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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Nah fam, I'm good on that one. I see enough carnage on the roads with normal cars.
Then again, self driving cars would be much safer off the ground. None of that 'which pedestrian should we run over' ethical dilemmas that car industry moral philosophers and actuarials currently grapple with.
Which pedestrian should we crash on is the new hot debate.
The Trolley problem doesn’t go away in the air (not that it’s that big of a deal to begin with). In fact, it might even be worse. Your car is falling. Do you crash into the crowded street or the crowded building? Which one? The destructive potential is much higher. If safety is really a concern, don’t you worry about giving every person a missile?
Flying cars “solve” a non-problem, because long distance highway travel is already the least dangerous. Most accidents are at intersections and points of conflicts. But eventually flying cars need to land and be near other cars and people. There will still be traffic jams, vast fields of parking lots, and cities made uncomfortable to actually walk or exist in.
Both of these things can be true. I said it would be safer, you say that when there is trouble, it'd be a much bigger trouble. However, crashing with a rolling car would be a much more common occurrence than with a flying one, where it would basically only happen as a catastrophic malfunction. Nobody would walk out unexpectedly in front of a flying car.
"Which building do I fly into"
Yeah, flying cars are even worse than land cars. Imagine how much less efficient parking and take off would be. Imagine all those cars circling the sky waiting to park. Would we need to cut down all the urban trees? Would we build even bigger parking lots? Huge runways and landing pads everywhere? It sounds like hell.
Another good point. Ever heard a helicopter land? That's what flying car highways will sound like nonstop
But at least in an emergency they’ll always land on their tyres.
Also imagine ending up in a car crash when you're like, 100 metres above the ground.
I bet if flying cars happen people will not be piloting them. They'll act more like personal train cars, joining others in orderly movement
Maybe a bunch of people could share one big one, like some kind of flying bus.
You mean sit in the same vehicle as you peasants?
Preposterous!
/s
With flying cars we'd have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.
Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we'd take these two ton death machines and say "let's put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from"? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it's a completely different scenario. And that's what we'd have with flying cars. At least I hope so!
I would honestly hope we would be smart enough not to go the road of the car again but instead invest in good public transportation, at least in cities and other densely populated areas. Flying cars, even automated, would be a terrible idea from both risk and energy/climate change perspectives.
flying cars it is then . . . I'm sure tesla is working on it already.