Strange Perspectives: The Learner Drivers Of The Sky

Richard Bradbury: Flying cars. The biggest disappointment of the digital age is that information flies around the world at the speed of light but the rest of us have to rely on a technology invented by the Mesopotamians 6,000 years ago. The wheel. Yes, cars are faster than bullock cars, but why are we still stuck to the ground six millennia later? Of course, Matt Armitage is a well-known hater of the idea of flying cars.

Richard Bradbury: I bet you had to force yourself to cover this today, didn’t you?

Matt Armitage:

I had hoped that one of the few bright spots of the pandemic might be that fewer people would ask me about flying cars.

Working on the theory that by not seeing or talking to people,

They wouldn't ask me about the subjects

we talk about all kinds of things on Mattsplained.

the future of employment. The future of society.

Artificial intelligence. Privacy.

The oligarchic and monopolistic power of technology companies.

But there were really only two things that anyone ever wants to ask me about,

Richard Bradbury: …sex robots and flying cars?

Matt Armitage:

Yup. I’ve become the sex robot guy. Not a great quirk to have.

Limits my children’s party work.

What actually seems to have happened is, because I have fewer conversations with actual people.

The topic of Flying cars has actually increased as a percentage of my overall conversation.

It's not like I get a lot of interaction on social media, but I think at least two people have asked me about flying cars this month.

Which is two more than have asked me about reforming the tech industry or how to manage tech addiction.

But now, it seems, they’re back. From outer space.

Richard Bradbury: Before he left, Jeff told me that you’re not allowed to use that line any more.

Matt Armitage:

See, he’s gone and he’s still controlling my life.

It’s ok. I’ll survive.

Richard Bradbury: You’ve been warned…

Matt Armitage:

Ok. I’m out the door.

While we were all sheltering in place, it seems like the various parts of the flying car industry

Were going into OverDrive, or updraft, or whatever it is that makes flying cars work.

And as the developed world has reemerged, so have they, to spread more fear and confusion.

Richard Bradbury: You really don't like flying cars, do you?

Matt Armitage:

OK, I can see how listeners might think today's show is lacking in objectivity.

So, I will keep my comments to myself until the end of the show.

And limit myself to reporting factual information for the time being.

Richard Bradbury: If you can manage that, you might win a Nobel Prize.

Matt Armitage:

No promises, but Nobel shortlist here we come...

So, I guess First things first we have to define what a flying car is.

And if you want more details you can look back through the mattsplained archive and even the shows pre MSP.

We've talked about flying cars a lot over the past 10 years.

flying cars around since the: 1920

I think I might have to have that put on a T-shirt.

So that when people ask me “when is someone going to make a flying car?”, I can just point to the answer.

Richard Bradbury: I think that's one of the things that confuses people the most. They assume because they don't see flying cars, that they're not technically possible.

Matt Armitage:

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head.

early flying car prototypes tended to be Hybrids of cars and planes.

So you would either get a car that you could attach wings to.

or a plane that you could remove the wings from and drive like a car.

Of course, you have a lot of practical problems with either approach.

Richard Bradbury: Aerodynamics?

Matt Armitage:

Yes, if any of you are supercar or Formula One fans then you'll know that

an enormously important part of that design process is creating downforce.

As cars get more and more powerful, we’re regularly seeing supercars break the 1,000 bhp mark,

So it really becomes about controlling the torque and keeping them on the ground.

Jet cars are a great example.

YouTube is full of videos of jet-propelled dragsters flipping or believing they can fly.

Two of the most famous examples of jet car fail are the Mythbusters TV show car.

presenter, Richard Hammond in: 2006

Cars and planes are kind of opposites in that respect.

So early flying car prototypes were often very difficult to get off the ground,

and had all the stability of a flying brick.

And what you really don’t want to be putting into the hands of the average driver,

is something that’s harder to fly than a regular plane.

Design is not just aesthetics, it’s about structure and practicality.

How many planes look like a 4 door saloon car?

There are reasons a 747 isn’t just a double decker bus with wings.

Richard Bradbury: And we have the reverse case for planes as cars?

Matt Armitage:

Yes, they tended to be slow.

They had small wheels and rubbish suspension.

It’s also much harder to stow the wings.

And propellers are not great at pedestrian crossings, outside schools or for cyclists.

Look at all the issues Toyota had over those sticky accelerator pedal claims ten years back.

Imagine what a faulty propeller might do.

And there’s not a lot of head-on impact protection in a plane.

Because it’s built for lightness and, you know, you aren’t going to survive anyway.

You’re trying to engineer something that meets the safety requirements of both air and land vehicles.

Which is an insane task to achieve.

Richard Bradbury: so when we talk about this resurgence of flying cars, we're really talking about something else? Something new?

Matt Armitage:

I guess one of the best examples, if you're looking at a starting point, is the gyrocopter that James Bond flew in you only live twice.

Which I’ve used as an example before.

to give you some context, even that idea is over 50 years old.

It dates back to: 1967

so you can see from this timeline how tricky this whole concept of personal aviation is.

\the gyro copter is essentially a mini helicopter.

helicopters are pretty tricky to fly, if I remember correctly they take more hours to get a license to fly than a light aircraft.

And they tend to have more accidents than traditional aircraft.

Those helicopter cowboys on farms in Australia?

That’s one of the world’s most dangerous jobs.

At least light aircraft glide.

Experience engine failure on a helicopter and it basically drops.

Again, not the kind of thing you want to put in the hands of a bleary-eyed commuter.

Let alone a post-happy hour commuter.

Richard Bradbury: so, we're really talking drones here?

Matt Armitage:

Well, until recently we haven't been able to say with too much certainty.

And there are a few makers who haven’t given up on the hybrid idea.

A lot of the companies working on personal flying vehicles have been very secretive about their prototypes.

Unless you were lucky enough to spot one in the sky on one of its test flights, you'd likely have very little idea what these craft looked like.

How they were driven and how many passengers they carried.

And the companies tend to choose remote locations, for safety reasons, and for secrecy.

There seems to be an enormous amount of industrial espionage going on between these flying vehicle developers.

Or at least I should say, allegations of espionage between these companies.

Suits and countersuits.

Richard Bradbury: Like the epic Apple and Samsung battle?

Matt Armitage:

Yes, only this time it's over designs and technology that no one's even seen yet.

But going back to that point about drones, we are finally starting to see the prototypes and in some cases, the ready for market devices of these companies.

Which brings us back to he timeline.

This isn't something that's happened overnight.

these are companies that have been working on these products and keeping them out of the public view –

not for any nefarious reasons – for ten years or more.

But in a sense those timelines tell you everything you need to know about flying cars.

The first flying car prototypes are over 100 years old.

Even with all the excitement around autonomous and electric cars since the early noughties.

And don’t forget, that despite all the big claims, we still don’t have self-driving cars on the roads in any great numbers.

We’re only seeing these flying car prototypes now.

We have a long, long way to go.

Richard Bradbury: Is that the route they seem to be going down? Autonomously piloted and electrically driven?

Matt Armitage:

We’ll get more fully into the details after the break.

But yes, the focus does seem to be on green and, if not fully automated, then at least partially automated.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise.

Passenger aircraft are similarly partially automated.

Especially in terms of take-off and landing.

Those are essentially the times of greatest risk, so it makes since that aircraft builders would design systems

to give the pilots most assistance at those points.

in the same way that car makers have started to incorporate radar automatic breaking technology into cars.

We're already seeing those technologies making their way from the luxury to the saloon car segment.

As well as some of the premium small cars.

Richard Bradbury: presumably we’re still talking about manoeuvrability and vertical takeoff though?

Matt Armitage:

Well, yes. The idea of personal flying vehicles is about freedom from congestion,

The freedom of the skies rather than the imprisonment of the roads.

The average condo would not be a pleasant place to live if all the residents were sharing a runway.

Although there are some gated communities in the US that are built around a runway, they market to light aircraft enthusiasts.

you have a garage on your house and a hangar for your plane.

But if you're talking about flying cars in terms of easing urban congestion then of course they have to be vertical takeoff.

So that's where the comparison to drones comes in.

So many of these new craft have propellers that switch from that downward thrust needed for takeoff and landing.

and whatever the thrust is you use for propulsion.

Richard Bradbury: We have to take a break, but before we do that: would it be correct to describe you as cautiously optimistic about this new generation of flying cars?

Matt Armitage:

Yes, there are still an enormous number of hurdles to negotiate.

Which we’ll come back to after the break.

But I certainly think there's a lot of potential there to expand public rather than individual transport.

Richard Bradbury: When we come back: which flying car would you choose?

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: We’re away with the birds today. Talking about the future of flying cars. You mentioned that there are a number of companies creating these vehicles.

Matt Armitage:

Over in the US we have companies like Opener, Kitty Hawk, Wisk Aero, Archer, Joby Aircraft. Lilium in Germany.

The big boys Boeing and Airbus are also developing urban type protypes, though probably for larger and more commercial traffic.

Literally skybuses.

And then there’s Ehang, the autonomous aircraft company from China that is actually the world leader, in terms of launching to market.

These are just a handful. There are plenty more, some more secretive than others.

Not to mention all the defence linked companies working on really secret projects.

Richard Bradbury: which suggests that there's a lot of money chasing this sector...

Matt Armitage:

We're already seeing incredible valuations in this sector.

Joby aviation is expected to merge with a SPAC this year and go public with a valuation of over $6 billion.

And several of the other companies in this sector are working on similarly structured deals to go public.

And one of the guys behind that joby aviation deal is Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn.

So there's a lot of serious money here.

Google's Larry Page has put money into a number of aviation startups including opener and Kitty Hawk.

Richard Bradbury: I guess that takes us back to the question about motivation. Most people see flying cars as personal transport. But is that what these craft are designed to be?

Matt Armitage:

There’s a real irony in talking about this today.

Flying was something we did so casually. But I haven’t been on a plane in 2 years now.

At one point I was taking flights every other week.

So, the idea of getting back to the skies is kinda daunting and tantalizing at the same time.

We’ve broken the habit, or at least I have, as we described in MSP159.

Back to your question.

Some of these new planes are personal vehicles, such as the blackfly by opener.

But by and large they mostly seem to be targeting that mass transit sector.

The Uber of the skies, I guess you’d term it.

part of that I guess is cost. Opener’s blackfly will cost around 150,000 U.S. dollars.

But its founder hopes to get that price down to the equivalent of an SUV as the market scales up.

But that's still a lot of money for a single occupant vehicle.

Some of his competitors have larger craft, but by and large you're looking at passenger loads of one to four people.

They should still be largely cheaper than helicopters.

And the hope is that they will be much safer and cheaper to run.

Richard Bradbury: So this is essentially an air taxi play?

Matt Armitage:

Yes, and that's not an untried market.

Brazil's Rio de Janeiro is a model for commercial air taxis based on helicopters.

So we're not talking about creating a business model from scratch.

Which is probably why investors are so attracted to it.

Richard Bradbury: if we're talking about a market at that scale. Tackling one city and then rolling on to the next, how will that work in terms of logistics? Do we have enough pilots?

Matt Armitage:

I think this is where the arguments are actually most interesting for me.

We know that autonomous cars are the gold standard for the e-hailing industry.

the driver is the most expensive part of your journey.

it will be interesting to see what kind of scale these companies can achieve with physical pilots.

Ehang I think has been working with a number of cities in China as well as governments in the Middle East.

And they are working on licensing for airtaxis in Europe.

their craft are autonomous. So there's no pilot, just the passengers.

But I think they have a command center where the drones are monitored by human operators who can take over in case of any emergencies.

Richard Bradbury: I know you think that autonomous vehicles are likely to be safer...

Matt Armitage:

When we're talking about cars, I think they have the potential to be safer and reduce congestion.

Perhaps more in urban settings than on highways or in the countryside.

But as we’ve discussed on the show before, that system largely relies on the majority, if not all of the traffic, being automated.

Otherwise, unpredictable humans are going to mess up all those finely crafted machine calculations.

That complexity increases when we talk about autonomous aircraft.

Especially doing short hops in urban settings.

Because you’re flying above buildings and houses.

Even if you replace the explosive potential of the aviation fuel with lithium cells, that’s still potential for a lot of collisions.

Richard Bradbury: So, there are still a lot of licensing hurdles to overcome?

Matt Armitage:

a of being able to operate by: 2024

That may be a large hill for them to climb.

Especially the autonomous part.

As I said, cities are only slowly coming around to the idea of self-driving cars.

There are currently no similar licenses for unmanned aircraft to fly over US towns and cities as far as I know.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to get that licensing in place before they can even start to test their business model.

The likelihood is that in many countries, the craft will need a pilot, even if most of the flight is automated, for quite a few years to come.

Richard Bradbury: If we’re talking about electric powered flying cars, do they have the range?

Matt Armitage:

Some of the Scandinavian countries have announced that they want to concentrate on electric aircraft for regional flights to cut carbon emissions.

That’s partly why I mentioned Boeing and Airbus earlier.

And this is something we’ve covered before as well.

Existing battery technologies represent a bit of a dilemma.

there is only so much efficiency left to squeeze out of lithium-ion batts.

And the packs are very heavy.

it’s not like a car or lorry. Add more packs and a bit more weight and you get more range.

With a plane, the more weight you add, the more power you need to keep it in the air, whatever you do, you have to compromise by reducing load.

Passengers or freight.

Richard Bradbury: And there’s a similar range trade off with flying cars?

Matt Armitage:

For now, yes. The range is fine, because these are short urban hops.

And rapid charging technology can see them powered back up in 2-3 hours.

Possibly even less.

But in order for them to be really useful in that go-anywhere, taxi sense they have to be quite small.

If you have to have a pilot for regulatory reasons, that’s a half to a quarter of your passenger payload gone.

Which puts the price of the service up as well as limiting its functionality.

And that’s before we get to that infrastructural component.

Richard Bradbury: Such as places to land?

Matt Armitage:

Yes. It’s all very well for this kind of craft to take off and land on tall buildings with flat roofs.

But as you venture out into suburbia, the buildings get lower and the closer you get to the ground,

the more you encounter hazards like power cables.

And then there’s the noise.

Yes, flying cars will be less noisy than helicopters.

Bu that’s a bit like saying a hurricane is quieter than a tropical storm.

At a previous apartment I lived in, one of the neighbours regularly commuted by helicopter.

Which was terribly exciting at first, but was mostly deafening thereafter,

We also experienced a massive landslide at that same apartment,

The landslide was a lot less noisy than the helicopter.

Anyone who has been near one of those camera or leisure drones knows that they are incredibly loud.

A roofing company used one to inspect my roof recently.

Technology wise fantastic, but my neighbours weren’t so impressed by the noise.

Richard Bradbury: In a sense, it’s an issue of swapping carbon pollution for noise pollution?

Matt Armitage:

Increasingly we’re seeing local governments and city planners working to make cities more livable.

So, this is a future development that is definitely not written in stone.

Especially when we have a ready supply of ground-based alternatives: electric cars are almost silent.

And electric bicycles and scooters are becoming a lot more common on our city streets.

Richard Bradbury: Still, this is the closest we’ve come to bringing the world of the Jetsons to life?

Matt Armitage:

My feeling is that, despite the money that’s being poured in,

This kind of transport is not going to become ubiquitous.

It’ll be more common than helicopter taxis but still in that bucket of being quite exclusive.

I don’t think regulators are ready for autonomous taxis.

I imagine it will take a few brave cities to volunteer and provide case studies.

So, I would imagine they will remain piloted and not pilotless for the foreseeable future.

Where I think there is more potential is in larger, bus sized machines.

Which could form part of public transport grids.

And speed up commuting as well as prising us out of individual vehicles, which is really the problem.

Whether it’s in the skies or on the ground, what we really want are fewer vehicles serving more people.

Rather than the other way around.

But I’ll leave it today, by saying that I’m happy that, after only 100 years of work, the age of the flying car is finally upon us.

Maybe I’ll put that on a t-shirt.