Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479167,00.html


But will this...





become this...





by 2015?

Innovation in small scale civil aviation has stalled - or more precisely, there has been lots of innovation, but it hasn't translated to affordable, mass produced small planes. Someday, that may change.

Imagine the cost of the liability insurance needed when most of the population is flying their cars around each other.




Their slogan should be: "Flying cars. Adding 1 more dimension to vehicle fatalities."

Imagine road rage in the sky, and people flying drunk or while distracted on cell phones.

And, to what would the fallout from a car crash extend? To Whomever is unlucky enough to be on the ground underneath!

Last edited by Ragtime on 12 Jan 2009, 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That was my thought - the front of my house is slightly susceptible to vehicular impact, although it has never happened. The rooms in the rear, not at all. But giving every Joe a plane would change that.

Flying cars would never work. There are already car accidents, we don't need them up in the sky. It will cause more damage. Cars falling out of the sky when they crash and they may land on a building or on a home. But cars have crashed into buildings anyway and into homes but not on the roof.

Vehicle break downs are also a consideration. The typical car coasts to a standstill. A flying car doesn't stay up there while you wait for the local garage to arrive to fix it.

Lots of good points, but I still hope to see flying cars within my lifetime. I can already think of technologies (some existent, some hypothetical) that could reduce the risk of accidents with an additional dimension, and address the various risks associated with malfunctions and break-downs in air-borne vehicles.

But how much fuel would it take to power a flying car? Considering that jet fuel would not be the only option, I wonder what the most efficient, reliable, and effective power source would be.

I was going to raise that point too, but I thought we had already listed enough problems to deal with!

You'd have to go clean-burning for the save-the-environment people not to go livid, though
they probably would anyway at the unnecessarily-high energy requirement for flying vehicles.

Last edited by Ragtime on 12 Jan 2009, 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The safety issue is liable to depend rather heavily on our ability to develop effective auto-piloting software. Commercial airplanes are already at a point where the pilots don't really have to fly the planes because the autopilot can handle take offs and landings and I think ground control can make attitude adjustments and the like in some situations. I believe the pilots are there now primarily to handle the event of equipment failure, which is uncommon with commercial planes but certainly happens (a bit more often thanks to penny-pinching airlines not doing their required maintenance).

They're likely to also regulate them even once the auto-pilot technology is effective enough, to only allow them to be flown over rural areas. So you might be able to drop the wings and take off and cut across a big rural area between cities real quick, making those long commutes or day-trips shorter, but without changing in-city commuting any. Private citizens don't maintain their cars well enough I think for regulators to be comfortable letting them fly within city limits.

I guess the pros would be:

1. There is less to accidentally crash into in the air (even if all the cars were there, because you've got a whole extra dimension in which to spread them out).

2. Smoother rides.

3. Faster transit, especially over long distances.

4. Fast, easy world travel a whim. Imagine being in a mood to go to Europe, and just getting up and going right then.

5. Driving in three dimensions means that drivers traveling along the "skyway" (or whatever it's called) could connect to other skyways instantly through special skylanes (think onramps) instead of friggen' traffic lights, which increase impatience (and therefore road rage) and collectively take months off our lives.

Last edited by Ragtime on 12 Jan 2009, 4:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Kickass. I wonder how it handles in stormy weather.

This gimmicks will not carry freight economically. Our economy runs on freight shipped from Here to There. Even as people movers this things are not all that good. Trains and buses are much more efficient. The only use for Flying Cars is to get to the train station on time.

ruveyn

Just as soon as someone learns to negate the laws of gravity...

you'd also need a pilots license to fly a car, a plane-car wasmade years ago and this problem stopped it going global.

they had an article in Wired last month about personal planes. Problem is, they're so regulated, that it costs as much as a top-of-the-line sportscar to get one. It's barely worth it to even manufacture them commercially.

And they all need runways...

Err that is not the first flying car and it hasn't solved many of the ploblems they have had since the late 40s. Namely it is not mauch of a car or a plane.


Simularity?