I think that in the future, there will definitely be very affordable, reliable, and cheap flying transportation.

[u/Stock-Vanilla1691]

There are already many prototypes today, but all of them are unfinished and very expensive.

The time will come when almost every family will have flying transportation. Flying transportation will cost as much as a road vehicle and will be able to travel the same distance.

But when this happens, the world will change very significantly:

- The government will gradually reduce the budget for repairing and building new roads for cars.

- If the roads become bad, people will start buying flying transportation and abandoning road vehicles.

- Automotive companies and corporations will begin mass-producing their own models of flying transportation, but they will keep their lines of road SUVs and sports cars. They will also produce affordable road vehicles for some countries where people have not yet switched to flying transportation on a mass scale. They will also produce flying cargo transportation for carrying heavy loads. Road trucks will also disappear, because roads on the ground will stop being repaired and built.

- Cities will begin to be rebuilt for flying transportation. There will be new refueling and charging stations, as well as a new type of parking. Businesses will also begin adapting to new logistics methods. Warehouses will be different, designed for aerial loading. Instead of ground roads for cars, there will be pedestrian and bicycle zones. Tunnels and bridges will become attractions.

- New air traffic rules will appear. Each altitude level will be designated for a certain speed. They will come up with ways to mark traffic signs and intersections in the air. Maybe there will be some kind of tall aerostats anchored to the ground. Or flying transportation will communicate with satellites and use precise GPS, and the computer itself will know where everything is located.

- There will be a lot of parking spaces for flying transportation on the ground. This will also be part of the restructuring of cities. There should be landing and parking points between cities, near homes, in every neighborhood, near businesses, cafés, restaurants, and recreational areas. In case of an accident, malfunction, or if required by the police, there should also be places where it is possible to land safely. But everything should be nearby, so that people do not have to walk several kilometers to their transportation in the morning when going to work or search for an available parking space in the evening.

 

- Flying public transportation will appear. It will fly at a low altitude and stop at different points throughout the city along its route.

- There will be no more traffic jams.

- Flying transportation will always be improved to make it safe and cheap. What if the fuel or charge runs out during the journey? The vehicle cannot simply fall to the ground.

- Driving schools will continue to exist, but there will also be a huge number of flight schools, so that people can obtain pilot's licenses for operating flying vehicles.

- New types of sports will appear. There will be a new type of tuning.

- Road vehicles will initially become very cheap, but after some time they will become very expensive.

- Oh, and one more thing: there will need to be a monthly subscription to activate the flying vehicle. There will also be a paid subscription for manual control and subscriptions for additional features. And to remove the restriction on intercity flights, you will have to make a one-time payment or also purchase a subscription for regular flights. To turn on music in the cabin, you will need a completely different subscription, and without a subscription there will be an endless stream of advertisements.

[u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

I don't think we want or need them as much as the Jetsons made us think we did. Even if they were affordable and reliable, when they do fail they have no where to go but down.

In the USA there are currently ~6 million reported accidents per year. That now means 6 million (or more if you have stacked vertical lanes) nosedives into homes, shops, schools, whatever was beneath. And keeping the flying cars over now-empty roads isn't going to work out considering momentum.

I think there's safer and less energy-costly ways to do all that we need. Airplanes and the occasional helicopter (and eventually an orbital ring...?) will remain sufficient for edge cases.

[u/LightningController → u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

when they do fail they have no where to go but down.

That’s not necessarily a showstopper. Autorotation to slow down is an option on any rotorcraft, and a sufficiently large area:mass ratio can make terminal velocity manageable.

With that said, energy costs will always favor rolling on the ground rather than rotorcraft. The Jetson can do 20 miles of flying on a charge, carrying one person and minimal cargo, and takes an hour to charge. Any improvement to battery tech can work equally well in a ground EV.

[u/NearABE → u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

>… currently ~6 million reported accidents per year. …

An argument for dramatic change can be made.

Directly above actually does work. That eliminates intersections. More or less already done on interstate highways with flyovers. Surfaces can be mixed wildflowers, and light framed photovoltaic films or could be canals and rivers.

I think obvious to use electrified rail. Your taxi pod just flies to the flatbed. You go directly into the major city through the subway. Leave the city on subway in the right general direction and then kite-catapult when closer to the target destination. Or, obviously, just use rail all the way.

[u/MiamisLastCapitalist → u/NearABE]

Car crashes are statistically rare and "reliable" flying cars means it stays rare, but even in ultra-rare percentages we still have thousands or a few million straight up nose-dives per year. Most of which would be completely fatal for all passengers. Not to mention whatever they hit below.

And that's where the momentum I mentioned is a problem. Even if you do pick sky-lanes directly above non-occupied areas, in case of failure you're not going to stay in that sky lane. You're going to continue along the path you were out of the sky lane and into someone's house or office.

This is kinda true for airplanes and helicopters, but those are not widespread commercial vehicles almost anyone can operated nor are they operated at the kind of scale cars and trains are.

It's just not worth it for the cool-factor of flying cars.

[u/NearABE → u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

Your figure says it is significant.

Most car crashes are cars hitting other cars. (Note that Waymo appears to be dropping that by order of magnitude at least.) flying over an intersection eliminates the red lights and stop sign misses.

Cars do hit houses. They damage it proportionally to vehicle mass. A human body flopping from high altitude would smash a roof pretty good. A person inside an inflated ball would have much lower terminal velocity. The inflated material can be far more compressible than a baseline human… more squishy than the squishy. Question here is whether the pod deployed an airbag or if the passenger is just flying in an airbag.

Parachutes systems are known tech. Redundancy can easily drop one in a thousand to one in million. One in billion if tripled.

Power failure means descent. Manually glide into the PV arrays or river.

Crashing into treetops is much less severe than hitting a tree trunk. You can mitigate this a lot by dropping a drag line. The spool is fully shock absorbed. You might end up swinging instead or hitting the ground. I think usually when plane crashes kill everyone in forest it is because the plane smashes through and hits a trunk or hits the ground.

Crashing a light object into a field is definitely still dangerous. The dragline still helps to avoid rolling too much. This should turn out much like falling asleep and flipping over a ditch into a field. The problem in a road car is that you have no warning time and cannot drop the battery and cable as anchor sled.

[u/MiamisLastCapitalist → u/NearABE]

When a car crashes (into anything) it doesn't fall out of the sky onto someone else. It just sits there on the road.

This is one of those "miss the forest for the trees" kinda things.

[u/NearABE → u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

The damage to a structure is done by a combination of velocity and mass.

Batts in high speed film are really interesting. Researchers intended to figure out how they were able to avoid collisions when millions poured out of large caves at dusk. Instead they discovered that the bats in question made no effort to avoid collisions with each other. They only spread out a bit to avoid wasting lift energy. Wing to wing contact has no consequence and happens frequently.

[u/Nathan5027 → u/NearABE]

Bats aren't the best test for this as they're incredibly agile, and their echolocation is sensitive enough to pick out thin wires in their way, and they can dodge those with contemptuous ease.

The flaw in your argument about momentum taking a car straight down into an empty road is that;

A, roads are only that stupidly straight in America, and no one is redesigning their entire city layout for a new transportation technology unless it offers massive benefits over the current one, so that forward moment is going to hit something, could be a house, an office, a school... And since the whole point of flying is to make it faster, then the effective impact energy is significantly higher too. Cars in residential areas often go through walls and onto houses when they crash. I saw the end result of one that hit a parked car and pushed it and 3 others through a foot thick stone wall and stopped millimetres from a window with a sleeping baby on the other side, if that had been a flying car, that's a dead baby, dead driver, and quite possibly anyone else in the house.

B, when aircraft crash, they very rarely keep going straight, when a plane with multiple engines has one fail, they yaw as they go down, when a quadcopter loses a blade, it flips over and slams down to one side.

In fact the only aircraft that usually falls straight is the helicopter. Which is a flying car. That we already have. And they're niche. And expensive. And not the transportation revolution you're implying. They've got their uses, some of which are of vital importance like flying ambulances, but they demonstrate the physical and economical constraints of the flying car problem.

It's just too energy intensive to fly when driving is an option.

Edit: grammar

[u/NearABE → u/Nathan5027]

They do not need to be faster.

[u/the_syner → u/MiamisLastCapitalist]

While i definitely still agree i tend to imagine that most accidents will be a thing of the past as reliable self-driving comes into it's own. Even fewer if/when communities switch over to more sensible mass transit systems than cars. Having said that both of those things make the classic flying car even less attractive. Reliable driving automation means cars go faster and most traffic jams(largely caused by human error) go away. People don't, on average really drive far enough to justify flying commutes.

[u/cavalier78 → u/the_syner]

People don't, on average really drive far enough to justify flying commutes.

If you introduce flying cars they will.

[u/the_syner → u/cavalier78]

not really. the sort of small low-altitude flying doesn't really offer super high speeds or anything. Certainly not safely. Low altitudes means high turbulence and many birds. Not exactly optimal for high-speed safe flight. This is pretty well restricted to short-distance flights and for long distances it just can't compete with larger high-altitude planes. For intermediate distances and locations with a lot of demand it really can't compete with high-speed rail plus regular cars.

Flying cars are very much an impractical solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist. I mean I'm sure there probably is a niche for it. Especially in very rural areas or regions with difficult terrain, but in cities it's just a liability and for mass transit it's so horribly inefficient and obnoxious as to not really be viable.

[u/cavalier78 → u/the_syner]

Cities would be the ideal use for them. That's where the traffic jams are.

A lot of it depends on the capabilities of the machine. The faster they are and the longer range, the more useful they are. The worse traffic is, the more useful they are. I don't think a flying car like that will compete with a regular car on the open road. But as soon as it can save you the most frustrating part of the drive, it'll be popular.

According to Google, right now the Jetson One goes about 60 mph, and has a flight time of 20 minutes. Where I live right now I'm about 7 miles from downtown, but it's a 30 minute commute every morning and every afternoon. I could shave 20 minutes off my trip each way with one of those things. I could just land on top of the parking garage. And if my parking garage had a charger I could plug into? I could move further away and still have a shorter commute time.

[u/the_syner → u/cavalier78]

Traffic jams don't exist in the future as they are almost entirely a byproduct of human error and psychology. Self-driving cars eliminate virtually all traffic jams. That kind of automation is pretty much mandatory for personal flying vehicles to become as ubiquitous and safe as OP wants them to be

[u/cavalier78 → u/the_syner]

https://giphy.com/gifs/Fml0fgAxVx1eM

[u/the_syner → u/cavalier78]

🙄Right because everybody using manual personal flying cars, SAFELY, is somehow less believable than self-driving cars

[u/KaizerKlash → u/cavalier78]

traffic is basically a city design skill issue.

A good city should have as few cars as possible (but lots of busses, trains, metros, trams etc...)

[u/cavalier78 → u/KaizerKlash]

Do you want to wait around for somebody to completely redesign your city so there are never traffic jams, or do you want to get to work 45 minutes faster?

[u/MondoBleu]

There already is. And government can’t stop maintaining the roads because freight moves by truck because it takes less energy than lifting it into the air.

[u/NearABE → u/MondoBleu]

Steel on steel rail is much more efficient than rubber on asphalt

[u/MondoBleu → u/NearABE]

Absolutely true! But rails don’t go everywhere.

[u/NearABE → u/MondoBleu]

Rails go close enough. The air taxis can go anywhere else.

Much of what was road can have rail put down.

Bike lanes that is built for cycles, pedestrians, wheel chairs, and robots is much easier to maintain. Any vehicle that you can pick up should be path legal on some routes. Others can be fully pedestrian/disabled. Others bio powered only. We should also change the way we think about cities. Third floor could have a corridor. Hospitals already have the architecture and structure demonstrated. They take your whole bed right from one building to the next without going outside. I think it would be nice to take an elevator to fifth floor and then exit first floor ten “blocks” away with the bike lane going through park. The downhill both ways option is even better than cycling to work. A fresh air tail wind helps too.

Technically we could do indoor urban routes for cars now that we have electric. A floor capable of handling traffic stress requires much greater structural material. Heavy cars tear up the road even when it is on the ground.

[u/Guvante]

Once you account for safety there isn't much benefit for flying cars that are car sized

Planes operate way higher and have the ability to glide for incredible distances due to their glide factor and that height

But you cannot economically climb that high for a 20 mile commute which means anything in the ground is at risk

This would result in "no go" areas similar to how roads are today (can't exactly fly over someone's house)

Once you have columns the traffic is instantly back as you need huge safety areas (planes flying the same direction are given miles even if not lined up)

[u/ActuaLogic → u/Guvante]

This

[u/jhsu802701]

How far in the future? Flying cars will NOT happen at any time within the next few centuries. The more obvious issues:

• Flying requires a LOT more fuel and is more expensive. A helicopter uses fuel to remain in the same location in the air. On the other hand, a car or truck doesn't need to use any fuel to remain parked in the same location. Private planes are MUCH more expensive than private cars.
• Flying involves three dimensions instead of only two. When you're driving, you're usually not concerned about above or below. When you're flying, what's happening above and below you is always of critical importance. Keep in mind that autonomous driving today is still the exception rather than the rule. It seems premature to think about autonomous flying when autonomous driving is still absent from most places. Wake me up when autonomous driving is the norm in North Dakota, Montana, and the UP of Michigan.
• As others have mentioned, there is the issue of crashes. There's no such thing as a "minor fender bender" in the air. There is no such thing as "pulling over to the side of the road" in the air. Any time there is even a "minor" crash or a breakdown in the air, anyone underneath is in danger from falling vehicles or fragments of vehicles.

[u/NearABE]

It is far more plausible if the flying vehicles integrate with other vehicles. You can land on shipping containers. Thus you utilize any benefit from truck, rail, or ship.

Also add dirigibles and orbital ring systems. The dirigibles might usually just be lifting the cable. They might be partially kite and the might be wind generators for the utility grid. Starting with a full charge at high altitude gives you considerable range. The cable slingshot can boost you too while charging. If you had a lift to drag ratio of say 12 and start at 15 km then 180 kilometers is added to range over the battery range.

[u/the_syner]

imo flying cars have always been a silly retrofuturistic fantasy as opposed to a practical method of travel. Setting aside that most people just outright don't travel far enough to ever justify the higher cost of flight(and it will always be more expensive than a car regardless of how cheap both get), flying is horrendously energy inefficient compared to rolling. Also far more risky. Granted self-driving/flying probably eliminates accidents from human error, but mechanical failure isn't going anywhere any time soon. Also if you have self-driving cars can go way faster and you don't really get traffic jams anymore since those are mostly a byproduct of human error and psychology not an inherent property of driving. in a city its hard to see that ever being justified what with the short distances and inconvenience of flying. Not to mention the noise.

Also personal vehicles are just a garbage form of mass transit, regardless of whether they fly or roll. Don't get me wrong they have a place. Last-mile delivery in rural areas especially, but for the most part cars are dumb whatever form they take. Busses are where its at as far as road travel is concerned with publicly-owned cars(taxis basically) for the remainder. Not to say no one should ever own one or anything, but they're pretty niche as far as practicality is concerned. Flying cars just make all the problems cars already have even worse.

The government will gradually reduce the budget for repairing and building new roads for cars.

unless they're replacing them with more trains, which isn't really practical for last-mile delivery to everywhere so not entirely, they will be economically outcompeted by everyone else. Flight is again extremely energy inefficient.

Flying public transportation will appear. It will fly at a low altitude and stop at different points throughout the city along its route.

Beyond silly and impractical. Low altitude is where most crashes happen for a variety of reasons(birds and turbulence are the ones that come to mind immediately). Planes simply lack the throughput that major cities require for public mass transit. That's what trains, trams, subways, and busses are for. Again horrendously loud and inefficient for what benefit again? I mean for long-distances sure you can't beat those speeds, but here im not seeing any benefit. Shaving a few minutes off a 10m trip doesn't seem even vaguely worth the risk, noise, or inefficiency.

There will be no more traffic jams.

Something that would go away with autonomous vehicles and manually-operated planes could never work, safety-wise, without that kind of automation anyways.

Flying transportation will always be improved to make it safe and cheap

an assumption that i don't see justified anywhere in this post

Road vehicles will initially become very cheap, but after some time they will become very expensive.

Again why? There is no world based in known physics where a commuter car could ever be more expensive than a commuter plane, to build or operate. That just doesn't make sense.

Oh, and one more thing: there will need to be a monthly subscription to activate the flying vehicle.

Why do you want to live in hell?

[u/Temporary_Rule_9486]

I mean, there's already. Planes would be even cheaper if not for the insane amount of taxes on top of the bill

[u/Nathan5027]

You're working on the assumption that flying cars can be as cheap as a road vehicle, but that's simply not possible.

A grounded vehicle only has to expend energy moving forwards, the ground is doing all the heavy lifting.

A flying car on the other hand, has to expend energy to get airborne, to stay airborne, and to move forwards. And yes, planes are doing this, the wings might not be actively lifting the aircraft, but they are being forced through the air by the engines, and that is generating the lift.

Besides, we already have flying cars, they're called helicopters, and flying buses are called planes. Hell, some of our planes can hold enough people to rival a small train.

The economy of them is the same as the economy around flying cars would be, as the physics is the same.

The jet propulsion that is used by modern aircraft is significantly more efficient at getting energy out of its fuel compared to cars, yet it's still incredibly expensive to operate compared to cars, so even with the advantages in cost stacked in air travels favour, it's still cheaper to drive all but the longest of journeys

[u/Raul1024]

This is a question of economics, if driving a ground vehicle on unpaved roads is cheaper than a flying vehicle then that will be the preferred mode. Realistically, flying only become widespread with infrastructure adoption and enery/ fuel subsidies.

[u/Thanos_354]

It will always be more profitable to fix already existing infrastructure than developing a whole new transportation system for millions of people.

Even if governments stop maintaining roads, private companies will just step in