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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: 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.