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Rolls-Royce wants to build a flying taxi:
[...F]lying cars are happening again? Make up your mind! I can't handle all this uncertainty. Let's add it all up, shall we?
We have an Airbus and Audi partnership, currently trying to build a city car/flying taxi concept. We have Uber building a flying taxi hub in Paris. Then we have Kitty Hawk, a secret company founded by Google co-founder Larry Page -- it's working on a project called Cora. Yes, it's another flying taxi.
[...] But guess who else is joining the flying taxi race... Rolls-Royce.
Not the Rolls-Royce of luxury cars fame, Rolls Royce the engine company, that split from the car company decades ago.
That Rolls-Royce is looking to get into the flying taxi game and has drawn up plans to create an electric vehicle that could potentially reach speeds of 400 kilometres per hour (around 250 miles per hour). Rolls-Royce believes it could be ready to launch as early as the next decade, a timeline that's consistent with many of its potential competitors.
Wonder if they will give a special rate to Danny DeVito?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday July 16 2018, @09:42AM (6 children)
Surely the mass-to-energy ratio of electric is so much worse than petrol (plus engine) that it is a bad idea?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @10:36AM (1 child)
Yes, it is. But short-haul luxury transportation was never about making economical sense.
City-center to airport with business luggage only, 10 minutes guaranteed travel time without a chance of traffic jams, for 500€ one-way? Instead of 50 minutes plus potential holdups for 120€? That's the market they're after, not the "I'm drunk, get me home" crowd ...
After 7-8 hours of flying your human pilots (24h of them!) are paid for the day, the rest is for deprecation, operating cost and profit. Back-of-the-envelope, but sounds doable.
And in 15 years: make them fully autonomous, fire the pilots and slash 150€ off the fare. Even more profit.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 16 2018, @12:30PM
There's going to be lots of those once all the business travelers are able to take flying taxis to the airport.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday July 16 2018, @10:42AM
Battery technology keeps improving. Soon electrical flying machines will be commercially viable. It makes sense to get in early and develop the rest of the technology in parallel.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday July 16 2018, @11:06AM
Yes but, electric motor tech has been (and still is) improving rapidly, and electricity storage tech (ie. battery) is improving too - whereas petrol engine tech is largely static and petrol storage ain't going to get any more weight efficient.
May make sense to start developing vehicles now in anticipation of further improvements in battery tech.
Biggest problem for Rolls may turn out to be legal - is it a car or is it a plane. It may matter because the company split decades ago and one half does cars and the other half does planes, might end up like Apple, agreeing to never go into music business and then iTunes...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday July 16 2018, @05:02PM (1 child)
You don't understand, man. This is disruptive, man. Those idiots who have been building helicopters for decades, they're so encrusted in their slow methodical habits, man. They don't know how to be Agile and disruptive, man. They don't understand computers, and we understand computers, so we're totally gonna teach them how they should have done their job all along. I have a drone, man. How hard is it to scale a drone to carry people, man ? It's a great idea, and it's only the crusty old people who don't understand code who don't get it.
(Yes, Rolls isn't a fucking Silicon Valley startup. Going after the many many other "we can do that, because Elon can make rockets" Dunning-Kruger optimists)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 17 2018, @02:35AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday July 16 2018, @10:42AM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44840953 [bbc.co.uk]
Engine maker makes new engine. Marketing department finds way to hype new product. No flying taxis will be made.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @10:49AM (9 children)
I have a radical idea. So if autonomous vehicles can't be made to safely interact with road traffic, LET'S JUST BUILD FLYING ONES INSTEAD!!!11
Seriously though, autopilots for flying vehicles have been working pretty well for decades. No pesky kids jumping in front of a plane and no road signs or trailer trucks standing in the middle of the projected route, demanding sophisticated AI to identify and react on. Airspace is tightly controlled, short of ATC messing up there is nothing to worry about the for the software but flying high enough to stay clear of ground structures (can be a pre-programmed route) and not hitting the ground too fast while landing.
My bet is on these being autonomous. Pilots are fucking expensive anyway and there's not enough of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @11:55AM (1 child)
Fine, get back to me when they can guarantee at least 99% reliability for all electronic and electromechanical components and subsystems involved in building these, otherwise keep them away from overflying my property (an observation there regarding location/position, about a month back, the military played their usual 'lets fuck with the GPS without warning' games, for close on four hours my phone was reporting its position to be anywhere within a three mile radius of where it sat being charged..including being a half mile offshore mid river, this is not an uncommon occurrence locally, and happens for probably very sound operational security reasons, though it's a royal pain and normally lasts for less that an hour)
Artificially restricted market, there are people out there who want to be pilots, but can't afford it. It's a costly game (approx $70,000 to $100,000 for your license then maybe a further thousand hours flying time after gaining your license before some companies will consider hiring you)
(Score: 2) by SparkyGSX on Monday July 16 2018, @09:40PM
99%? That would mean one of them would crash on your house every other day!
Critical parts on aircraft without redundancy are required to have a failure rate of less than 1*10^-9 per flight hour.
To put that into perspective: the pilot, who on average will live to about 80 years, falls short by about a factor of 100, and that is just counting him dying of old age, not being incapacitated of messing up some other way.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Monday July 16 2018, @12:19PM (6 children)
...partly because the number of individual air vehicles is tiny compared with the number of cars on the road, and most flights are at least a couple of hundred miles, between out-of-town airports, so those aircraft spend 90% of their time between cities where there is plenty of airspace - even then, air traffic control is not without its problems around busy airports.
Take a significant fraction of current car users and put them in mini-helicopters and you'll soon have chaos in the skies - OK, you don't need roads, and you've got three dimensions to spread out in - but those journeys still have to begin and end on the ground so you're still going to have congestion around popular destinations: fixed-wing planes don't queue well, and even helicopters will use vast amounts of fuel/charge sitting in holding patterns (no turning off your engine while waiting at the lights!) Plus, since there's no such thing as a minor fender-bender in the air, everything has to be much more cautious and vehicles have to be kept much further apart. They'll probably need bigger parking spaces, too.
Then there's the inconvenient truth that even electric aircraft have to get energy from somewhere, and nobody has invented Mr Fusion yet.
Sorry but, at least in the foreseeable future, "flying car" == "slightly lower-cost helicopter for the sort of plutocrats who already use helicopters to flit between their penthouse suites and Learjet hangar".
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snow on Monday July 16 2018, @03:24PM (4 children)
I can't wait to listen to the buzzing of 10,000 drones/flying cars while I try to enjoy my morning coffee.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday July 16 2018, @11:00PM (3 children)
I'm sure someone said the same thing when we transitioned from horses to automobiles, and they were probably true too for some time.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 16 2018, @11:35PM
They're still true now, as long as minorities put fart-pipes on their cars and have to drive them to work every morning.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday July 17 2018, @12:12PM (1 child)
Hmm... the current noisy, dangerous, dirty and slow situation in vehicle-clogged cities (even ignoring larger-scale environmental issues) vs. being knee-deep in horseshit. Cancer, or, whatever you get from from wading through festering dung. Can I see option 3, please? (its called telling the motor and oil industry lobbyists to fuck off, installing a usable public transport system, then banning private cars from the streets so they don't clog up the roads for busses),
Of course, the transition to horses was also accompanied by both a vast population increase and, ultimately, a higher proportion of people owning cars than ever owned horses.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:40PM
Option 3 is death from above, flying cars. Noisy and potentially smoggy during take off and landing, but we've shifted the rest of the problem to the birds. Oh yea, did I mention death from above?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @11:09PM
Hmm, I wonder how dense helicopter/drone traffic has to become before its more economical to hold them aloft with giant fans on the ground blowing upward.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday July 16 2018, @10:58PM
Check out the video [bbc.com] at the top, after the page finish loading, this thing seems to handle like the ones in sci-fi movies, i.e. not a plane or chopper. Single person carrier only for now. This space is looking promising and could only get better as bigger corps with bigger pockets invest more in it.