Originally published at: General Motors' new "air taxi" design is basically a one-person flying car | Boing Boing
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For those moments when a regular car simply isn’t a perverse enough waste of resources for moving a single human body!
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Bah, humbug. Been seein’ this stuff for half a century with exactly zero models for sale to date. Grump.
Further, a pet peeve: notice that the slick Cadillac advert has its notional contraption flying in clear, empty skies, exactly as car adverts show their toys driving along empty, scenic roads. We know that for cars, reality looks pretty different - when was the last time you were alone on a long, scenic stretch of road? And for those flitabouts, how is rush hour going to look like, maybe traffic congestion in 3D? Grump, grump.
As an example, see Bob Shaw’s “Vertigo” (or “Terminal velocity”): busy, dangerous skies…
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I am intimately decompressing.
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Ah yes, because when I see this:
I think why should we limit personal transport to only clogging horizontal space. What could possibly go wrong?
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I’m more interested in the sex-mobile he was talking about.
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Breaking news! Big company does stupid render to get press!
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Which will make it first: this, or the Moller Skycar?
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Exactly, this is quite simply the wealthy’s answer to the fact that their private Lincoln Towncar may raise them above the yellow-taxi plebs (by their definition of pleb…) but can still get stuck in the same traffic. This little chopper would take them out of traffic but will be accessible to so few, that traffic itself won’t be alleviated at all. If we make no other laws, certainly we should make a law that the wealthy have to ride the bus/subway like everyone else if they want to live in our cities.
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I see the cynicism on this thread, but I’m going to say I’m looking forward to this. But I would like to have the ballistic parachute option package in mine though.
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I don’t know the details of this deal but it seems that United Airlines has just committed $1b to order 200 similar electric VTOL craft from another manufacturer, which seems super premature if the company doesn’t yet have any actual vehicles or received airworthiness approval from the FAA on their design yet.
Also, a minor pet peeve of mine. Shouldn’t the term “flying car” be reserved for vehicles that are at least theoretically capable of landing or traversing on a street? It’s hard to see how these things are any closer to a car than a helicopter is.
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I feel like the exact use case that he mentions “You’ve just finished a day at work and you need to get to a meeting across town.” has been essentially rendered moot by the last 12 months. It definitely feels like a solution looking hard for a problem in 2021.
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Why wasn’t this about the electroshagmobile they have on deck?
The one factor that makes these vehicles marginally more plausible than previous generations’ visions of flying cars is that it doesn’t require the passenger to fly the thing.
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Maybe I’m getting old and crabby, but I think the future of this is the Planet Express crashing into the big video board.
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Yeah, up until now it’s been (mistakenly) seen as a technology issue, when it was a regulatory/economic issue (“flying cars” are expensive as hell and need to be regulated like other aircraft). They could exist, as an object, but not work like a car, thus making them pointless to produce. By making it an autonomous service, they can push it back into primarily being a technology issue (with a side of more limited regulatory and logistics issues). The “flying car” ironically works best when it’s not even trying to be a car.
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…Meet George Jetson!
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To be filed under: Stealthy Sharing
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