It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
Flying cars. The idea has intuitive appeal — just drive like normal, but most congestion problems go away!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
We’ve made them, but the tradeoffs that you have to make to get a good road vehicle that is also a good aircraft are very large. The benefits of having a dual-mode vehicle are comparatively limited. I think that absent some kind of dramatic technological revolution, like, I don’t know, making the things out of nanites, we’ll just always be better off with dedicated vehicles of the first sort or the second.
Maybe we could have call-on-demand aircraft that could air-ferry ground vehicles, but I think that with something on the order of current technology, that’s probably as close as we’ll get.
Flying cars lose al appeal the moment you encounter other drivers on the road. Just imagine that, but flying.
I don’t think any government will ever allow flying cars.
Too prone for accidents, and way too much freedom.
The thing is how is a flying car different from a aircraft?
We have (ultra) light aircraft not much more expensive than a good car, we have helicopter with vtol abilities. Licencing isn’t that more complex than for a car.
The problem are the maintenance cost as a failure would be dramatic, and the noise meaning people don’t want them over their bacxyard/balcony
If we had as many aircraft in the sky as we do cars on the road, the changes of deadly collisions in the air would go up by a lot. It would become crowded up there, with a lot of potential obstacles to bump into.
There are many models of flying cars. They usually are bad cars and bad planes and very expensive. Only good for niche wealthy enthusiasts.