gets shot down over a military base.
According to the article, it’s available for preorder. Hmmm.
If I worked for that company, I’d be strongly tempted to “borrow” that preorder list. After all, it’s basically a directory of rich people who also happen to be imbeciles. I have zero experience in running scams, but considering how easy the targets are, I think I’d be successful anyway.
Why does it have a SpaceX logo on it? This is not associated with SpaceX in any way?
thanks for using Leebra!
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