Larry Page is quietly amassing a ‘flying car’ empire

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/19/17586878/larry-page-flying-car-opener-kitty-hawk-cora

by 0xbxd • 8 years ago

71 87 8 years ago

Fifer82• 8 years ago

Is a Flying Car just essentially a big drone with more noise? Do we need the Car part? Also why are we building big drones, can't we just have mini electric helicopters?

jlebrech• 8 years ago

the "car part" is the human error part. also less accountability for the manufacturer.

mtgx• 8 years ago

Hopefully his flying cars are not like all the other Google hardware products (released in "beta" for hundreds of dollars with a ton of issues).

jpm_sd3• 8 years ago

All of these concepts have the same problems:

* loud * short range * no auto-rotation * no passive stability * almost no unpowered glide

Accidents waiting to happen. Never something that you will want to have zipping around your residential neighborhood.

snarf21• 8 years ago

What do you think about single person gyrocopters?

nradov7• 8 years ago

Those already exist and are available in kit form. You can buy one if you want it, but they aren't very popular because they're expensive, slow, noisy, and relatively dangerous.

at-fates-hands• 8 years ago

This doesn't even touch the idea of training people to fly.

I've been studying for my Remote Pilot license just to use my drone professionally and the amount of information you need to know is at times overwhelming. I seriously can't imagine how you would administer a test like that to license people to fly their cars.

kickling• 8 years ago

Well, we already have licenses for flying planes, which seems to work quite well.

molteanu• 8 years ago

That doesn't seem to be an issue: You have got enough happening in your life without having to learn how to fly. But what if flying across town was as easy as hopping in a rideshare? What if Cora could fly for you?

Cora will combine self-flying software with expert human supervision, so you can enjoy the ride. [0]

https://cora.aero/

erikb• 8 years ago

What is the point of this post? This is all well known and that is what development projects are for.

If you would at least argue that this will always be the same then there would be a discussion to have. But right now this post is just saying the obvious while ignoring that everybody is exactly working on resolving these problems.

jpm_sd3• 8 years ago

The point is, Larry Page is fighting physics, and therefore wasting his money.

SurrealSoul3• 8 years ago

Flying cars seems like a horrible idea.

Pros: Alleviate ground congestion, potentially go faster

Cons: Landing, air congestion, higher risk than driving

I know this is still super fresh, but honestly moving our already horribly unsafe daily communte up several thousand feet in the sky doesn't make much sense to me. I seen people survive horrible car crashes, I haven't heard of anyone walking off a 1-on-1 plane crash

icebraining3• 8 years ago

Flying cars seem great for rare occasions (including actual emergencies - ie, flying ambulances that could safely land on a residential street), not for daily commuting.

SurrealSoul3• 8 years ago

like a helicopter?

ainiriand4• 8 years ago

Everything looks impossible until someone does it. And keep in mind that flying is actually safer than driving. Yes, if you have an accident the odds of being lethal are increased but keep in mind that it is not the same kind of flying. 10000m vs 100m and the speed is also different. Have you ever looked at the fatalities in commercial flying in the early 30s? Better systems were implemented and it is perfectly safe now. So even if there is still a long way to go, someone has to walk that way and take the rewards.

oblio2• 8 years ago

Commercial flights are super safe because there's a million regulations to follow. An airplane costs $100 million or so and is flown by a super trained crew.

How is that going to be replicated for $20k cars?

7384725277842• 8 years ago

I think "flying car" should be reframed as 'noisy expensive conventional personal aircraft'.

'Flying car' is associated with what you see in scifi movies, they never use conventional aircraft tech, they can lock in space, don't burn oil, don't sound like an high-pitched overblown fan, don't have wings, ... They are piggy-backing on this image without delivering the necessary innovations. Unless someone hacks gravity or improves energy density of batteries beyond today's dreams, "flying cars" will stay a scam, it won't happen. More likely to see everyone riding segways by 2020... With global warming, the idea of vast distribution of personal aircrafts integrated into daily lives is beyond absurd, IMHO.

avoutthere• 8 years ago

Flying cars seems like a horrible idea.

It depends on the use case. For high-density urban areas, the challenges probably outweigh the benefits. But for low-density, rural/semi-rural regions, those who commute an hour or more could really benefit from such a vehicle. For example, hospital staff driving home after a long shift.

beobab2• 8 years ago

That is a very good point. I had not considered that. Thanks.

mrec• 8 years ago

I haven't heard of anyone walking off a 1-on-1 plane crash

Offtopic and nitpicking, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision

growlist• 8 years ago

I dread the future that includes traffic above our heads on anything like the scale of the traffic currently on the roads.

ainiriand4• 8 years ago

The traffic over your head is actually many times bigger than road traffic.

bytematic• 8 years ago

Is this a joke on the physical size of aircraft/spacecraft?

7384725277842• 8 years ago

As of todays physics this is an impossible future, as long as there is no ~~game~~ epoch changing innovation on the energy sector.

newfocogi• 8 years ago

I think Musk's quip that most people would want their own personal flying taxi, but no one wants their neighbor to have one, is pretty insightful. As building density increases and our structures continue to scale in the third dimension, our transit system needs to as well and going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous. Of course, only time will tell what wins out - it won't necessarily be the most efficient option, as history of transit systems has demonstrated.

nickik• 8 years ago

Seems to me Uber like point to point vehicles that are cheaper then helicopters could be useful in large cities.

However I agree, personalized flying cars for everybody are a fantasy.

lmm• 8 years ago

going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous.

How so? Messing with the ground under tall buildings seems a lot more dangerous than messing with the airspace around them.

WilliamEdward• 8 years ago

In the air, cars can drive on a 3d axis, have no way to see road signs, and are more likely to fall on top of other cars if they're lucky enough not to get into an accident with one already in the air.

Compare this to a tunnel, which has controlled routes, is out of the way of road-way cars, and if made properly will never collapse on itself. That's how.

dharma1• 8 years ago

Not a structural engineering expert, but beyond a certain depth for tunnels (depending on soil type I believe) there isn't a structural risk to buildings above, especially at the tunnel diameter sizes suggested by Boring co.

With airspace you have several problems - noise, collisions, crashing on whatever is below.

Having said that, I think we'd all love a safe, electric VTOL vehicle. I don't think they would be allowed in densely populated areas though, same as drones above a certain weight.

slivym• 8 years ago

Musk might have a point -but he's got his own blind spots. Sky scrapers create efficiencies by packing large numbers of people densely- they all have to go to one place, but in total they take up less real estate. Musk's contention is to transport people to these highly dense areas, rather than increasing the density of the vehicles we transport people in turn, instead we stick with low density vehicles, but do far more journeys.

It'd be like having a city where all the offices are sky scrapers but all the houses are detached bungalows. It'd be nuts. As office buildings get bigger and more efficient you get housing blocks that are bigger and more efficient and you get transport that's bigger and more efficient - trains and buses, not just more cars and more roads.

elicash6• 8 years ago

People don't want to be underground for extended periods. If I were building an autonomous world from scratch, I'd want to design it so people are always above ground but "things" travel below ground.

There's an Amazon patent for an underground delivery system via tunnels that would mitigate against some problems that autonomous cars will bring. Once we have fully autonomous cars that don't need people, most cars on the road won't have anyone in them. Rather than pizza delivery people, shipping delivery, etc -- even something like "oh let me send my friend a key to my apartment while I go on vacation."

It will completely take over the roads unless we do something drastic. So send THAT traffic underground. We are going to need traffic lanes for "stuff." Let somebody commuting to work see the sun during their commute.

Edit: One thing I'd add is that New York and other places used to have a basic version of this - a series of pneumatic tubes that connected the city. There's a city in the U.S. that does trash via pneumatic tubes. I don't think that's the ideal delivery system for other reasons, but worth pointing out that this isn't an entirely new idea. Here's a map: https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/up...

nradov7• 8 years ago

People drive through long tunnels or ride on subways every day. Being underground is not a problem.

radlad• 8 years ago

OTOH, if I can commute to work underground in less than 5 minutes, but it takes me 20-30 minutes above ground, why not use that space above ground to build out more places where humans will actually "be"?

e.g. Convert roads in cities to pedestrian/bicycle only traffic, or add housing.

poof131• 8 years ago

We will go up not down. The only limitation is legal, not technical nor economic. Working through the regulations will take a bit of time but is already underway with the FAA’s pilot programs. The problem people are missing in the industry is that it took years for the FAA to lay out the infrastructure and rules for the national airspace. It will take time to work this out for autonomous drones, which will operate on a much larger scale. Cities and states will play a key role. It’s not going to be a VFR free-for-all with collision avoidance, but very much mimic class-A airspace but between 200-400’ and will be fully autonomous. As an F-18 pilot, I use to hate drones, but I’ve been converted. We are at the palm pilot point for UAS. Musk’s comment about noise is correct, but that is solvable and no reason to go back in time and try to dig our way out of our transportation and infrastructure problems. Imagine a world with bridges on demand. Drones enable that future not tunneling machines.

robotresearcher2• 8 years ago

We already went down. Tens of millions of people use underground metros every day all over the world.

elicash6• 8 years ago

Who wants to look up to the sky and rather than a beautiful sunset see a thousand drones? There's a word for that: pollution.

godelski• 8 years ago

I think going underground is also much more difficult economically. You don't just have to build, but remove first. You don't have to do that in the sky. And that's why most buildings that even do go into the ground don't go very far. It gets harder to dig. You can't scale the same way down that you can up. If it was cheaper they'd do it.

sokoloff3• 8 years ago

I still can't think of flying cars as anything other than a terrible compromised aircraft married to a terribly compromised car. There are 15K airports in the US. Drive a few miles over to one and get in a proper airplane seems like a better plan for most use cases I can think of.

When I see the average driver competence on the roads, I don't see most of those people successfully commuting in a flying anything over the course of their lifetime.

tntn• 8 years ago

When I see the average driver competence on the roads, I don't see most of those people successfully commuting in a flying anything over the course of their lifetime.

Ah! But AI, you see! They'll fly themselves!

hamilyon2• 8 years ago

Fully automated flying is much different from fully automated driving and arguably easier to pull off. Barrier is lower, so we will probably see it implemented in near future.

dzdt• 8 years ago

Larry Page is not an idiot. Flying cars have giant unsurmountable flaws that should be apparant to anyone who is not an idiot. What gives?

bobsil1• 8 years ago

New tech = not insurmountable

gilbetron2• 8 years ago

The tech is the easy part, it's the logistics and ramifications for failures. Blow a gasket on the road, and you come to a gradual stop. Do it in the air, and you have a minor disaster if anyone is underneath you.

robotresearcher2• 8 years ago

He wants one, and is a billionaire with billionaire buddies. He doesn’t need to make an Everyman product. There is a market for private helicopters now. These will require less training to use.

jpm_sd3• 8 years ago

He's a software guy and has too much money to play with.

no1youknowz• 8 years ago

Saw this the other day [0]:

As battery technology gets better and with a similar vehicle as the one in the video is paired with AI to do the flying. I think it will be a viable technology in the future.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhKTCbbqbaE

elvirs• 8 years ago

average consumer has proved to be a very irresponsible car owner and shitty operator of the vehicle. and given the fact that people got more distractions behind the wheel compared to 20 years ago such as checking emails, checking into flights, disputing a credit card charges or whatever little things that you need to get done often and can be done over the phone. it would be better for everybody if these flying vehicles were not sold to everyone and only well paid professionals were allowed to operate them as taxis.

shusson• 8 years ago

my assumption is that they would be autonomous...

sigi45• 8 years ago

In Munich politicians asked to plan in airtaxi spots to be build/considered for the rebuild of our main train station, while I have to throw away liquids above 100ml in the airport!

gilbetron2• 8 years ago

I just imagine all the traffic on the ground, but now in the air. Because with flying cars you don't get to just fly where you want, as people fantasize. There needs to be aerial lanes, and they will be packed. Sounds like a shitty world.

Also, whenever you see an accident or a car pulled over with mechanical issues imagine that happened in the air - where do you think flying cars will end up in that situation? Cars are dripping and leaking stuff all the time, where do you think it will end up with flying cars?

socrates1998• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it be better if they had a driving component as well?

I can't imagine everyone could take off from their own homes? That would just be so chaotic and dangerous.

I would think it would be better to drive to a designated spot and take off from there.

Still, I love these things and would absolutely love to see them work.

Larry Page is quietly amassing a ‘flying car’ empire

Related Stories