Even cars are stupid because every human possessing tons of steal and wasting oil that was created over millions of years just is not sustainable.

 

Now imagine personalized air traffic, it will be unaffordable anyway for normal people.

 

We should rather create our environment in a way that public transport solves most our problems.

You can just take control from the human and have AI do it

Current flying cars are not the first ones - there were hundreds of different projects, but they didn't achieve much traction to become the mainstream mode of transportation

the problem is not the maneuvering of the vehicle but the energy used in relation to efficiency.

 

cars are already bad, flying cars are even worse.

We have reduced the air-trafic accidents significantly

 

there are hundreds of planes flying over your head every day, and none of them fall - but they have big mass and energy. That doesn't make you scared

why do you think we can't repeat it with flying cars? Just because they have wheels it will be different?

One of the problems with old flying cars was probably control panel - it made it look like a plane, overcrowded with gauges and indicators

 

but modern EV cars allow to display this information on the screen so can fit it neatly on the screen. So when you go into flight mode, you can just switch it and it will start to display aircraft parameters like altitude, range, air speed

what the fuck are you even writing, did you read my post?

I am not posting about accidents, but efficiency.

you measure efficiency in what units? If energy is cheap, some people can buy that energy. If its energy of combustable fuel - if someone can buy a full tank of fuel for his flying car trip - so be it. The flying cars can even be made electric, so they wouldn't even use gasoline, but will be just chargable. Or they can be made to fly on methane, propane or hydrogen.

This is the one I'm looking forward to btw

anon, i...

I mean not this one specifically but the bike based kind in general. There were few others, none of them hit the market yet.

I doubt we'll ever see them outside of the rich entertainment sector though. Flying cars and bikes make no sense at all with current technology.

At short range (e.g. within a city/suburbs) they would be unusable if traffic gets big enough, and also require significant free space for landing.

At medium range (50-1000 km) it would be cheaper and faster to use car - high-speed train - car combination. And even if there's no train connection, prop-driven flying car would not be much faster than autobahn (the one you attached has declared airspeed of 170 km/h)

They could make sense as luxury vehicle for some nation with a lot of islands or wilderness. Imagine Philippines for example, if they had money a lot of those islands don't have bridges, so you are forced to just use boat. But just flying could be more comfortable.

 

or you can fly over wild areas, somewhere in China with those vehicles. There is a giant valley in China - and i think NOT A SINGLE FOREIGNER BEEN THERE, because i can only find literally 5 pictures from there.

found it ( coordinates 34.86454664336169, 111.1615851301512)

you can only cross shit like that in a plane

 

https://www.google.ru/maps/place/Pinglu+County,+Yuncheng,+Shanxi,+China/@34.8323932,111.1782102,1331a,35y,331.75h,70.56t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x36798432c46d1291:0x245dbc857d97739e!8m2!3d34.8346699!4d111.19474!16s%2Fm%2F080fyqb!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu

Maybe we could see something like this one day - flying car taking off, flying over or landing on the aircraft carrier

Well, so you need a region which:

1. has lots of islands or mountains/hills (to avoid being outperformed by land transport)

2. has low population density (to avoid overcrowded skies)

3. is economically developed (they may be affordable but still more expensive than common cars for obvious reasons)

This is a rare combination. There are regions like this, but not a lot of them. New Zealand could be an example (a lot of people already have GA planes there). Some regions of China - yes, probably. Philippines are not an option because of the high population density.

Well, it can be sold to rich Arabs

imagine being sheikh who is so above the regular people, you just fly in your car

 

i think about how China made electric vehicles affordable and if they invest a lot of money, they can drop the price significantly. Chinese also have islands in the West shoreline and areas of low population density in the West of the country - in Xinjiang, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia and Tibet

Sure, and this is the only potential development of the flying cars I can see now. But these rich Arabs already can just buy planes, helicopters and sport cars separately so why bother with having another one?

 

This thing still has to be stuffed with avionics and such. The planes are expensive not just because they are called planes.

And if it follows a convertible design like this AirCar than it also has much more moving components than both plane and car so more potential stress and weak points, all of this also adds to the price (both building and maintenance).

 

I really doubt they fit the "is economically developed" criteria...

Because its cool. They buy expensive cars to flaunt their wealth in front of others, and they value unique shit. So if everyone already has helicopter, yacht and a plane - you can be different if you buy a flying car on top of it

 

It can be made smaller and cheaper now, replaced with simple screens like here >>304477

 

China has a lot of millionaires. They have as many millionaires as some countries in the West have population, lol.

Exactly. So if it gets mass-produced it won't be that valuable to them anymore.

 

Avionics is not just displays (it is already replaced with screens on many modern planes), it is also tons of sensitive sensors, feedback systems and other.

 

I meant these regions of China, not China itself. It is a big country, you know.

Even Western China is now developed, they have skyscrappers and shit, just like Dubai, so they have rich people who can afford it.

 

Watch this:

Then they also have the high-speed train connection and good road network, or will have it soon. The same with the valley from your pictures above - if it would be located in a developed region with some demand on crossing it, it would have a bridge build over it. Which means people there would be interested in flying cars only for fun, not for means of transportation.

Well, train can't get you everywhere. Some Chinese even preffer isolated places. I remember finding this video - the guy either rents or lives in the mountains in Xinjiang?

 

population of Urumqi is 4 million people, so its a quite big city

doubt, it's not really remote tbh

dude, there is a city of 2 millions across the river called Sanmenxia, and i can't find even a single foreigner blogger visit it, i mean can't find a single Video blog from it

 

there are literally huge cities deep in China that probably haven't saw a foreigner in ages. And i mean deep in China, because of cause Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou saw foreigners, but they never travel inland. Probably same about Iran and Russia though

YouTube: -Mc6047VVRw?si=sXZcrhMoOEiiMsFL

 

I did some research, turns out not even the Chinese know why this canyon exists.

imagine trying to fight in the terrain like that - not even tanks can cross these canyons and rifts. Its perfect defence lines, if you fortify them. China should move their capital in that place and they would be unconquarable.

What if I drop a nuke?

What? The pressure wave wouldn't be effective in that terrain

 

plus, you can't "drop" the nuke since you can't get the plane so deep into China. They are developing some insane stuff with air defences, better than Russian

what do you mean

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g1016913-Sanmenxia_Henan-Vacations.html

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=101561334%40N08&view_all=1&text=sanmenxia

 

Loess erosion. Nothing to do with tectonics, it's just water. (They also dig those underground houses in the area.)

I found a geological study related to this section as well.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.palaeo.2021.110423

You know what, looking at the map it looks to me like it's so perfectly straight probably because it comes from water erosion along some man-made structure – either an irrigation channel or even just a road which gone wrong and started rapidly eroding. Loess does that. (It's one of the famous failures of muh cultural revolution: trying to do intensive farming on loess just washed the land away like that.)

It's not the only straight one around, but most of the others look more natural.

its atleast 50 meters deep, can't see how it can be done accidentally

they would need 1000s peope digging, but its not in history

erm

what

I literally can't believe you have never seen what water erosion does to an unmaintained road, or even just a footpath

now imagine this but over centuries, and in loess which erodes like nothing

flying bike. Imagine this flying low and decapitating you