When will we have flying cars? Maybe sooner than you think.
Name & manufacturer Type First test flight Expected delivery Aeromobil 4.0 Folding-wing STOL 2014 (3.0 model) 2020 Aeromobil 5.0 Folding-wing VTOL N/A 2025 or later Pop.Up Next (Airbus/Audi) Quadcopter 2018 (scale model only) ? Vahana (Airbus) Fixed-wing VTOL 2018 2020 Aurora (Boeing) Fixed-wing VTOL 2019 2023 (for Uber) Ehang 184 Quadcopter 2018 2019? Volocopter 18-rotor copter 2016 Trials in 2019
Joby Aviation Fixed-wing VTOL N/A ? Lilium Fixed-wing VTOL 2017 Before 2025 Moller Skycar Fixed-wing VTOL 2003 ? Pal-V Single-rotor gyrocopter 2012 2020 Terrafugia Transition Folding-wing STOL 2009 2019 VRCO NeoXcraft Quadcopter with tilting rotors N/A 2020? Kitty Hawk Cora (formerly Zee.Aero Zee) Fixed-wing VTOL 2016 ? Opener BlackFly Fixed-wing VTOL 2017 ? Karem Butterfly Fixed-wing VTOL N/A 2023 (for Uber) Bell Nexus Hexacopter with tilting rotors N/A 2023 (for Uber) or 2025 Embraer X Octocopter with rear propeller N/A 2023 (for Uber) Pipistrel Fixed-wing VTOL N/A 2023 (for Uber)
Why are so many flying cars launching in the next few years?
Lighter composite materials, better communications and guidance systems, and software that could enable the vehicles to fly themselves (probably essential if there’ll be a lot of them in the air) have all played a part. Above all, battery technology is on the verge of making electrically powered flight feasible. We’re still some way from the energy density needed for flights of any length, but short hops aren’t completely out of the question.
But wait—are these literally flying cars?
Not really. A few, like the Aeromobil and the Terrafugia Transition, are cars you could drive on the highway, but most are more like personal flying vehicles .
So, um, helicopters?
Nope. Most have wings that generate lift, like ordinary planes. A few have multiple rotors, like drones. Either way they are, theoretically at least, safer than choppers (see below).
When can I buy a flying car?
Sorry, you probably won’t be able to. At least for now, you’d need to be a certified pilot (or employ one) to fly it, and besides, where would you park it? They’ll mostly be owned by firms such as ride-sharing companies and run on fixed routes.
Will flying cars be autonomous?
Ultimately, they probably will be; human pilots are expensive and might not be reliably safe in a really crowded sky. Autonomous flying is an easier technical problem than autonomous driving: obstacles in the sky are few and can be detected with simple radar, whereas a self-driving car needs multiple sensors and heavily trained algorithms to recognize people, other vehicles, traffic signals, lanes, and so on. An automated air traffic management system in constant communication with every flying car could route them to prevent collisions, with human operators on the ground ready to take over by remote control in an emergency. Still, existing laws and public fears mean there’ll probably have to be pilots at least for a while, even if only as a backup to an autonomous system.
Where will flying cars fly?
Places where demand is high and road traffic is bad—within large cities or from city centers to airports. Rural or intercity travel probably won’t make economic sense.
Where will you catch one?
At “vertistops” and larger “vertiports” on the tops of buildings, which will bring the building owners some extra revenue. (There’d also be chargers or battery-swapping stations there.) That’s how we’ll deal with the problem of finding space in crowded cities .
Won’t rides be insanely expensive?
Again, most of these aren’t helicopters but winged aircraft, so all the propellers’ energy goes into pushing them forward after takeoff, not keeping them aloft. An electric VTOL vehicle’s energy use per mile is theoretically comparable to that of an electric car. Mass production should eventually bring down the prices of the vehicles themselves. The real cost problem might be the pilots (while we still have them, at least).
Still, our panel speculated that a trip of a few miles might cost passengers as little as $40 or $50—a bit more than a ground taxi, but in a congested city you’d get to your destination much more quickly. In a 2016 white paper, Uber had some sunny projections (pdf, p. 1 and p. 95) showing that for certain routes at least, it will actually be much cheaper, as well as several times faster, to take a flying car than a wheeled one.
Is it safe to have hundreds of flying cars buzzing above packed urban centers?
To make vertical takeoff possible, these vehicles need multiple engines that can produce far more power that what’s required for steady flight. That means that if one or two of them fail, the vehicle can still fly or glide to safety. New air traffic management systems will probably rely more on algorithms than humans to manage the routing—another reason why it’s better if the aircraft flyautonomously .
Okay, but what about a terrorist taking over a flying taxi and crashing it into a building?
As on planes, you could separate the pilot’s cabin from the passenger cabin to make a hijack harder. Failing that, maybe there’d be a system for letting ground controllers take over remotely, locking out the pilot, if the craft deviates from its planned route. In any case, one of these small craft probably can’t do enough damage to make it an attractive target for terrorists.
And how about hackers taking control?
That’s a more credible threat. Good cybersecurity is going to be essential.
Won’t flying cars be noisy?
Again—they’re not helicopters , so they don’t have huge blades to disturb the air. Also, the engines will be electric.
Countries are already going crazy trying to regulate drones; how will they regulate flying cars?
These are pretty different problems. Since drones are cheap and anybody can buy one, regulators must stop people from doing malicious or stupid things with them. VTOLs and their pilots, on the other hand, could be certified for safety much like regular aircraft, so existing regulations might not need to be modified much. A bigger question will be whether individual cities decide to allow them in their airspace.
So how long before flying taxis are a common sight in major cities?
Estimates on the panel ranged from “two to five years (but more likely five)” to “10 years.”
Is that plausible? Assuming a big leap in battery capacity, the biggest hurdle is likely to be regulatory. If flying cars are licensed and flown under the same rules as other aircraft, they could start to appear in a few places pretty soon, but managing large numbers of them will require a whole new approach to air traffic management. That, as a somewhat less boosterish panel of experts warned last year, is going to be a struggle.
Gideon Lichfield
I’m MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief. Science and technology were my first love and my first beat as a journalist, but for nearly two decades my career took me elsewhere—covering Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and… More Israel/Palestine for the Economist, followed by a turn into digital media in New York, where I helped launch Quartz, a business-news outlet for the 21st century. Having seen my share of the world’s dysfunction, I’m endlessly curious about how we can use technology to make things better and why we sometimes end up using it to make things worse. My mission is for MIT Technology Review to be the leading voice exploring emerging technology, its impacts, and how the human choices that determine those impacts get made.
The Best of the Physics arXiv (week ending February 9, 2019)
This week’s most thought-provoking papers from the Physics arXiv.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Nano-switches made out of graphene could make our electronics even smaller
For the first time, physicists have built reliable, efficient graphene nanomachines that can be fabricated on silicon chips. They could lead to even greater miniaturization.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
This new fabric will automatically cool you down when you get hot and sweaty
The material responds to the body’s heat and wetness to help keep us at a comfortable temperature at all times.
by Charlotte Jee
/3
You've read of three free articles this month. Subscribe now for unlimited online access. You've read of three free articles this month. Subscribe now for unlimited online access. This is your last free article this month. Subscribe now for unlimited online access. You've read all your free articles this month. Subscribe now for unlimited online access. You've read of three free articles this month. Log in for more, or subscribe now for unlimited online access. Log in for two more free articles, or subscribe now for unlimited online access.
