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Beating the air into submission...

EuroFlyer wrote:

You buy a drone, or buy a monthly fee. In the morning it brings you to the office, in the evening it brings you back home

The thing is there’s no reason why this wouldn’t work with automatic cars, too – and the energy requirement will be a small fraction of what it would be with drones, and it would avoid the absolute racket of millions of drones bruteforcing themselves into the air.

Andreas IOM

EuroFlyer wrote:

Ever watched a blizzard come over New York over night with 20cm of snow in mid April ? I did. And there was no ground transportation any more. That day.
Perhaps that’s not the right rhetorical question to ask of someone living in Sweden (or Norway, or Finland).

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

What happens it loses one or even two of the engines after take off?

EKRK, Denmark

I don’t know abut this one, but the general concept is two motors for each prop, with independent wiring and control, simply mounted to one shaft.

Overall, while less reliable than a car (due to weather, which will affect it more), and more expensive, this will be somewhere in the gap between a helicopter and a car, and probably closer to the car than the heli in cost.

The obstacles will be more human factors (acceptance by the population, perceived safety, regulation etc.) than technology or cost.

Biggin Hill

I don’t think this technology is going to work in anywhere near the foreseeable future, because to make it pay you need a high utilisation of the vehicle which is incompatible with having to charge the batteries. One could have exchangeable battery packs but that is yet another obstacle which is incompatible with competition, and without competition we will just get the French taxi business extortionate prices. All the standard stuff, suitably emotionally debated, is here

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I think the biggest obstacle to wider deployment is going to come from a very different corner, nothing to do with technology – it’s the noise. I sometimes operate a small drone for work and even this little thing (DJI Phantom) makes one hell of a racket. Not sure I even want to know how much noise the contraption exhibited at CES makes. I somewhat doubt that it’s going to be politically acceptable to have these things in any significant numbers over big cities. Drones are fantastic pieces of technology and have myriad uses, personal transportation ‘en masse’ in congested cities is, methinks, not one of them.

I agree noise will be a huge issue: eight tiny props bruteforcing the aircraft into the air is going to be loud, and you’ve got people selling the idea “think of all the cars we can get off the road/lower congestion/etc”. Tens of thousands of these at low altitude in a city would probably only be tolerable by the profoundly deaf.

Andreas IOM

I wouldn’t look at it from a ‘current technology’ angle but rather from a logical perspective.

An ever increasing amount of people lives together in metropolitan areas with ever increasing density. These mega cities will be growing, covering huge amount of square miles. At some point, individual transport in its current form will reach its peak and heavily regulated, both through prices and laws. Individual cars won’t be allowed in these metro areas anymore, at least not if they’re not shared. There will be mass transport, there will be bikes, there will be self driving cars or cabs.

Getting from A to B within acceptable time will require new ways of thinking. Not only for individual purposes, but for police, rescue, medical, delivery, freight, etc. services. There is simply no alternative to air transport. Due to the density of these cities, there will be no tolerance for human error, and no space for airports. We will see very fast trains, between the cities, we will maybe see some large airport hubs, for the big distances. But, much of the freight and personal transport within these cities will be done through the air, by drones, flying fully on auto mode, controlled by a central grid. Too many of them to allow human errors.

Time frame ? Give it another 50 years. Maybe 100. Look at the population extrapolations by club of rome.

These drone models on display like in the picture above: they’re basically the Benz Motorwagen in comparison to modern automobiles, if you like that analogy

Last Edited by EuroFlyer at 11 Jan 12:09
Safe landings !
EDLN, Germany

The other angle on this is that these people will have a poor quality of life (despite Tinder’s stock market value exceeding Google’s by then ) so may choose to have fewer kids, which actually is the only long-term solution to anything

The cost of escape to the countryside (the traditional solution for the wealthy) is high already and will keep rising.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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