Amazon just got an unlimited FAA license to test its drone platforms for cargo. No you may say that isn't the same as having people on board a flying car and you'd be right but the ability to accidentally drop things on people and houses is also a big deal that is functionally close to the same thing and this rating is coming from people who know this and are driven by stats. You may have noticed that Google just announced that it was going to unmanned self-driving for its Waymo taxi service. Google goes slow and Google did its first 100 demos of this tech almost a decade ago and its been in testing and refining ever since. You may wonder did something trigger this announcement on the part of Google? I think it was triggered by Tesla releasing Smart Summon which Musk said would be "kind of silly at first." I think this is because parking lots are the unscripted uncontrollable worst case scenario for self-driving. So Tesla introduces something that crawls along a walking speed in a parking lot. But note if it can do this at walking speed is just a frame rate increase to dial that up to what Google has been doing in is more modern geo fenced city street enclosures. And you may know that in 2017 Tony Seba predicted peek oil in 2020 because of autonomous driving and it looks like we are right on schedule. It also looks like a tech for which there is no way for the fossil fuel industry to get in the way because like the light bulb once it is introduced anywhere in viable form it will be everywhere almost instantly- they can't stop China so they can't stop it anywhere- but I this also means law enforcement catches up with the fossil fuel industry as we've been seeing. And it is worth noting that just as Tesla has been introducing people to the advantages of electric cars as evidenced in the collapsing of the German Luxury sedan resale values it also has had people drive a couple billion miles supervising self-driving technology, helping people trust the technology. Now the connection to flying cars happens in a few areas. First is that people will not be piloting flying cars because they can't handle it safely. But that said, here is nothing it the flying car environment like a crowed inner city parking lots. So we can pretty much check the box on flying autonomy coming right on top of ground based EV autonomy tech which is eminent. But then we have the problem that we just can't imagine flying cars. Here is a link to what looks like a perfectly conceptualized model. https://www.motor1.com/news/235241/audi-italdesign-airbus-flying-car/ I used to like the Lilium model but their full mock up crossed the threshold to where it no longer looks desirable because it now seems crude, inelegant and even unsafe. And I've realized you don't to have mechanical mode switching to land and you don't need great speed. The model in the link is better, it may not be as fast but it also isn't going to be wasting a lot of energy to stay aloft without going fast, it will simply move a lot of air slowly and glide on its vector-able cushion. It also has the basic plan for small drones which can beat a human at a game of ping pong. It is a stable plan with enclosed blades or cowlings which are crucial for the psychology of the system. New helicopters are actually very quiet you don't hear them until they are on top of you and even then it is not much. These simply provide too many advantages and for the same reasons Amazon is pursuing drones for cargo to avoid. The ability to go in more of a straight line at high way speeds and even possibly to stack in flight and the ability to reduce road wear and tear and the ability to make vehicles simpler then even a Tesla with almost no moving parts and no emission is too much of a draw as is their ability to complement Boring company type approaches and reduced traffic and urban sprawl alleviation from autonomy cutting down on the number of vehicles on the road and stopping traffic weavings and radically reducing accidents. It is inevitable and it is already being targeted by VW and Porsche because they want to at least look like they are leap frogging to stop the embarrassment and they already know they face a massive reduction in vehicles on the road under a model where Tesla doesn't even plan to sell to the public anymore after robo taxis because robo taxis are so much cheaper for every one and lucrative for non built out suppliers. Also the abandoned parking lots will provide the landing and take-off and charge points for these vehicles- guessing they may use a battery swap model a first. One more piece that I expect to see is tech that is more reliable than a parachute for emergencies as is shown in the link to the included patent application which is something that is a mixture of parachute and air bag tech to immediately slow descent (can't necessarily wait for an ordinary parachute to deploy in low altitude setting) and cushion landing if descent is too fast. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9611045B2/zh So in essence this thing puts a big air bag balloon (parachute effect) with inflated suspensions system around the craft and of course there would be harnesses and air bags inside the craft- might have to wear helmets- major inconvenience or just wear foldable portable personal strap system to keep head stabilized if spun in a crash- don't want basilar tear. If you drop a balloon to the ground it falls like a bit like a parachute and bounces. And these systems need not be expensive to be light, instead of carbon fiber they use can use the new aluma-steel or so called giga steel which while stronger than titanium weighs what titanium weighs but crucially can be made super thin while retaining better than titanium strength but high grade steel level costs. Similar reasons why SpaceX chose steel over carbon fiber for rockets. If you look at this link https://www.motor1.com/news/279457/audi-autonomous-flying-taxi-test/ You see a 1/4 scale mock-up of the concept- it looks a lot more terminator like and it shows it is a counter rotating 8 blade quad set up. It shows the blades up high enough but that they don't look like a death machine but more like a helicopter but the note that there is the difficulty with how do you keep the blades from contacting the ball enclosure- do you separate he motors and blades to where they comes down with a parachute or in their own ball enclosure?
James Cameron's film Terminator predicted these flying machines for for the 2020s- his terminator was from 2029 sent back to the year 1984. The drones if you look closely have quad-copter design or at least he kind of quad span- may have vectored nozzle thrust on the tails like you see on Harrier wing tips. Also a tribute is due to James Cameron for the original Terminator because of course a Super Intelligence is going to make a time machine (had to flying drones and machines you can't tell from humans) but the time machine in particular. You know if you have a time machine you solve all production problems and transport problems but you also solve (in some versions- less limited ones) the problem of death in fact with it you undue aging and the death of everything that ever died and drop the veil between the living and the dead and possibly make it so it isn't even necessary to eat or do surgery or maybe even evacuate and you certainly get little things out of it like instantaneous teleportation and unlimited do overs- life becomes a video game. You may have noticed that if Ahuyasca doesn't drop the veil between the living and the dead for our global culture that Tom Campbell's predictions on proving this is the Matrix may do it- his tests which are being done in universities now to show we live something that at the top layer is like a simulation (and where he has fleshed some of the underlying underlying layers in his My Big TOE books) claims to be able to predict the timing on radio active decay and show its not actually random in our space and predict which way a half splitter beam will be directed showing its not random based on a update of the delayed quantum erasure effects. And of course if there are time machine's were ready living under the effects of them unless Nick Herbert's conjecture about a first one is true. But we should be clear that one of the first things an SI would do is create one. I'd like to address something that Musk said. He called this stuff a helicopter in helicopters clothing. That is right to an extent but an battery based system is going to be more reliable to a radical extent as will autonomous systems be radically more reliable and the simplicity should make them radically cheaper to operate and new systems don't have be loud- old helicopters were loud. Electrical may mean its easier to stop the blades and give back up safety systems a better chance of working.
These really are flying cars. Instead of 4 wheels simply have 4 spinning parts up high and a gondola underneath. A drone up top. Its not like we haven't been moving freight and people through the air for decades now. We have. he difference is we simply needed a way to take the much lower altitude units autonomous because while he load should be easier for computer its much harder for a human be up in the air because of the psychology of a mistake.
