A recent New York Times story on the flying car industry didn’t explicitly compare it to the early automobile pioneers, but it’s not hard to see the parallels. Flying car entrepreneurs speak in lofty terms, such as to “free the world from traffic,” as they compete for investments, technical talent and regulatory approval of their new-fangled machines.
Reporters Cade Metz and Erin Griffith (2021) offer an overview of the hurdles facing wanna-be flying car producers, but they focus the most attention on the machinations of an embryonic industry dominated by a “wild west” of start-ups that raid each other’s talent pool and sue each other for intellectual property theft. Who might become the 21st Century’s answer to Henry Ford . . . or Albert Erskine?
As with the early auto industry, the flying car field is rife with a diversity of approaches. However, one trend has been to combine electric power, driverless technology and a ride-hailing service — a veritable Uber in the sky.
Will driverless technology advance faster in the air?
One of the more interesting takeaways from the article is that autonomous technology may be better suited to the air than the road because you can “fly in a straight line and you don’t have the massive weight or the stop-and-go of a car” on the ground, noted Sebastian Thrun. He was the founder of Google’s self-driving car project and now runs an “air taxi” company called Kitty Hawk (Metz and Griffith, 2021).
Also see ‘Is Tesla Cybertruck a brilliant breakthrough or a gimmick?’
That said, the complexities of flight — particularly in urban areas — and the high cost of the technology have thus far been a brake on the flying car industry’s efforts to get off the ground.
It remains to be seen whether flying cars will amount to little more than a new kind of helicopter service. However, if nothing else, flying cars do challenge the auto industry to focus more on technical innovation than the race to make scariest-looking grilles.
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RE:SOURCES
- Metz, Cade and Erin Griffith; 2021. “What Is a Flying Car? Inside Silicon Valley’s 10-year quest to make soaring above a crowded city street as easy as calling an Uber.” The New York Times. Posted June 12.
Also see ‘A few thoughts on skepticism about an EV transition led by Tesla’
OMGosh, a flying Lexus… too frightening to think about.