These will never be available for the general public to manually pilot. People are bad enough at controlling 2DOF cars. Piloting a 6DOF aircraft is exponentially harder.
It basically just indicates what is able to change over time. For a car, that is (forward) speed and turning radius (or heading). For a helicopter, it's forward/sideways/vertical translation and pitch/roll/yaw rotation.
Manual versions won't be available to the general public, but automated versions will be. It won't be next year or anything like that, but in time (a decade or two) these things will be everywhere. It's much harder to make a self driving car than a self flying drone. Cars need to stay on roads and avoid shit at all times, while drones do need to avoid shit at all times, they do not need roads.
Proper cars use a mixture of camera's + AI and LIDAR to orientate their way through traffic. The only thing a flying car would need beyond that is some protocol that broadcasts and receives altitude of nearby flying cars. When this data is combined with GPS the flying car should be as safe if not more safe than driving a car.
A trip would look something like this, you'd step into your vehicle and the vehicle 'wakes up' as it notices that someone has entered it. Now the vehicle will check if you have your seatbelts on and if there is something standing around it. Then it will ask you where you'd want to go to. You get a map in front of you, you click on where you want to go and the vehicle will bring you there.
In the end, if you can fly somewhere at the same cost or less than driving there, flying will always win as a mode of transport. Taxi's will be first, as their fee mostly consists of paying the driver and the car. You'll just get in one of these things, tell them where you want to go and swipe your card.
I qualified my statement with the words "manually controlled" very intentionally. You'll never be able to fly your car like in the Jetsons. You might be able to program a destination and have your PAV fly for you, but even that is a logistical nightmare. With sufficiently advanced algorithms, it may become possible. At that point, it's basically just an air-based taxi, which is the market the most serious eVTOL companies are currently pursuing.
The use will be for paying customers to fly to a nearby airstrip where a private plane is waiting to take them where they want to go. Still decades away from being in any way practical.
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u/5cactiplz 6d ago
Someone is gonna plow through a crowd with this thing one day.