Why Don't We Have Flying Cars Yet? || PORUK 2021

 Why Don't We Have Flying Cars Yet?

Ever since there has beenflight, people had this vision. And I think you and I had this vision. You're on the highway, you're going liketwo miles an hour and you just desperately want to push the button to go vertical and take off over this. It's just an irresistible that all drivers have had. Hey, doc, we better back up. We don't have enough roadto get up to 88. Roads, where we're goingwe don't need, roads! These visionary scenes depicted in "Back tothe Future" and "Blade Runner" did not exactly pan out. Instead, we continue to waste hourse stuck in traffic, fantasizing about flying cars. Yet, we don't have them, even though the potential market is huge. The market for urban air mobility is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2040. Companies like Boeing, Airbus, Toyota and Uber are recognizing the need for more efficient travel and injecting millions into developing VTOLs, or vertical take off and landing vehicles. Though these operate more like massive drones or helicopters than they do cars, VTOLs have the potential to fundamentally change the way we commute in cities. So what's taking so long? And will we ever be able to push a button and zoom over traffic with our car/plane hybrid? The biggest challenge, according to engineers, in creating a flying car is to create a machine that is robust, rugged and probably heavy enough to with stand the rigors of the road. The bumps and the occasional fender benders, and at the same time, a machine that is light enough and aerodynamic enough to be safe in the air. Most engineers claim that although it was an interesting problem, it was not a solvable one. The balance would always be wrong, or the weight would be wrong, and you could never do better than creating an inferior car that would also be an inferior airplane, and that you were much better off making an airplane and making a car and keeping them separate. Andrew Glass is an author and illustrator who spent years researching flying cars for his book. He says that initially, the notion of roads seemed far more far-fetched than flying cars. Even though there were sort of rudimentary cars and rudimentary planes, t here were no roads to speak of. And so there was this fascinating kind of archaeology of a period where people couldn't even imagine a complex, comfortable highway system. But what they could imagine was bolting the wings of a rudimentary airplane to the top of a rudimentary car and flying over the countryside until they got to a landing strip where they would land, dis engage the wings and drive to where they were actually going. People have been trying to build car/plane hybrids since the early nineteen hundreds. In 1917, the Curtiss Auto plane debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition in New York. 

The Auto plane had a removable fuselage, wings and tail and actually looked like a car when it travelled down the road. But with World War I in full swing, priorities quickly shifted from building a flying car to building military planes, and the Auto plane was eventually dismantled for parts. In the mid 40s, public interest in flying cars was re-sparked after Robert Fulton flew his Air phibian prototype. The Air phibian used the same controls for flying and driving and required that drivers leave their airplane parts behind, when you drove it like a car. Three years after its first flight, the Air phibian became the first flying car to receive certification from the Civic Aeronautics Authority, predecessor to the FAA. But in the end, the Air phibian's high production, cost meant it was never made on a wide scale. Still, the Air phibian became the inspiration for Molt Taylor's Aerocar a few years later. The Aero car too earned the green light from aviation authorities and complied with all road vehiclecodes that existed at the time. It was everything that peoplehoped it would be. It was safe. It was versatile. It was an actual good looking carthat was comfortable and easy to drive. It was also a plane that wasfunctional and would take you three to five hundred miles, but he justcould not find backers for it. Ford was curious about the Aerocar, andin 1970, even commissioned a study to gauge the market interestin such a vehicle. Ford predicted they could sell about25,000 Aerocars, but the company eventually decided to pass on theproject after engineers and lawmakers raised concerns. When the Department of Transportation heardabout it, t hey went a little crazy with the idea that Ford wasgetting ready to put a lot of drivers flying over suburban areas. 

And the engineers at Ford came back with the usual criticism that to make this car safe enough to meet all the safety standards, it would become too heavy to be an effective airplane. And so the technology there just took a dip. It's revived, I think, with the notion of self-driving cars. Flying cars have kind of become this by word where people say, 'they promise me flying cars and all I got was...' you know, fill in the blank. Yeah. Why don't we have flying cars? So, we're close, actually. We're closer than we've ever been. So I think that it's a hard problem. They have be be certified in order to be commercially relevant. And that's that's really the key. And the other thing from a technology stand point, it just wasn't there, even 10 years ago it was barely there. And the batteries, the motors, to make these things affordable and reliable, electric propulsion is kind of a key enabler. And so that's really the differentiator that that's making it possible. There have been a number of innovations through hardware, software, telecommunications and infrastructure that have led to this acceleration of both capital and early commerciality and proto-commerciality of urban air mobility. A few of these things are weight reduction, carbon fiber composites, more dense and higher energy density batteries, which improve the power to weight. 

Smaller, lighter, electric motors, morepowerful micro motors, for what they call, DEP ordistributed electronic propulsion. An electric motor also has the abilityto, you can control torque, right? That's sort of the power that the motorthrows off and you can control rotation speed very effectively. And so for something like a verticaltakeoff and landing vehicle, where you need a lot of power to get the vehiclein the air, you don't need a lot of power in what you call cruise, right. As the vehicle transportsthrough the air. And then you need a fair amount of powerto get the vehicles back safely on the ground. An electric propulsion systemand really high-technology motors and motor controllers are perfectfor that mission. These were technologies that really onlyexisted in a military application until recently. And we're now seeing it comeout of the DOD and DARPA and the military field intothe commercial market. Adding to that then, lower pricedand higher capability for sensing compute. So all the things that you would seein an autonomous car prototype can be applied in an urbanair mobility vehicle. And autonomous operation? Experts don't see this as too muchof a challenge for VTOLs, since these vehicles will be doing alot of repetitive tasks. Autonomous control technology has matured to astage where we can put it to goos use. The mission is very simple. Just take off, carry somepeople safely and then land. And so for a simple mission,flying the aircraft should be simple. And so we think that itis ripe for application of autonomy. This level of autonomy is notany, it's not too far-fetched anymore. All these advancements in key technologies haveled to a number of flying car prototypes. Massachusetts-based Terrafugia has managedto get road and FAA approval for its Transition model, thoughit's not yet commercially available. Slovakia-based AeroMobil too has not soldany vehicles and is awaiting approval from the European Aviation Safety Agencyfor its Aero Mobile 4.0 car. However, both of these companies seemto be turning their focus to VTOLs.

 Terrafugia's newest model, the T F-2, willhave removable pods that can be docked to either an airvehicle or car wheels. Meanwhile, a rendering of AeroMobil'slatest model, the AeroMobile 5.0, shows a car that drives to ahelipad before it takes off vertically. Experts say engineering a hybrid car/planeis really difficult because the two vehicles are designedfor opposing goals. When you design cars, your objectiveis to find friction with torque. When you design airplanes, your objectiveis to fight gravity with lift. This leads to differentkinds of solution. Sticking wings into a car doesn'tmake them good airplanes, anymore than sticking wheels onto airplanes. In addition, a hybrid air androad vehicle in the U.S. would require certification from both the FAA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which canbe hard to achieve. That's why many companies have turned to VTOLs. The Vertical Flight Society, a trade association for the advancement of vertical flight, has been tracking electric VTOL designs since 2016. 

Its website lists over 250 different designs for eVTOLs. One well-known company working with eVTOLs is Uber. The idea is that with the new technologythat's been applied to cars, that have made electric cars possible, like power trains, batteries, electric motors, we can make a new class of aircraft thatcan take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but uses multiple different rotorsinstead of one large one that allows it to have kind of built-in,inherent redundancies that actually make it both safer to operate and cheaperto operate at the same time. Uber is not building anyof the vehicles itself. Instead, the company is collaborating with established manufacturers, including Boeing and Hyundai, to bring Uber'sride-sharing platform to electric flying vehicles. Uber says it hopes to haveits eVTOLs up and running by 2023. Another big name in the space is Airbus. The company is testing CityAirbus,an all-electric, four-seat, remotely piloted flying taxi, which has so farperformed more than 100 test flights. Toyota also recently invested $394 millionin electric air taxi startup Joby Aviation. And Porsche has announced thatthey are exploring creating a luxury, electric, flying vehicle with U.S. plane-maker, Boeing. Startups Opener and Kitty Hawkhave come up with their own versions of VTOLs. Both startups are backed by Googleco-founder, Larry Page, and promise a personal flying vehicle that doesn'trequire a pilot's license. Companies see enormous opportunity here. People are consciousabout environmental impact. They're tired of congestion. They want to travel faster, quicker. And they're morereceptive to ride-sharing. Even with all the buzz, experts agreethat there are many challenges that manufacturers must face before they can bringan urban air mobility vehicle to market. In order to have longer distancesand faster charging times to keep that utilization up, w e're gonnaneed pretty significant improvements in power to weight of the battery. Another one thatdoesn't get a lot of attention, but should, is noise. 

You don't want to fill theair with these whizzing, buzzing, high-frequency vehicles. The third one is privacy. While many in the public mightbe comfortable with autonomous vehicles covered with sensors that could facially recognize pedestrians, the thought of something being in the air at night,flying around your home or in your neighborhood or, you know, between businesses may introduce a new genre of privacy and safety-related nuances that areyet to be explored and will ultimately go into the courtsand the regulatory bodies. Then there's the questionof safety and regulation. Airplane safety is two or three ordersof magnitude more than car safety. A car engine may not bereliable, like my first car. It may break down. But it's safe because you can just, youknow, pull over and wait for emergency services. But not in airplanes. If something goes wrong, that's it. That's the end. It'sa life-threatening event. Not only for people inside,but those on the ground. Even futurist, Elon Musk, seems to behesitant about the idea of flying vehicles. There is a challenge with flyingcars in that they'll be quite noisy, the the wind force generated to be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars going all over theplace, that is not an anxiety reducing situation. You're thinking like, did they servicetheir hubcap or is it going to come off and guillotine meas they are flying past? Our dream is that this willhelp solve the worldwide transportation crisis. Where, you know, it's impossible to get fromhere to San Francisco in rush hour traffic right now. And the regulatory system is basically setupso this aircraft can't meet that need right now. But it'snot because of capabilities. This aircraft is capable, right now,of actually flying to San Francisco, landing and recharging and coming back oreven landing and coming back based on the distances. But the problem right now,is the regulatory environment has not caught up with the capabilitiesof this kind of aircraft. Because honestly, this type of aircraft was just invented. But regulation seems to be catching up. I want to close with some thoughts on the next very, very innovative piece of technology that we see emerging,and that's urban air mobility. As I mentioned, these are aircraft that fill that void from 30 miles to 300 miles between the small drones and the commercial aircraft we know today. And probably the biggest question I get on this is, 'is this real? Are they really happening?' Yes, this is more than just hype. This is more than just promotional videos. We have at least six aircraft well along in their type certification, which is the first step in introducing the new aircraft into operation. In 2019, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency released a special condition certification for VTOL aircraft. The condition applies to vehicles with ninepassengers or less and a max certified takeoff mass of7,000 pounds or less. As for if flying carswill ever fill our skies? Right now, that seems unlikely. I don't imagine that this is ever going to happen where people actually accomplish this dream of a flying car in every garage. It was a kind of self-contained that wasn't going to be a reality for very many people. It seems as if trying to design a dual purpose road car and flying car is just not economical and not the optimal technological solution. So if you look out 10, 20, 20, 30years, the future of transportation is a mesh of high-speed, automated, efficient, electronic and sustainable terrestrial transport and then working as much with electronic, automated urban air mobility for various applications. With so many big name companies invested in developing VTOLs, there's a really good chance that commuting over traffic will become a reality, even if flying cars remain a fantasy. 

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