Ever since there has been flight, people had this vision.
And I think you and I had this vision.
You're on the highway, you're going like two 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 fantasy that all drivers have had.
Hey, doc, we better back up.
We don't have enough road to get up to 88.
Roads, where we're going we don't need, roads!
These visionary scenes depicted in "Back to the Future" and "Blade Runner" did
not exactly pan out.
Instead, we continue to waste hours 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 takeoff 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 withstand 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, disengage 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 Autoplane debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautic
Exposition in New York.
The Autoplane 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 Autoplane was eventually
dismantled for parts.
In the mid 40s, public interest in flying cars was re-sparked after Robert
Fulton flew his Airphibian prototype.
The Airphibian 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 Airphibian became the first flying car
to receive certification from the Civic Aeronautics Authority, predecessor to
the FAA. But in the end, the Airphibian's high production, cost meant it was
never made on a wide scale.
Still, the Airphibian became the inspiration for Molt Taylor's Aerocar a few
years later. The Aerocar too earned the green light from aviation authorities
and complied with all road vehicle codes that existed at the time.
It was everything that people hoped it would be.
It was safe. It was versatile.
It was an actual good looking car that was comfortable and easy to drive.
It was also a plane that was functional and would take you three to
five hundred miles, but he just could not find backers for it.
Ford was curious about the Aerocar, and in 1970, even commissioned a study to
gauge the market interest in such a vehicle.
Ford predicted they could sell about 25,000 Aerocars, but the company
eventually decided to pass on the project after engineers and lawmakers raised
concerns. When the Department of Transportation heard about it, t hey went a
little crazy with the idea that Ford was getting 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 byword 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 standpoint, 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, more powerful micro motors, for what
they call, DEP or distributed electronic propulsion.
An electric motor also has the ability to, you can control torque, right?
That's sort of the power that the motor throws off and you can control rotation
speed very effectively.
And so for something like a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, where you
need a lot of power to get the vehicle in the air, you don't need a lot of
power in what you call cruise, right.
As the vehicle transports through the air.
And then you need a fair amount of power to get the vehicles back safely on the
ground. An electric propulsion system and really high-technology motors and
motor controllers are perfect for that mission.
These were technologies that really only existed in a military application
until recently. And we're now seeing it come out of the DOD and DARPA and the
military field into the commercial market.
Adding to that then, lower priced and higher capability for sensing compute.
So all the things that you would see in an autonomous car prototype can be
applied in an urban air mobility vehicle.
And autonomous operation?
Experts don't see this as too much of a challenge for VTOLs, since these
vehicles will be doing a lot of repetitive tasks.
Autonomous control technology has matured to a stage where we can put it to
goos use. The mission is very simple.
Just take off, carry some people safely and then land.
And so for a simple mission, flying the aircraft should be simple.
And so we think that it is ripe for application of autonomy.
This level of autonomy is not any, it's not too far-fetched anymore.
All these advancements in key technologies have led to a number of flying car
prototypes. Massachusetts-based Terrafugia has managed to get road and FAA
approval for its Transition model, though it's not yet commercially available.
Slovakia-based AeroMobil too has not sold any vehicles and is awaiting approval
from the European Aviation Safety Agency for its Aero Mobile 4.0
car. However, both of these companies seem to be turning their focus to VTOLs.
Terrafugia's newest model, the T F-2, will have removable pods that can be
docked to either an air vehicle or car wheels.
Meanwhile, a rendering of AeroMobil's latest model, the AeroMobile 5.0,
shows a car that drives to a helipad before it takes off vertically.
Experts say engineering a hybrid car/plane is really difficult because the two
vehicles are designed for opposing goals.
When you design cars, your objective is to find friction with torque.
When you design airplanes, your objective is to fight gravity with lift.
This leads to different kinds of solution.
Sticking wings into a car doesn't make them good airplanes, anymore than
sticking wheels onto airplanes.
In addition, a hybrid air and road vehicle in the U.S.
would require certification from both the FAA and the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, which can be 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 technology that's been applied to cars, that have
made electric cars possible, like powertrains, batteries, electric motors, we
can make a new class of aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a
helicopter, but uses multiple different rotors instead of one large one that
allows it to have kind of built-in, inherent redundancies that actually make it
both safer to operate and cheaper to operate at the same time.
Uber is not building any of the vehicles itself.
Instead, the company is collaborating with established manufacturers, including
Boeing and Hyundai, to bring Uber's ride-sharing platform to electric flying
vehicles. Uber says it hopes to have its 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 far performed more than 100 test flights.
Toyota also recently invested $394 million in electric air taxi startup Joby
Aviation. And Porsche has announced that they are exploring creating a luxury,
electric, flying vehicle with U.S.
plane-maker, Boeing. Startups Opener and Kitty Hawk have come up with their own
versions of VTOLs.
Both startups are backed by Google co-founder, Larry Page, and promise a
personal flying vehicle that doesn't require a pilot's license.
Companies see enormous opportunity here.
People are conscious about environmental impact.
They're tired of congestion.
They want to travel faster, quicker.
And they're more receptive to ride-sharing.
Even with all the buzz, experts agree that there are many challenges that
manufacturers must face before they can bring an urban air mobility vehicle to
market. In order to have longer distances and faster charging times to keep
that utilization up, w e're gonna need pretty significant improvements in power
to weight of the battery. Another one that doesn't get a lot of attention, but
should, is noise.
You don't want to fill the air with these whizzing, buzzing, high-frequency
vehicles. The third one is privacy.
While many in the public might be 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 are yet to be explored and will
ultimately go into the courts and the regulatory bodies.
Then there's the question of safety and regulation.
Airplane safety is two or three orders of magnitude more than car safety.
A car engine may not be reliable, like my first car.
It may break down.
But it's safe because you can just, you know, pull over and wait for emergency
services. But not in airplanes.
If something goes wrong, that's it.
That's the end. It's a life-threatening event.
Not only for people inside, but those on the ground.
Even futurist, Elon Musk, seems to be hesitant about the idea of flying
vehicles. There is a challenge with flying cars 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 the place, that is not an anxiety reducing
situation. You're thinking like, did they service their hubcap or is it going
to come off and guillotine me as they are flying past?
Our dream is that this will help solve the worldwide transportation crisis.
Where, you know, it's impossible to get from here to San Francisco in rush hour
traffic right now.
And the regulatory system is basically setup so this aircraft can't meet that
need right now. But it's not because of capabilities.
This aircraft is capable, right now, of actually flying to San Francisco,
landing and recharging and coming back or even landing and coming back based on
the distances. But the problem right now, is the regulatory environment has not
caught up with the capabilities of 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 nine passengers or less and a max
certified takeoff mass of 7,000 pounds or less.
As for if flying cars will 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 fantasy 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, 30 years, the future of transportation is a mesh
of high-speed, automated, efficient, electronic and sustainable terrestrial
transport and then working as a mesh 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.