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We have had legit flying cars for generations, they are called "helicopters" and most people can't afford or safely pilot one.
If you think the classic sci-fi "in the future we'll all be using flying cars and it'll be awesome" thing is a good idea, just try to realistically imagine how crappy life would be for us all if you and every idiot you fight with in traffic every day had a helicopter.
You can't drive a helicopter down the freeway. You can't land one just anywhere.
You can't with this car plane either, a runway that gives room for the wings and tail to extend AND to be out while moving forward up to speed or landing will be necessary.
The point is though it can travel on the ground to the airport.
So do cars and trains! They easily take people to the airport, where you can conveniently park your helicopter between uses.
Not with that attitude!
Why would flying cars be easier to land anywhere than a helicopter is? This is exactly why flying cars are impractical.
you can't land a helicopter just anywhere... so the solution to that is to "need a runway". I fail to follow the logic
And helicopters are loud AF. If you think motorcycles are annoyingly noisy imagine peak hour with helicopters.
This video has 7.6M views and was posted 2 years ago
Please just give us good public transport, busses, trains, please...
we dont and never have needed flying cars its a fucking dumb idea and always has been.
We're going to see more of this shit as wealth inequality continues to balloon. The old logic that money was made selling the most products to the most people is eroding, money is now either made extracting rent from normal people or selling prohibitively expensive status symbols to an elite class with so much money they can piss it away endlessly.
It's why the richest man in the world went from the man who sold the most things, to the man who sold the most prestigious cars, to the man who sells handbags.
Lol, this video is 2 years old
Sir, that is a car shaped aeroplane. Nothing about that is like the flying cars envisioned by the likes of The Jetsons.
I thought the same thing until the wings got all tucked in there and it hit the highway. I mean, you can park it in your driveway. It still needs a runway but it's the closest I've seen. It's more of a plane that turns into a car.
The driving part isn't as important as being able to take off vertically. Needing a runway makes it the worlds only airplane you can drive to the airpoint to take off with, not as convenient as the flying cars we've been promised.
Well, those are coming too.
They have flying prototypes and some key FAA approvals already.
Initial planned use is "air taxis" ala uber between skyscrapers, which tracks because uber was a big investor. Seems like a viable way to give more people a more affordable"helicopter" style around major urban areas at least.
How is either a better or more affordable option than a cheap helicopter? Air taxis using helicopter have existed for decades and fly around urban areas every single day.
Will people still need a pilot's license and all of the associated time + training that requires? Because they will surely also need to have a driver's license and insurance and everything else required of owning a car!
I do not understand the appeal at all unless it's just a refusal to give up on a very specific childhood nostalgia.
The idea is that this will be launching from landing pads in the city and will be publically accessable via a small hanger area. The trips are supposed to be mostly automated, with a human pilot for safety. The 6 props allow a lot more control in a simplier manner than a traditional helicopter.
It is supposed to be a lot cheaper, safer, and more accessible than helicopters, along with being way more of them available. Something akin to what dirigibles tried to do in the 1930s with building launchpads, but way more reliable and efficient.
The appeal is another type of transit, for now. The design as I understand it can also convert to "airplane" mode and fly for an hour or so at 200mph on battery power. I expect that if the air taxi service is safe and steady enough, these will be also be available for 200 mile flights without the irritation of standard air travel. Hell, they may sell them to people directly at some point.
I linked their website above if you want to do a deep dive.
it's a plane. calling it a "flying car" doesn't change the fact it walks, talks and quacks like a plane
Not really though. Planes are not street legal, and this looks to be fine to drive on the highway once you land and fold up your wings
there are cars (sports cars, for example) that aren't street legal. There are also street legal things that aren't cars (I don't consider a semi to be a "car", for example.
Being street legal is not what makes something a car.
It is distinguished by calling it a flying car. Or would you rather a rolling plane?
I will just never understand how so many people look at a broken down car on the side of the highway, then think "what if whatever happened to that vehicle was the same, but 5,000 feet in the air?"
Cars and airplanes do not have the same maintenance requirements. An airplane has strict maintenance protocols that are needed regardless of if it is in-use or not. Critical maintenance items require sign-off by a specialized department. If the pilot doesn't have the proper maintenance logs and approvals then the plane gets grounded. Yeah sure, some idiot could circumvent that at a private airport, but obtaining a pilot's license is time consuming and expensive, and the vast majority of pilots take aviation regulations very seriously.
Why would a different type of vehicle that also flies in the air not need to follow similar maintenance requirements?
The only reason cars and car drivers aren't held to the same standard is because if a car breaks, it just stops moving. If a plane, even just a single passenger one, stops working, it falls out of the sky.
Flying cars are danger to everyone, cars and driving suck enough! Please don't let this happen in our skies. What if someone wrecked one into my house and killed me.
Imagine how much damage a deranged person could do with a flying car. Forget shooting up a gas station or school, just fly a car through it.
Cars suck and flying cars will probably also suck. No thanks.
Great. Let's move the traffic jam into the air.
This shit is just useless.
Kinda reminds me of Thunderbird 2.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=a2tDOYkFCYo
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Doesn’t work. Just keeps loading. For me at least 🙃
Same
I saw someone else on another post the same, the piped videos have been working for me. I am on firefox desktop though not mobile or through a 3rd party app if that makes a difference.
I was expecting some sort of hovercar ...
Airplane*
It literally turns into a car at the end of the video and drives out of the airport.
It's a flying car.
Thought the same then I skipped like half way through the video and saw the wings fold in and it drive around.
