can we just please get some normal, boring, safe, efficient trains that actually function instead of this gizmo bullshit?
Right? I’d love some decent trainage in the US.
I’ll never understand the eternal hype around “flying cars”. Fuckers out here can hardly drive on a 2d road. Now you want to introduce a third axis on them?
I guarantee that if the general public gets their hands on a real “flying car”, it’ll take about 2 weeks before some drunk idiot commits a mini 9/11.
Right? Cool, now the road goes over your house! Along with the Amazon drones.
Drink idiots hit things in cars all the time.
Make the test to acquire your license actually difficult to the skill level required instead of the “you can take two left turns and park shitty, here’s your license” level of difficulty that most states use for road vehicles.
I got my driver’s license when I was 18, after studying for the test and practicing for several months on a learner’s permit.
Now I’m 40. I’ve never been retested. I have completely forgotten what’s on the exam. I’ve developed a whole bunch of bad driving habits, particularly with the advent of smart phones. And nobody is going to challenge my license renewal so long as I can pass an eye exam every 10 years.
Dog if you make one mistake you can kill so many more people than in a crash. This is a horrible idea.
So require more training and certification for use?
Are you guys all seriously hung up on the word “car” here and trying to imply that eVTOLs can’t just come with its own infrastructure and pilot requirements independent of what we currently have?
It doesn’t have to be like cars, where the skill level of the driver can be non existent and still pass licensing.
I just can’t believe I’m in the tech community of a supposedly leftist website having to argue for a technology that beyond small local airstrips (literally a grass field with charging stations and basic rest stop equipment) needs no additional ground infrastructure.
The opposition? Begin large scale rail projects that will require we carve through a lot of natural resources as well as acquire the resources to build it with.
I just have to double check to make sure I didn’t fall into the wrong internet rabbit hole.
I just can’t believe I’m in the tech community of a supposedly leftist website having to argue for a technology that beyond small local airstrips (literally a grass field with charging stations and basic rest stop equipment) needs no additional ground infrastructure.
The opposition? Begin large scale rail projects that will require we carve through a lot of natural resources as well as acquire the resources to build it with.
🤣
Im saying that it doesnt matter if the requirements are super high, it’s still dangerous and I don’t really see how the use cases are justifiable. It also doesn’t scale well with a lot of people. You could easily just build rail or use a bus and make a bus lane.
Fuck that just built trams and trains
there are literally rails behind my house why is there not a tram on it to go across town idk. Cargobonly passes once every hour lmao
Do you have any idea how much time and resources it would take to construct high speed rail across the US compared to small local airstrips for VTOLs?
Do you have a idea how much more efficient it would be?
An order of magnitude less than carrying the same cargo via VTOLs.
Jesus Christ I don’t even know why I bother arguing with people who will constantly move the goal posts. We aren’t talking about cargo, we are talking about transporting people, fucks sake.
This place really did take the dumbest of reddit.
Do you know how much more utility and efficiency actual public transport has?
Flying is a horrible option for short range public transport.
Trains and Trams please and thank you
No. Only the promise of a single-person direct-to-destination fee-for-service that ends up being a giant scam.
We will never build mass transit in this country. You can’t make us.
You forgot your /s
Jesus fuck. It’s just like some auto execs to pull shit like this. Completely fuck up transportation infrastructure on the ground to your own benefit and everyone else’s detriment, then use your winnings to build taxis that can fly over the carnage you’ve wrought. We are living the Cyberpunk future.
Fucking waste of resources.
We already have “flying cars”. They’re called helicopters, and you need training and a license to fly them. Just like you’ll need for this thing and just like you need for a normal road-going car.
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You’re right, failure is possible so we should never try anything, ever.
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I’m hoping regulations get in the way of this. The FAA is barely comfy letting people fly a drone beyond line of sight with a waiver, fully automated flight for untrained passengers is going to take some doing.
Wasn’t there some controversy with who had the first flying machine? There was supposedly some guy in CT that flew an aircraft before the brothers?
EDIT - found this article Three states bicker over ‘first in flight’ claim
I’m making this claim based on the Wright Bros exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and space museum…
One of the genius things that they did was invent scaled testing (I’m not 100% sure I can make this claim, but I’d be happy to learn it I was wrong). Rather than building the device and testing it, which killed a lot of people through history, they built miniature components and tested them individually to prove concepts, and THEN built their production version in iterations.
Like, to test airfoil designs, they built a table top sized wind tunnel, put a miniature airfoil in, and evaluated its performance, and made determinations for the final product. This SIGNIFICANTLY lowered design costs and prototyping at the time.
This also happened to result in an airplane.
Probably helped lower some risk, too.
