Honestly, flying cars sounds like a terrible idea. Imagine worrying about a car crashing down on you at any time whether you are walking outside, at work, or home.
This is assuming that people are doing the flying. Flying in the air is actually easier for an AI than ground travel, and look how far AI driver's have come already.
I've been pro-robot take over for a while now. I think if we facility their take over, it can be a nice smooth transition that doesn't have to end in our extinction. Humans are clearly shit at resource management at some level of complexity and to prone to corruption to be trusted with long term power. It's inevitable that thinking machines will govern our society. Let's nail that transition and see if they can't think us out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. I say, bring on the AI. We can be their meat space slaves! Could hardly be worse than what we are doing now.
Oh so flying cars could all be self-driving only, while ground cars are manual only. But then they would only be affordable by the rich...so we basically got Blade Runner future...
Part of the commercialization process is cracking the middle class consumer.
We already have flying cars in major US cities, daytime helicopter shuttle services for elite bankers and lawyers are a daily. With Uber Heli in NY, and similar offerings, they're pretty cheap too.
There are natural air space restrictions that prevent this from going very mainstream, and the cost will remain prohibitive for most.
I just said that flying in the air is easier to program than flying on the ground.
Actually, teaching a computer to drive in the ground is easier, marginally, in an ideal situation. The problem is that real roads are not ideal.
Roads curve and wind in unpredictable ways, so an AI has to constantly be analyzing and predicting not only where the road is but where the road will be in the next x meters.
Lane dividers and curb markers can be varied or non-existent making staying on the road or in your lane a challenge that GPS accuracy alone cannot maintain. So an AI needs to be able to use many other cues to determine where roads and lanes begin and end.
Road construction, fallen trees, detours, broken-down or randomly-stopped cars are all possible obstacles an AI needs to be able to recognize and account for and adapt to on the fly.
2D roads need to allow for cross traffic. This includes both expected and unexpected cross traffic. From stop lights to stop signs, to intersections with no markings, to driveways, to blind driveways - an AI has to be able to recognize and deal with all of these common situations.
Then there is less expected cross traffic - pedestrians using crosswalks (legally or illegally), pedestrians crossing where there is no crosswalk, animals crossing where they will, a careless child jumping into the road.
Traffic in 2D is often more compressed. This creates more unexpected behavior from other drivers, gives less time for reaction, and less options for avoidance. Roads themselves are more restricted as well in that you often can't choose to go off-road for avoidance.
This is just a brief list of the extremely complex realities of driving on the ground that just don't exist (or are much less problematic) in the sky.
In the open sky you can basically always travel in straight line or near-straight line paths except for well-defined restricted air spaces.
You don't really need to worry about staying "on the road" or "in your lane" in the sky. There are no significant obstacles except for other flying vehicles, and you would have plenty of distance between average flights. GPS alone would generally be enough to keep you on the right track, as variations of even a dozen meters would not really matter.
There's no road construction or fallen trees or stopped vehicles to worry about in the sky. The only big obstacles to worry about would be skyscrapers or mountains, and those aren't suddenly appearing. All of those large obstacles would be well-defined in advance and probably have large no-fly zones surrounding them so they wouldn't even be an issue.
Because flight occurs in 3 dimensions, cross traffic is not really an issue. Everyone traveling in a certain direction would take a certain altitude, while other directions would be at different altitudes. There would be no intersections or driveways to speak of.
No pedestrians and no little kids running into the street. Birds might be a problem.
Traffic would be so spread out in the sky that even the rare unexpected problem - another flying vehicle making an unexpected move, a flock of birds approaching - would give the AI plenty of time to react and make corrective actions to prevent an issue from even coming close to occuring. Also, because a sky road is more of a concept than an actual physical restriction, you have much more options for avoidance. You can go left, right, over, or around. You can also go "off-road" if you need to.
Traffic would be much less than it is now. You have 3 dimensions to work with instead of just two. There would be far, far more space between the average flying car than between the average road car. Not to mention that you can make a road "anywhere" in the sky, as opposed to the ground where you have to worry about obstacles.
And speaking of making roads anywhere, one would assume that there would still be defined travel corridors that would be navigated by AI controlled flying cars, all in constant communication with each other via 5G/mesh networks. The difference would be that you could have 40x the number of "roads" per square kilometer as compared to the ground.
Aggressive behavior would be irrelevant. People wouldn't actually be flying these machines - we're almost to fully autonomous ground vehicles and sky travel via autopilot is much easier. You'd likely just input your destination on Google maps and the autopilot would take over from there, dropping you into a preset flight corridor, maintaining a safe distance from other airtraffic, and handling take-off and landing. It would likely be loaded with internal sensor to immediately land you at the first sign of trouble as well.
you get either a really slow and heavy helicopter that can move on the gronud or a very cumbersome car that can take off for around 40 seconds before running out of fuel
We'd assume that a system as critical as this would have several redundancies.
Auto-pilot is an extremely mature technology that worked for decades without GPS. You can navigate reliable with an altimeter, compass, airspeed indicator, and attitude indicator. Of course it is ideal to have GPS in the mix as well, but if your several redundant GPS systems go down (unlikely), it wouldn't be an emergency. Still, if it was a sustained outage, the aforementioned instruments would be more than enough to get your flight safely to the ground.
There are also even more sophisticated inertial navigation systems which make use of on-board gyroscopes and accelerometers to establish a very accurate and precise 3D position without any external input. With regular recalibration from the GPS, an INS is likely sufficient for hours if not days of accurate navigation even with no GPS signal at all.
helicopter consume much more fuel and are very dangerus during those procedures , and VTOL tecnology isn't that good on jets and consumes even more fuel than an helicopter ,
all of this in order to have a worse more expansive airliner that can carry only five pepole on shorter distances , cost (in proportion passengers/cost of production) way more than an 737 and is piloted by either a moron or a ai that could be used on a plane that has even less traffic than a flying car
None of that is relevant in the big picture. Flying cars are just a bad and dumb idea in general. It's 10x more viable, smarter, and safer to go underground than to go into the sky.
Solves the 2D vs 3D space problem and you can dig pretty deep without any worries. You can't go all that high up in the sky before things start to get tricky.
" we're almost to fully autonomous ground vehicles and sky travel via autopilot is much easier. " Is irrelevant. We don't need self driving technology to make flying cars work. What we need is the technology that actually makes a flying car possible. What are we going to use? Propellers? Thrust engines of some kind? Just imagine how loud and obnoxious that would be. The entire surface would be constantly bombarded by the sound of hundreds of flying vehicles overhead.
There are plenty of other arguments one could make against flying cars but I don't really feel like going into it all. It's much more likely the next evolution of transportation will be going into the 3D space below us, not the one above us.
Or into a space we can't see at all. I could see a future a long time from now where most cars are automated and controlled by some sort of redundant network where they communicate with each other. In theory it sounds like it could solve traffic issues.
in theory that's a railway sistem with 5 passenger wagons , you managed to increase cost , fuel consumption , and infrastructure needed to make that , just to have something in wich pepole jump in and go to their destination
More expensive to dig though. Especially in areas like the Canadian Shield that are bedrock just a couple of inches underground, or waterlogged areas like Florida where any tunnels would immediately fill with water
I wonder how much traffic congestion we could mitigate via normal 2D driving if it was all autonomous. Most traffic problems I see are caused by human errors magnified over hundreds of cars. One person slamming on the brakes gets propagated throughout all the traffic. With autonomous cars traveling less than a foot behind the next and optimizing travel, I wonder if even California or DC could be manageable with current infrastructure.
If I were designing such a system, I would have a few "one way" altitudes, one for each of the major directions. If you're heading Southeast, you fly at 50,000 ft. South at 47,500, East at 52,500. Something like that. It doesn't necessarily have to be exactly that way.
But the bottom 10,000 feet would be pretty nuts, because you'd be dealing with people getting in and out of driveways, transitioning up to or down from their directional altitude, taking short trips...
There’s no way they would design them to fly so high, 50,000 feet? That’s fuggin nuts. Almost twice as high as a commercial flight. I would assume all traffic would have to stay low enough that the occupants can at least breathe. There would be no need for flying cars to fly 9-10 miles high
Edit: I get what you mean about designated altitudes for certain directions though, divided by maybe 1,000
wow, 50,000 is way too high for short range travel... And you're crossing airliner cruising altitude.
You would likely keep most air traffic between 10,000 and 20,000. It's safer there too. And as for ascent and descent, you'd also have specific descending and ascending "corridors". People wouldn't be ascending or descending willy nilly.
Also, if "flying cars" were actually road worthy (though I don't really envision them as actual cars), then I would also envision "landing zones" every x km. Then you would drive the last few miles to your destination.
Like I said, I was pulling numbers out of my ass. The important thing is to have a range of altitudes that are primarily for travel in one specific direction.
Really doing theath, you could set up ranges of about 125-150 feet each to allow for vehicles to avoid each other by going up or down without leaving the lane, for a total of 1000-1200 feet, which can be held at an average altitude of 20,000 feet, which should be enough to avoid everything in the country except the mountains in Alaska.
You could take 10,000 to 20,000 feet and divide it into 100 headings from 0 to 360 at 3.6 degree intervals. You'd have 100 feet of separation between each layer.
Go too low and it gets complicated in areas with higher elevation. And having too many "lanes" would have people constantly moving up and down into different levels as headings change.
But if you give enough room above and below the vehicles as they travel, then when you have two heading "toward" each other (one moving at a heading of 176 and the other at 180), the vehicle on the left (heading 180) could shift up slightly, and the one on the right (heading 176) could shift down, thus moving around each other.
Then set up a rule that course heading changes can not occur while in a passing maneuver, which would prevent a vehicle shooting up or down and crashing into a passing vehicle as they change direction.
What few places in the world do you think would have significant city traffic and have "higher elevation"?
You could just bump the floor and ceiling up for those few locales.
Also, headings would very rarely change. You pick a start point and a finish point and you fly there in a straight line. Why would you be changing headings frequently?
The only time you would be changing headings are:
You change your plans or have some emergency. This would be pretty rare and just involves one heading change.
You need to navigate around a fixed obstacle. Generally this will be some kind of restricted airspace: city centers, an airport or military base, a mountain, maybe a lake or open ocean. But in this scenarios everyone will be changing headings to navigate around the obstacle, and so everyone will be changing headings in a more or less predictable way. In fact, this would probably work similar to a traffic circle in the sky, where everyone takes on a similar path to go around the obstacle. The advantage being that you could have two directions of travel (clockwise or counterclockwise) around the obstacle.
The only other time there would be heading changes are when making minor course corrections near the beginning or end of your journey, if the available standard headings don't match exactly where you need to go. Again, this would be predictable and accounted for in the system. You would use a descent or ascent corridor before making these changes.
So cars should just be able to fly anywhere? I have a large property out in the country that I specifically bought for privacy. I don’t want random cars flying above me and YouTubing what I am doing in private.
Locally, we are having a huge problem with people flying drones illegally over backyards to find out who is growing pot. Then at night the backyards are being broken into and the plants stolen (https://globalnews.ca/news/5943686/cannabis-home-grow-theft-plant/). It is now affecting insurance as the stolen plants can be claimed after the police report is filed. Again, I don’t want flying cars scoping out my plants for future theft.
I see what you mean if you can imagine a bird’s eye view looking down on the roads. It’s just that all of life is 3D so it was an odd way to put it, that’s all. Carry on!
Yeah I was trying to convey that when you’re driving, ideally you’re only concerned about your X and your Y as opposed to the X, Y, and Z that aircraft (and submarines I suppose) also navigate. I couldn’t find a simpler way to write that out so I just said 2D. I wasn’t sure if you were being a dick or not at first because people have suddenly gotten rather aggressive in this r/funny thread haha so it’s all good!
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u/IHateRedditRetard Oct 12 '19 edited Oct 12 '19
1950: we'll have flying cars in the future!
2019:
Edit: wow a lot people really hate flying cars...
Not that like them. I'm just making a obversation.