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The Associated Press reports via the Bangkok Post
Cartivator, a startup group of about 30 engineers including some young Toyota employees, started to develop their SkyDrive vehicle in 2014 with the help of crowdfunding.
The head of Cartivator, Tsubasa Nakamura, said that while the car was still at an early stage of development, the group expected to conduct the first manned flight by the end of 2018.
During the demonstration on [June 4], the current test model, a primitive-looking assembly of aluminium framing and propellers, was able to get off and float on the ground for a few seconds. Nakamura said the design needed more stability so the prototype would be able to fly long and high enough to reach the Olympic flame.
The engineers are aiming to make their flying car the world's smallest electric vehicle, which can be used in small urban areas, and hopes to commercialise the car in 2025.
The Inquirer put it this way:
A startup backed by the Japanese automaker has developed a test model that engineers hope will eventually develop into a tiny car with a driver who'll be able to light the Olympic torch in the 2020 Tokyo games. For now, however, the project is a concoction of aluminum framing and eight propellers that barely gets off the ground and crashes after several seconds.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:48PM (7 children)
People have a hard enough time driving in 2D without fucking something up (check YouTube for the worst offenders). 3D "driving" will be a clusterfuck of disaster raining down fireballs of car parts.
Then there are those idiots that throw their rubbish and other crap out of the windows whenever they feel like it.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:55PM (3 children)
Note that you could 2.5D hovercraft it 5 feet off the ground and stop spending billions on roads. You'd still have to spend millions to put up signs and cut down trees and stuff like that, but it could be a lot cheaper. And every driver taking the hovercraft trail to work is one less on my legacy roads WRT congestion and rush hour. I wonder if eventually roads would only be for trucks, and the only for automated trucks because there's no "civilians" left on the roads, they're all on hovercraft paths.
Also I suspect there would be skill levels involved and having done ground school (admittedly a long time ago) and some flight hours, I bet I could solo extremely quickly at which point I wouldn't be computer limited anymore to "no higher than 10 feet" or whatever the definition of hovercraft is.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NewNic on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:02PM
Have you ever seen a hovercraft navigate a turn? There is a reason that hovercraft are typically used on wide open spaces.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:01PM
SUVs with knobby tires and Harleys with "special" pipes are not loud enough for you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:16PM
The fuel (and pollution) costs of everyone flying 5 feet off the ground will far outweigh the costs of building roads.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:02PM (1 child)
I would feel more comfortable with lighter-than-air craft that wouldn't catastrophically plummet to the ground if they lost power.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:46PM
Yes. That. Imagine millions of these things on the . . . er, above the road, and they only have a failure rate of 0.01 percent. What could possibly go wrong?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:08PM
3D commuter vehicles are perhaps the best argument ever for self-driving vehicles.
The type of vehicle in the article will have very limited battery life and require reliable planning to ensure that nobody runs out of juice at 500 feet AGL. That alone is a sufficient argument for me to say that your average car-driver isn't up to the task.
However, I just might trust a (well tested) computer system to manage a fleet of these 3D vehicles. If we could stack up the local roads 20 layers deep with flying cars, that would be a major win for commuter congestion, and a big lose for people who care about noise pollution.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:50PM (4 children)
I suppose for flight training we could watch old episodes of "Knight Rider" with the Hoff from the 80s. I never was very clear on the physics of how KITT could fly.
That was a TV show from after the "its the 70s so everyone involved is smoking weed heavily" and before the "its the late 80s so everyone involved is snorting coke". Its the kind of show you can watch sober and not get a contact high.
For SN readers with good taste who are not going to watch "Knight Rider" reruns, its basically a superhero crime fighting duo where the car and its AI named KITT was the alpha superhero teammate and The Hoff was the beta superhero teammate.
Superheros are bulletproof and can fly and say snarky one liners, so naturally that's what the car did as it bailed out beta superhero The Hoff on a fairly regular basis.
Think of it like a transformers TV show but the car simply doesn't transform.
Probably the funniest part of the series is the alpha male automobile had a smoking hot human girlfriend who crawled and wiggled all over him every episode and as the beta male The Hoff was incredibly jealous and always trying to steal her away from alpha male superhero KITT, but she only had eyes for the car and ignored The Hoff. I'm surprised that got past the network censors of the day, I mean even in the current year we can't have prime time bestiality but here we were in the 80s with some chick "really enjoying KITT's stick shifter lever". In fact I guess its sorta bi- in that The Hoff had some stock footage appearing in every episode where he couldn't keep his hand off KITT's stick shifter lever either. It was a very complicated relationship. Everytime the three were together, the girl would climb onto and wiggle all over and insert fingers god knows where deep inside KITT right in front of The Hoff who wanted her pretty bad, but she ignored The Hoff, meanwhile the instant the girl was out of sight, or so it seemed, The Hoff's hand was all over KITTs stick shifter in like every episode, like every episode had the stock footage of The Hoff stroking KITT's shift lever as they drove off together away from KITT's girlfriend. As an alpha male automobile KITT got a lot of action and its surprising he was able to perform all those intensely physical stunts. Also gotta point out that alpha superhero KITT was a BLACK automobile, although he had uncle tom whitey nasal kinda accent, and the white girl was all over KITT as KITT cucked The Hoff who is a white guy, or at least florescent orange suntanned, guy. So its not just interspecies sex, not merely bi-curious or bi-flexible, its also interracial. And the network censors are like "whatever" run it who cares, we didn't get to many complaints about three company it'll be fine. The 80s were weird. Like in the 10's if we wanted a TV show about interracial bi police detectives we'd just get a TV show about interracial bi police detectives but in the 80s we had to make one of them a car and do more wiggling than I've ever seen a real car mechanic do, along with endless scenes of manual transmission shift lever rubbing to get the point across. The 80s were quaint and funny in their own weird way, progressive TV today has all the quiet subtlety of a slasher movie killer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:23PM (2 children)
KITT was automatic transmission though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:52PM
...and if all of that wasn't annoying enough, the voice of the car was Dr. Craig from "St. Elsewhere". [google.com]
The 80s were weird.
TeeVee was, and always will be, weird.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:49PM
No, think about it that whole shift into warp speed drama shot for example.
You are correct AC that in the decades since Knight Rider there have been super fans turning the cars interior into a partial or nearly full simulation of KITT and some of those conversion hobby cars have been auto. You actually got me to look at some images.google.com to check. Some of the conversions are pretty good.
I have also discovered there was a remake in 2008 of Knight Rider (Of Course!) and I have no opinion on that topic. AC might be correct that the 2008 remake was auto transmission, no comment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:13PM
Don't forget the Dukes of Hazard influence on "TV car shows" that lasted well into the conceptual formation of Knight Rider... The censors may have been confused thinking that the mechanic was sister Daisy or something.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snospar on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:07PM (5 children)
1) Build a fairly big quadcopter using any parts you find lying around
2) Arrange press conference using the term "Flying Car"
3) ???
4) Profit *
* I do hope not. Seriously, any investor that sees those photos and thinks "Wow! The future is here - must get in on the ground floor!" should seek medical help, they may be having a stroke.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:16PM (4 children)
Perhaps overly pedantically, it has eight rotors, not four.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:59PM (2 children)
4 Rotors Should Be Enough For Everybody.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:04PM (1 child)
I doubt it could ever exceed a 640k payload.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:12PM
Depends on the Expanded Mass Specification.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:01PM
If you look at the photos, however, you will notice that it has only 4 nacelles.
The suggested dept. line was
from the large-plexiglass-quadracopter-with-wheels dept.
The editor's dept. line mentioned a thing with no wheels.
(George's flying car collapsed into a briefcase which a human could carry with no noticeable effort.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by leftover on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:22PM (3 children)
That looks like an overfunded high school club project rather than the product of "30 engineers".
Have to wonder what kind of engineers they are -- software, perhaps. They must have just abstracted away weight vs lift.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:52PM
Flight control software written for Arduino.
Runs on Arduino emulator written in Python running in Linux on a virtual machine written in JavaScript running on a web browser [bellard.org] that happens to be Internet Explorer on Windows XP on VirtualBox on a Linux PC.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:43AM (1 child)
When a V tilts on one side, the lift is augmented on that side and reduced on the other.
Trying to balance such a contraption relying on sensors and computers alone is foolish.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:09PM
> Trying to balance such a contraption relying on sensors and computers alone is foolish.
Trying to balance a Falcon 9 or an F-35 on sensors and computers alone is definitely foolish.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:42PM
Why would you go to Statler Toyota for a hover conversion? It's a rip-off anyway. I recommend Goldie Wilson III. Prices as low as $39,999.95! Remember, keep 'em flying!