cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36069403
cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/52477761
Not flying cars. Didn’t even have wheels. Just hexacopters
Wait? So they are called “flying cars” but if none of a cars functionality?
The marketing does all the heavy lifting
The chinese quality .ml always talks about
You realize that China has dominated the smaller consumer drone sector for ages now? And that most countries are beginning to turn to Chinese drones for military applications?
Still a better track record than the F35.
Go back to your hole.
Not the air show. Just a rehearsal. One vehicle went up into flames. No deaths, one seriously injured.
Saved you a click.
Eh, not exactly. I’m curious as to what sort of a contraption it is.
Here. Saved the third guy a click.
So they’re like… low-altitude helicopters?
That’s always been the idea behind flying cars.
The ones that turn into planes are just planes that can be driven around a little easier than a normal plane.
If you want flying cars to work in a real city, they need VTOL capabilities.
If you want flying cars to work in a real city, they need VTOL capabilities.
A proper flying car would also have rolling capabilities
There was actually a “flying car” certified in like the 1950’s, they only ever made like six of them though. It was a car that you could snap wings, a tail and a propeller to and it would fly. There’s one in the EAA museum.
The most practical “flying car” I’ve ever seen was a dune buggy that also functioned as a powered parachute. Designed to be an offroad vehicle that, if the terrain is truly impassible, it can fly over it. in VERY good weather, at about 40 mph. And you need something of a clearing to take off in but not as much as a plane would.
Now people are trying to make hexacopters a thing, without really describing to my satisfaction why they’re better than an actual helicopter. They’re not quieter, they’re no more efficient, they’re certainly not safer.
“Flying car” is a bullshit term. They are aircraft and must be treated as such.
“Jet” is a bullshit term. They are aircraft and must be treated as such.
Jet is a form of propulsion shortened to describe an aircraft. Jet aircraft, prop aircraft, etc. It is not a “bullshit” term.
Yes, these “cars” are aircraft.
A horseless carriage is a horseless carriage regardless of it being on the ground or in the sky.
Really. When you replace the “horseless” with a horse, you call it a carriage. The name changed with the propulsion method.
People can’t even handle a zip merge, da fuck we need flying cars for, lmao, another technobro invention that only thinks about the individual and not the wider effect on society
The sky is huge. In theory you should be able to avoid most crashes just by separation rules which can be automated. I didn’t make this up, it’s literally a thing that exists called Big Sky Theory.
The cars are autonomous, we need them because people can’t even manage a zip merge.
So the flying vehicles that apparently crashed into each other of their own accord are safer than cars? Really?
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but regular cars crash into each other as well.
Under the guidance of an “Ai” in a three-dimensional environment yeah I don’t think so. I can always get out of my 2D car, I’m not sure about you.
Know what can be automated a lot easier than cars or planes, and can carry orders of magnitude more people with much less fuel usage? Fucking trains.
Yeah, a quadcopter train sounds like the obvious next step.
It would have to be at least a octoper
And thus the reason we don’t have flying cars. That was two. Imagine the flaming hell that would be raining down if we had commute traffic numbers in the sky.
We don’t have “flying cars” because “flying cars” is what we call aircraft whose use case isn’t practical or safe.
You can go spend $100 grand on a light sport airplane and get a pilot’s license in a couple months right now. You’ll almost certainly never use it for actual practical travel.
I know a guy that’s a pilot and while 90% of his flying is leisure, he’ll sometimes fly down to France for his vacations etc in one. Doesn’t own them though, has to pay rentals.
We don’t have flying cars because technology has not progressed enough to make it economically viable for the masses.
We don’t have flying cars because people are fucking dumb, and because the viable options are loud as hell.
We absolutely have the technology, and if there were a drive to make it affordable there would be more significant research into doing so.
To do a flying car, you need to simulate friction in the air, with significant enough force to prevent colision, while also maintaining low enough noise pollution to be acceptable to the average citizens. This second part is why we don’t have Personal helicopters, despite aircraft being relatively affordable (in my cursory search I found two Helicopters less than 200K, one barely more than 100k, if there were significant drive to make them mainstream for the public they’d presumably be much cheaper, benefitting from economies of scale.)
Additionally, how do we as a society handle ATC for flying cars? Emergency stops? Impromptu repairs? Birds in the props‽
I’m not trying to naysay the retrofuturistic image we all want for the world. I am saying it probably shouldn’t include flying cars. Especially if they’re just Personal quadcopters.
This sounds like the person raving against personal computers in the 50’s, how “no-one will ever need or want one.”
And here I am sitting on the shitter with one that fits in my pocket.
Imagine trying to explain to someone just 40 years ago that I now have light bulbs which can sense motion in addition to being voice-controlled and full RGB. 80’s interior designers would go bonkers for these.
I don’t think these will replace normal traffic anytime soon but niche rescue vehicles or smth, perhaps. Also maybe we’re just at the awkward point between quadcopters and Star Wars style jets? The jets are just so much more aesthetic.
We don’t need cars, nobody has even built highways or gas stations or traffic cops yet.
Just in case anyone was wondering why we don’t do that.
Now imagine hundreds of them populating the skies over a densely populated city, just to carry a few hundred rich people around.
When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.
You take the rough with the smooth
It’d be fine if þey disintegrated, but instead þey’re going to land on someone, statistically someone middle or lower class.
helicopters.
Yes, and how many helicopters fly regular passengers over your city?
There’s a reason these are speciality vehicles for speciality operations, and not a generic form of transport used all the time.
exactly. there are hundreds of them populating the sky, lugging a few hundred rich people (or their representatives) around.
You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That’s only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it’ll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.
It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.
These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.
You can’t do a large rollout of these things within the current regulations. They’re simply not made to accomodate all that traffic. Creating the regulations and systems around it will take a long time so best to start early. Or you’ll have to copy everything from a country that’s ahead later on.
I don’t think we’re going to see the mass adoption of aircraft costing 10 times the median US income
Couldn’t people say the same shit when regular cars were new and there was an accident?
“That’s why you’ll never see thousands of them going down a highway at 80 miles an hour.” -1920s idiot who needs to get their crystal ball checked.
Sure, a person might have said that. They’d have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It’s hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It’s also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.
That’s why aircraft regulations require safety systems, redundancy.
There are safety systems, like parachutes, which can save ultralight aircraft even on total power loss.
Damn, traffic was that bad huh?
The “car” in question:
That’s a better cyber truck than the cyber truck
That looks fucking awesome
Does it though?
Yes. Not for the streets but for the arctic!
Is that even a car? It just looks like a massive drone.
Cars travel on the ground. These are indeed massive drones with the capacity to lift humans. The media won’t give up “The Jetsons” flying car term (regardless of how impractical and unsafe the concept of layman operating in 3D space is). These are just electric, multi-rotor aircraft. My rant is over.
I don’t know about your definition. The term comes from a two-wheeled chariot it seems (though the etymology of that seems to be a word meaning “to run”). It’s been used from everything from chariots, to train cars, to street cars, to automobiles. They all share two things in common. They’re an enclosed container meant to carry things, and they’ve got wheels.
I don’t think the wheel thing is fundamental to the definition anymore. Anything traveling on the ground is going to have wheels. The “flying” part let’s you know how it travels, the car part informs you about the utility. I think it’s perfectly clear what it means. What else should we call it that’d be more clear?
Autonomous ultralight electric quad rotary aircraft rolls off the tongue quite well.
yeah these drone conveyances are not exactly like the moller concept.
even in the future nothing works
We need this on every military parade.
