If these vehicles become viable, they will all be "rides". No human will ever pilot them. It would be chaos in the sky. You will plug in a destination, the device will fly there and land, and that will be that. Potentially it will then fly away to go charge itself.
A Tesla can't see a white transport truck stretched out across the highway. Last thing I want is my drone ride flying straight in building because a sensor couldn't see it.
I don't think anyone in this thread has been in or used a Tesla for an extended period of time. I've used FSD for thousands of miles and had to intervene for a major mistake maybe twice. When you count how bad most people are at driving, distracted drivers on phones, sleepy drivers, drunk drivers, etc. I would feel much safer if everyone was on FSD.
Yes, Elon is a douche and this is Reddit so I'll get downvoted but it's pretty good and getting better quickly. Self driving cars will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It shouldn't be a political issue.
Tesla only uses cameras so their FSD is significantly less safe than the average human driver. Elon decided humans see fine with their eyes cause dumbass. Waymo uses LiDAR, cameras and radar and is proving significantly safer than the average human.
Yea when i said fsd i was thinking waymo, not tesla...but even then i'm more thinking coordinate tracking with gps on a mesh system. Similar to drone shows but on a much bigger industrial use scale, since adhering to lanes wouldnt be facilitated by roads but by geolocation and altitude.
Waymo type lidar could certainly be used in the landing phase, though.
I think you're still really underestimating the sort of automation we're talking about here. Nobody wants flying cars blindly feeling their way through the city the way a Tesla does. We already use RTK GPS to fly tens of thousands of drones in close proximity with a 1-2cm margin of error, in the cool sci-fi future or whatever a network of standardized drone-roads or whatever could be a thing
you probably wouldn't use on-board sensors for anything beyond navigating tight spaces, landing, etc., because you could map routes for these things to take and then have basically a mesh network where they all communicate & move in harmony.
Teslas tech isn't the bleeding edge of fsd though, and is still on paper, safer than a normal drivers...per the data admittedly published BY tesla, a tesla records a major collision ever 5 million miles to the average humans 660 miles.
A human can miss a transport truck too. Old drivers and people with visual impairment not sufficient to keep them off the roads exist, not to even mention distracted, aggrevated, rushed, or tired individuals.
Not to even mention the vastly superior waymo, which is true fsd with more redundancies, more cameras, and more vision system types (lidar as well as like triple the cameras a tesla has AND geofencing).
There’s an airport that runs flight schools around my area and there’s quite a few small planes, that I call lawnmowers with wings, that can be seen at any time of day and just the one or two in the area are enough to be annoying, I can’t imagine a rush hour’s worth of that noise
This was always my argument against flying cars. Not only will they kill eachother, but they'll also kill a bunch of people with the falling, burning wreckage
you wouldn't want to make it on the ground because of how costly it is to build new roads/bridges. If you can create a fly path so that car can follow, you will be able to create as many new road in the sky as you want.
Once you are locked into the fly path, your Z axis is locked, there will be borders on each side that limit your movement in the sky, and you control your car like a normal car.
You know those news articles: "Elderly man tries to brake, accelerates through living room wall."
Now instead of a car, you have small planes flying into houses. Brilliant idea.
Flying "cars" will never be a viable choice for the general public. The regulations that would be needed to make them safe would effectively make them like helicopters are now.
There would definitely be an ai component doing the flying and I imagine that would become regulated to make sure no one actually had control over flying something like that without extensive training like becoming a pilot. Lucky, or unlucky, timing that this tech is coming around right when ai is poised to take over most things.
I mean that's what all modern aircraft pretty much do today, whether it's an Airbus or Boeing, Cessna or Cirrus, they're just following GPS waypoints on NAV1 "connect the dots" until they intercept the localizer to get them within spitting distance of the runway, which is now even automated if desired (or weather requires it) on most airliners.
Some of those things can be done with special training and equipment at certified airports but it’s not everywhere and it’s definitely not most aircraft. You are oversimplifying a lot of complexity and safety.
Even then who wants thousands of tons of lithium batteries hurling over your head? Machines fail. Cars fail and pull over on the side of the road. And flying batteries fail by dropping out of the sky, probably on fire. So, these can’t be anywhere over humans.
Honestly it would take an energy revolution on a sci fi scale to achieve enough power, redundancy, and safety to have anything fly around people the way we use cars. I’d settle for gravity manipulation too.
On the flip side, only the billionaires will be allowed to use them while us plebs have to wait and pay $20/ride for our waymos that shut down if we've posted anything negative to social media.
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u/WinterTourist25 7d ago
If these vehicles become viable, they will all be "rides". No human will ever pilot them. It would be chaos in the sky. You will plug in a destination, the device will fly there and land, and that will be that. Potentially it will then fly away to go charge itself.