Larry Page is quietly amassing a ‘flying car’ empire | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page is quietly amassing a ‘flying car’ empire

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71 points0xbxd87 comments

I think Musk's quip that most people would want their own personal flying taxi, but no one wants their neighbor to have one, is pretty insightful. As building density increases and our structures continue to scale in the third dimension, our transit system needs to as well and going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous. Of course, only time will tell what wins out - it won't necessarily be the most efficient option, as history of transit systems has demonstrated.

Seems to me Uber like point to point vehicles that are cheaper then helicopters could be useful in large cities.

However I agree, personalized flying cars for everybody are a fantasy.

> going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous.

How so? Messing with the ground under tall buildings seems a lot more dangerous than messing with the airspace around them.

In the air, cars can drive on a 3d axis, have no way to see road signs, and are more likely to fall on top of other cars if they're lucky enough not to get into an accident with one already in the air.

Compare this to a tunnel, which has controlled routes, is out of the way of road-way cars, and if made properly will never collapse on itself. That's how.

Also, (and almost totally unrelated) Azimov predicted tunnels for autonomous vehicles in his Daneel Olivaw books.

Mind you, he also predicted "rolling roadways", like a big conveyor belt instead of trains.

The Roads Must Roll was Heinlein.

Asimov ran with it in Caves of Steel. But credit where credit is due.

Elevated roadways would be far easier to build than tunnels.

Not a structural engineering expert, but beyond a certain depth for tunnels (depending on soil type I believe) there isn't a structural risk to buildings above, especially at the tunnel diameter sizes suggested by Boring co.

With airspace you have several problems - noise, collisions, crashing on whatever is below.

Having said that, I think we'd all love a safe, electric VTOL vehicle. I don't think they would be allowed in densely populated areas though, same as drones above a certain weight.

Musk might have a point -but he's got his own blind spots. Sky scrapers create efficiencies by packing large numbers of people densely- they all have to go to one place, but in total they take up less real estate. Musk's contention is to transport people to these highly dense areas, rather than increasing the density of the vehicles we transport people in turn, instead we stick with low density vehicles, but do far more journeys.

It'd be like having a city where all the offices are sky scrapers but all the houses are detached bungalows. It'd be nuts. As office buildings get bigger and more efficient you get housing blocks that are bigger and more efficient and you get transport that's bigger and more efficient - trains and buses, not just more cars and more roads.

People don't want to be underground for extended periods. If I were building an autonomous world from scratch, I'd want to design it so people are always above ground but "things" travel below ground.

There's an Amazon patent for an underground delivery system via tunnels that would mitigate against some problems that autonomous cars will bring. Once we have fully autonomous cars that don't need people, most cars on the road won't have anyone in them. Rather than pizza delivery people, shipping delivery, etc -- even something like "oh let me send my friend a key to my apartment while I go on vacation."

It will completely take over the roads unless we do something drastic. So send THAT traffic underground. We are going to need traffic lanes for "stuff." Let somebody commuting to work see the sun during their commute.

Edit: One thing I'd add is that New York and other places used to have a basic version of this - a series of pneumatic tubes that connected the city. There's a city in the U.S. that does trash via pneumatic tubes. I don't think that's the ideal delivery system for other reasons, but worth pointing out that this isn't an entirely new idea. Here's a map: https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/up...

People drive through long tunnels or ride on subways every day. Being underground is not a problem.

I used to take the DC Metrorail to work. Being above ground is absolutely nicer than being below ground if you've got the choice. I looked forward to the parts of that train commute that were above ground. There was even a part where we would come out of the tunnel and I'd look behind me to view the Washington Monument. It was great, especially at night.

I would rather take a short trip underground as the alternative to a long trip above ground, given the option.

When I need to get from A to B, I just want to be there quickly. I can enjoy the surface of the Earth on my own time.

My specific point was about how to address a coming traffic crisis, sorry if that was unclear. I'm suggesting that 90% of traffic will be unaccompanied "stuff" and that moving it underground will free up traffic for people above ground. So either way, we're both talking about getting from A to B more quickly.

I'm sure there will be a need that arises for more tunnels for people, too. But I think the place to START and allocate resources is tunnels for stuff since that's where the problem will come from.

I think that we should consider total underground transportation as a design goal. Even if we reduce, say, the highway traffic by 90%, the remaining 10% will still deal with weather conditions, peak usage times, and bottlenecks such as construction or traffic accidents.

There are plenty of reasons to move people underground rather than above, along with goods. My personal interest in this is that a scalable 100% underground transportation system would make for a better model for life on the moon or Mars than anything we currently have on Earth.

Besides, traveling underground doesn’t have to be a dreary, dystopian experience. If we moved people in rectangular structures resembling elevators, we could cover the floor and ceilings with LCD screens, so instead of feeling like you’re inside an elevator, you could set the screens to show a panorama of the city you’re in, or the Swiss Alps, or if you throw a camera and microphone in there, you could attend a meeting while you’re on your way to that meeting.

Even if we get goods moving off the roads, personal transportation still has enormous costs. Just ask any American who has had to choose between paying high rent to live close to work, or buying a car to commute further away from their lower-rent home.

Driving doesn't fit into such a world view. Driving through a long tunnel never lasts up to 30 minutes, and tunnel lengths are never such that if your car got stranded, walking out on foot to reach the surface would challenge people with small children.

Subways are categorically a different animal. Of lesser endurance than light rail networks, the excess of amount of time spent within them is due to unintended delays and speed limits that draw out travel times. Spending more than 45 minutes on a subway trip is often viewed as unhappily inconvenient and/or an error.

> Driving through a long tunnel never lasts up to 30 minutes, and tunnel lengths are never such that if your car got stranded, walking out on foot to reach the surface would challenge people with small children.

Aside from unusual traffic delays, you are probably right about the 30 minutes thing (the longest road tunnel is just over 15 miles long), but it also has no emergency exits other than the ends, and the maximum 7.6 mile trek to an exit with both ends clear (and, a fortiori, the longer possible exit journey if not starting at the middle but a near end exit is not possible) are likely to challenge people with small children. LLP

OTOH, if I can commute to work underground in less than 5 minutes, but it takes me 20-30 minutes above ground, why not use that space above ground to build out more places where humans will actually "be"?

e.g. Convert roads in cities to pedestrian/bicycle only traffic, or add housing.

What I'm suggesting is that traffic is going to be almost entirely "stuff" in the future and that it creates a crisis that we will need to address. The idea is that when we think of traffic today, we're obsessed with moving people. But that's not what most traffic will be in the future... 90% of it will be deliveries of goods of different kinds.

Maybe that's wrong. But I don't believe so. But I'm not arguing that it's wrong to ever have tunnels for moving people.

Can you elaborate why/how you think most traffic will be "stuff" instead of people? Is everyone going to stop working and never go more than a couple of miles from home?

I don't see this happening anytime soon. While some office jobs can be transitioned to work from home that does not account for the majority of workers even.

Could write a lot here, but it's not that people will travel less but that we'll ship more stuff. Basic idea is that as the cost of shipping goes down, we should expect to see much more of it. And for a variety of reasons I see shipping costs just being decimated in the next couple decades.

We will go up not down. The only limitation is legal, not technical nor economic. Working through the regulations will take a bit of time but is already underway with the FAA’s pilot programs. The problem people are missing in the industry is that it took years for the FAA to lay out the infrastructure and rules for the national airspace. It will take time to work this out for autonomous drones, which will operate on a much larger scale. Cities and states will play a key role. It’s not going to be a VFR free-for-all with collision avoidance, but very much mimic class-A airspace but between 200-400’ and will be fully autonomous. As an F-18 pilot, I use to hate drones, but I’ve been converted. We are at the palm pilot point for UAS. Musk’s comment about noise is correct, but that is solvable and no reason to go back in time and try to dig our way out of our transportation and infrastructure problems. Imagine a world with bridges on demand. Drones enable that future not tunneling machines.

We already went down. Tens of millions of people use underground metros every day all over the world.

Who wants to look up to the sky and rather than a beautiful sunset see a thousand drones? There's a word for that: pollution.

I think going underground is also much more difficult economically. You don't just have to build, but remove first. You don't have to do that in the sky. And that's why most buildings that even do go into the ground don't go very far. It gets harder to dig. You can't scale the same way down that you can up. If it was cheaper they'd do it.

All of these concepts have the same problems:

* loud * short range * no auto-rotation * no passive stability * almost no unpowered glide

Accidents waiting to happen. Never something that you will want to have zipping around your residential neighborhood.

What do you think about single person gyrocopters?

Those already exist and are available in kit form. You can buy one if you want it, but they aren't very popular because they're expensive, slow, noisy, and relatively dangerous.

This doesn't even touch the idea of training people to fly.

I've been studying for my Remote Pilot license just to use my drone professionally and the amount of information you need to know is at times overwhelming. I seriously can't imagine how you would administer a test like that to license people to fly their cars.

Well, we already have licenses for flying planes, which seems to work quite well.

That doesn't seem to be an issue: You have got enough happening in your life without having to learn how to fly. But what if flying across town was as easy as hopping in a rideshare? What if Cora could fly for you?

Cora will combine self-flying software with expert human supervision, so you can enjoy the ride. [0]

https://cora.aero/

What is the point of this post? This is all well known and that is what development projects are for.

If you would at least argue that this will always be the same then there would be a discussion to have. But right now this post is just saying the obvious while ignoring that everybody is exactly working on resolving these problems.

The point is, Larry Page is fighting physics, and therefore wasting his money.

Flying cars seems like a horrible idea.

Pros: Alleviate ground congestion, potentially go faster

Cons: Landing, air congestion, higher risk than driving

I know this is still super fresh, but honestly moving our already horribly unsafe daily communte up several thousand feet in the sky doesn't make much sense to me. I seen people survive horrible car crashes, I haven't heard of anyone walking off a 1-on-1 plane crash

Flying cars seem great for rare occasions (including actual emergencies - ie, flying ambulances that could safely land on a residential street), not for daily commuting.

like a helicopter?

Hard to fit an helicopter here, but cars enter well: https://praqualquerlugar.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/alfama-...

hard to imagine landing a car there

The BlackFly doesn't seem wider than two regular cars, so I don't see why not.

Everything looks impossible until someone does it. And keep in mind that flying is actually safer than driving. Yes, if you have an accident the odds of being lethal are increased but keep in mind that it is not the same kind of flying. 10000m vs 100m and the speed is also different. Have you ever looked at the fatalities in commercial flying in the early 30s? Better systems were implemented and it is perfectly safe now. So even if there is still a long way to go, someone has to walk that way and take the rewards.

Commercial flights are super safe because there's a million regulations to follow. An airplane costs $100 million or so and is flown by a super trained crew.

How is that going to be replicated for $20k cars?

It probably won't, it might be replicated by million dollar automated flying taxi's though?

Could be. Isn't automated flying even harder than automated driving? After all, it's not going to be military drone flying with no obstacles, we're talking about flying and landing in an urban environment.

When commercial aviation started the regulation was really loose. There were not even a consenus on how to report accidents, how to tell the root cause, etc... We face a similar problem with flying cars. Can they be used as safely as standard cars are used? I think the bar is that low. But we should push for more and learn from mistakes done in road safety, like the need of humans to control your capacity to drive. Yes, it is going to be hard, but is going to be done eventually.

I'd think "flying cars" would clearly fall under existing aviation rules. Those aren't as strict for smaller aircraft/private use as they are for commercial airlines, but there's still a regulatory framework already.

It would definitely make sense as a starting point. But it has some specific use cases that would require specialized regulation. Anyway, someday this will become a reality and we will see if the rules fit.

For private use the laws where I am are much stricter (and can be broadly summarized as a "short whitelist of places where you can fly").

True. I should have specified that I was thinking more along the lines of safety regulations etc., where generally General Aviation is less strictly checked.

I think "flying car" should be reframed as 'noisy expensive conventional personal aircraft'.

'Flying car' is associated with what you see in scifi movies, they never use conventional aircraft tech, they can lock in space, don't burn oil, don't sound like an high-pitched overblown fan, don't have wings, ... They are piggy-backing on this image without delivering the necessary innovations. Unless someone hacks gravity or improves energy density of batteries beyond today's dreams, "flying cars" will stay a scam, it won't happen. More likely to see everyone riding segways by 2020... With global warming, the idea of vast distribution of personal aircrafts integrated into daily lives is beyond absurd, IMHO.

> Flying cars seems like a horrible idea.

It depends on the use case. For high-density urban areas, the challenges probably outweigh the benefits. But for low-density, rural/semi-rural regions, those who commute an hour or more could really benefit from such a vehicle. For example, hospital staff driving home after a long shift.

That is a very good point. I had not considered that. Thanks.

> I haven't heard of anyone walking off a 1-on-1 plane crash

Offtopic and nitpicking, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision

I dread the future that includes traffic above our heads on anything like the scale of the traffic currently on the roads.

The traffic over your head is actually many times bigger than road traffic.

Is this a joke on the physical size of aircraft/spacecraft?

As of todays physics this is an impossible future, as long as there is no ~~game~~ epoch changing innovation on the energy sector.

I just imagine all the traffic on the ground, but now in the air. Because with flying cars you don't get to just fly where you want, as people fantasize. There needs to be aerial lanes, and they will be packed. Sounds like a shitty world.

Also, whenever you see an accident or a car pulled over with mechanical issues imagine that happened in the air - where do you think flying cars will end up in that situation? Cars are dripping and leaking stuff all the time, where do you think it will end up with flying cars?

I still can't think of flying cars as anything other than a terrible compromised aircraft married to a terribly compromised car. There are 15K airports in the US. Drive a few miles over to one and get in a proper airplane seems like a better plan for most use cases I can think of.

When I see the average driver competence on the roads, I don't see most of those people successfully commuting in a flying anything over the course of their lifetime.

> When I see the average driver competence on the roads, I don't see most of those people successfully commuting in a flying anything over the course of their lifetime.

Ah! But AI, you see! They'll fly themselves!

Fully automated flying is much different from fully automated driving and arguably easier to pull off. Barrier is lower, so we will probably see it implemented in near future.

It’s already been implemented for a few years now. Planes can even easily take off and land on their own now.

Automated landing systems are only in very limited use, and require active monitoring by qualified human pilots who can immediately take over if something goes wrong. In general autopilots don't cope well with mechanical failures.

They can land by themselves, but the safety envelope demanded by the FAA and industry just means that they don’t. The ability is there if needed in a pinch.

Sure they can land by themselves as long as nothing important breaks on the airplane during the landing sequence. If something does break then the pilot may have to intervene at a moment's notice. The pilots aren't just kicking back, they're actively flying the aircraft even though they aren't directly manipulating the control surfaces and throttles. That's why aircraft carrying paying civilian passengers will continue to need a rated pilot onboard for many years to come.

Yes. And if they aren’t monitoring locally they are monitoring remotely.

But the level of automation right now in aircraft is dangerous: enough that the pilot’s job is really boring, not enough that the pilot isn’t occasionally needed. We all know how that works out in practice.

The aircraft case is a good bit different than the car case IME.

In cruise, there's not much to do in an aircraft and minimal oversight by the pilot is easily accomplished. Then, during the arrival (and during the departure), the workload is quite a bit higher, meaning the job is anything but boring and it's easy for the pilot to remain engaged.

Take off and landing aren’t really that much of a commercial flight, especially for long hauls. And even these aspects are automated more and more these days, it isn’t weird that the pilots are supervising an automated landing...for safety reasons (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland).

The pilot workload and involvement is high during the entire departure process and arrival process, not just the takeoff and landing. Call it surface to 30K feet and letting down out of 30K feet to the surface. Traffic, crossing restrictions, speed restrictions, frequency changes, aircraft power and configuration changes, etc. In cruise in RVSM airspace (where the use of autopilot is mandated anyway), there's not much to hit and everything is nice and orderly and the workload lowest. Full autoland usage is a minority of landings, even in equipped aircraft.

Remote monitoring is insufficient for passenger carrying flights due to communications latency and reliability problems. It might be tolerable for cargo flights though where risk tolerance is higher.

The excellent safety record of scheduled commercial flights contradicts your claim that the current level of automation is dangerous. We have proof that it works well in practice.

This isn’t my claim, it ia well known problem in the industry. See

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/10/28/bhana

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114262...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/airline-pilots-depend-t...

https://jdasolutions.aero/blog/airbus-announces-a-response-t...

Etc....

If it's such a problem then where are the incidents? This is much ado about (almost) nothing.

The automated systems have made flying safer at the same time creating a new danger that needs to be managed. It isn’t rocket science, like how self driving cars rarely get into accidents and when they do it’s news because the human driver wasn’t paying attention.

The bored pilot problem is only going to get worse as technology marches forward, even if the fatality rate keeps going down.

Bored pilots aren't a problem if passengers are safe. There are many thousands of commercial flights every year so we know the current safety levels aren't a fluke.

On the other hand we don't know yet whether self driving cars will actually be safer. They're only used in very limited times and places so there's no way to do a fair analysis.

Bored pilots are a problem if you are a pilot, or if you want to keep pilots alert and happy. Bored pilots also have already led to more than a few accidents, so the FAA definitely cares.

Larry Page is not an idiot. Flying cars have giant unsurmountable flaws that should be apparant to anyone who is not an idiot. What gives?

New tech = not insurmountable

The tech is the easy part, it's the logistics and ramifications for failures. Blow a gasket on the road, and you come to a gradual stop. Do it in the air, and you have a minor disaster if anyone is underneath you.

He wants one, and is a billionaire with billionaire buddies. He doesn’t need to make an Everyman product. There is a market for private helicopters now. These will require less training to use.

He's a software guy and has too much money to play with.

Is a Flying Car just essentially a big drone with more noise? Do we need the Car part? Also why are we building big drones, can't we just have mini electric helicopters?

the "car part" is the human error part. also less accountability for the manufacturer.

Saw this the other day [0]:

As battery technology gets better and with a similar vehicle as the one in the video is paired with AI to do the flying. I think it will be a viable technology in the future.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhKTCbbqbaE

Wouldn't it be better if they had a driving component as well?

I can't imagine everyone could take off from their own homes? That would just be so chaotic and dangerous.

I would think it would be better to drive to a designated spot and take off from there.

Still, I love these things and would absolutely love to see them work.

average consumer has proved to be a very irresponsible car owner and shitty operator of the vehicle. and given the fact that people got more distractions behind the wheel compared to 20 years ago such as checking emails, checking into flights, disputing a credit card charges or whatever little things that you need to get done often and can be done over the phone. it would be better for everybody if these flying vehicles were not sold to everyone and only well paid professionals were allowed to operate them as taxis.

my assumption is that they would be autonomous...

In Munich politicians asked to plan in airtaxi spots to be build/considered for the rebuild of our main train station, while I have to throw away liquids above 100ml in the airport!

Hopefully his flying cars are not like all the other Google hardware products (released in "beta" for hundreds of dollars with a ton of issues).

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