“Flying car” is an element that often appears in sci-fi works and sci-fi film and television dramas, and represents people’s beautiful vision for the future of transportation.
But to be honest, is it difficult to think of the concept of “flying cars”? It doesn’t seem to be difficult, it’s just a combination of two mainstream vehicles of the twentieth century. So is it difficult to make a “flying car”? In fact, it is not difficult. As early as the last century, there have been many “failed” attempts. In recent years, many startups have started the design and manufacture of “flying cars”. Judging from visible reports, there have been several The company’s flying car was successfully tested.
At the end of August, Japanese startup SkyDrive conducted the first flight test of a flying car named SD-03 at the Toyota Proving Ground. This aircraft with a Japanese sci-fi anime feel successfully maintained a flight altitude of 10 meters for 4 minutes. According to reports, this flying car can carry out low-speed and unfettered stable navigation at low altitudes. In the future, the flying speed can be increased to 100 kilometers per hour, and it is planned to be commercialized in 2023.
This “flying car” is only designed with a fixed landing gear, so it cannot be driven on the road. Strictly speaking, this flying car can only complete a point-to-point direct flight, but in fact it can be called a “low-altitude aircraft”.
So although there are some suspicions of being critical, we need to do a detailed review of the emergence of “flying cars”. When many people have expressed that they will regard flying cars as the mainstream means of transportation in the future, we may have to take a closer look at the many tests and problems that flying cars want to be popularized.
“Virtual Reality” of Flying Cars
Before the concept of flying cars appeared in many science fiction works, the prototype of the concept actually appeared. In the hands of engineers full of romantic fantasy in the twentieth century, it is not difficult to build such a mechanical device that can travel on the road and fly in the air.
(Ge Curtis and his Autoplane)
According to records, as early as 1917, G. Curtis, known as the “father of flying cars,” invented the world’s first flying car called Autoplane. The rear of the car is composed of three layers of wings, the longest one. The wing reaches 12.2 meters, and the propeller is composed of a four-blade propeller driven by an engine. Subject to the technological level at the time, Autoplane only managed a short flying jump in the end.
This combination of innovation has inspired many subsequent inventors. In 1937, Waldo Waterman also tried to put wings on a car named Arrowbiled, but it did not succeed in the end.
(Airphibian)
It is not feasible to install wings for cars, so it is also an idea to convert airplanes into cars. In 1946, an engineer named Robert Fulton invented a flying car with detachable wings and tail, and telescopic propellers into the fuselage. This flying car named Airphibian can successfully fly at a speed of 190 kilometers per hour, and can also travel normally at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour on the ground, making it the first flying car certified by the Civil Aviation Administration of the United States. As for why it has not become popular, the price may be really gratifying.
(Aerocar)
After that, another famous flying car, Aerocar, was successfully taken to the sky in 1949. This flying car invented by American engineer Morton Taylor is the closest model to mass production in the world. However, only six of this flying car have been manufactured. One of them is quite legendary and once worked for Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The five existing ones are all collected by the museum.
Why did Aerocar fail in the end? In fact, due to the dual effects of traffic jam anxiety and the energy anxiety caused by the oil crisis that were not serious at the time, flying cars do not have many advantages to “fly into the homes of ordinary people.” In addition, the wing of this flying car over-occupied the road space on the ground. Although it later obtained a government flight permit, it did not have the opportunity to promote it to the civilian field.
There is no successful flying car in reality, but it shines in virtual science fiction film and television works. In the future world built by many science fiction directors, flying cars have become an essential element.
In the “Star Wars” of the overhead universe, the magnificent spaceships are already an ordinary existence, not to mention the car spacecraft flying close to the surface of the planet. Or the kind of urban floating spacecraft created in some steampunk-like overhead world.
(Steampunk aircraft)
This flight mode, which has traditional fuel characteristics and violates the principles of physics, can only be seen in soft science fiction and represents people’s imagination of the sky. The other is the imagination of future urban traffic. There is a high probability that a possible flying technology will be envisaged, such as a magnetic levitation car, which can fly on the ground or shuttle in the air. But the director’s more consideration is to use these aircraft to express the exciting chase scenes. This logic is too far from reality.
(Flying car at low altitude in “Total Memories”)
Flying cars in Hollywood can naturally be wild, without worrying about the actual traffic management, nor the technical realization and cost of flying cars. But these issues are the issues that companies that want to bring flying cars to commercial use today have to consider.
The technology is feasible, but the future is unknown
Until the last decade or so, with the advancement of new power batteries, new materials and autonomous driving technology, flying cars have once again become a hot spot for some manufacturing companies and Internet companies.
In 2009, an American engineer Kenneth Wernicke invented a flying car with a foldable wing and propeller and successfully flew, becoming the first flying car that can drive on the road in a true sense.
Encouraged by this, more reliable flying cars have been designed. On July 6, 2010, the Terrafugia Company of the United States produced a land-air dual-purpose deformed vehicle with foldable wings, equipped with a gasoline engine and lithium-ion phosphate batteries, with a range of 640 kilometers in the air and a top speed of 160 kilometers per hour. , When it becomes a car model, it uses electric power and is allowed by the US aviation authority to put into commercial production.
In 2017, this company was acquired by my country’s Geely Automobile. Although the first flying car has not yet been launched, Li Shufu is still confident about it.
In addition to automobile companies, there are traditional aircraft manufacturing companies that are now investing in flying cars. For example, in 2018, Boeing acquired the aviation technology company Aurora Flight Sciences, established the Boeing Next division, and announced the restart of the flying car plan.
(Boeing’s flying car)
Sebastian Thrun, the initiator of the former Google unmanned car project, founded the flying car company Kitty Hawk after he left, a company specializing in the manufacture of flying cars, and received investment from Larry Page. In the view of founder Thrun, flying cars, like autonomous driving, are a new technology that completely changes ground transportation.
But now the Kitty Hawk project has frequent technical failures and it is difficult to complete commercial mass production. It is now only positioned as a peer-to-peer shared aircraft between cities.
In addition, we can also see Intel in the United States, Toyota in Japan, Volkswagen in Germany, PAL-V in the Netherlands, and EHang in China are all making their own explorations in this field.
But on the whole, the technical feasibility of flying cars is moving towards commercial use, that is, to meet the requirements of air travel in terms of flight mileage, power life and safety. However, if flying cars are to be put into large-scale use, whether it is in terms of regulatory requirements, supporting facilities, or even the congestion problem that people have repeatedly complained about, it is not the optimal solution. There is no schedule for large-scale commercial use of flying cars.
“On the road” license is rare, subverting the difficult period of ground transportation
Fundamentally speaking, the flying car itself has a huge paradox. The original meaning of this concept is that it can be used as a vehicle for land and air. When you need to travel a long distance, switch to airplane mode, and switch to road driving when you need to travel close.
Therefore, one of the major technical reasons for the failure of early flying cars is the inability to resolve the contradiction between flying devices and ground driving. Overly complex flying wings simply cannot meet the requirements of road driving. Safety and convenience are a great obstacle. The current flying car solutions are solving this problem through foldable wing propellers, making the switch between flying and ground driving as convenient and convenient as possible.
But another inevitable problem is that such cars still occupy highway resources. In today’s increasingly serious congestion, the addition of flying cars will undoubtedly bring more severe tests to ground transportation. This is also the reason why many land-air dual-purpose flying vehicles cannot really hit the road.
Based on this essential contradiction, now more flying cars actually adopt the point-to-point low-altitude flight mode. This type of aircraft no longer uses longer wings, but uses quad-rotor helicopters for take-off, landing and flying. This not only does not occupy ground traffic, but does not occupy too much space, and can be in a small space or on the top of a tall building. Perform lifting. However, considering the denser residential areas and narrow public spaces in cities, it is still a huge problem to be able to provide landing space for these aircraft.
Due to the low-altitude flight, once more and more flying cars are put into use in the future, route planning and flight permits in low-altitude areas will also become a challenge for urban traffic management. In addition, because the operational difficulty and risk factor of flying are far greater than those of driving a car, the training and assessment of pilots will also become an obstacle to the popularization of this mode of transportation. Of course, we have seen aircraft such as Ehang launch a completely unmanned mode, that is, the aircraft will automatically control flight and navigation throughout the entire journey, and passengers do not need to operate. This may be the key to solving these two problems. But if the flying car is turned into a three-dimensional transportation system, the difficulty of this realization is still very arduous.
Of course, the biggest difficulty for flying cars on the roads on a large scale lies in safety supervision. On the one hand, if a large number of flying cars go to the sky, as long as there are sporadic failures or loss of control, they may cause serious accidents. On the other hand, if flying cars are hijacked and abused by dangerous elements and become offensive weapons, the risk will be much greater than that of ground traffic. risks of. Now that drones are strictly controlled, talking about flying cars is actually a luxury.
In addition, the best way to solve traffic congestion at present is still to develop public transportation and underground transportation. In particular, the safety and large volume of underground transportation can fully meet the travel needs of future cities. We see Elon Musk, who is most keen on invention and creation, bet on the underground tunnel project instead of flying cars.
Obviously, flying cars have come to our eyes, but when it will be available to us at any time like shared bicycles, it may take a long time to wait. In the middle, flying cars are probably just a luxury choice for a few wealthy people to travel between cities. Even if they use them, they must be under a very strict regulatory and reporting system.
Therefore, flying cars can only be said to be a small supplement to the existing transportation system. There is still a long way to go to subvert ground transportation and solve ground congestion. The so-called 3D three-dimensional travel mode is more likely to travel underground rather than in the air.
After the successful test flight of the Japanese SkyDrive flying car, a Japanese official said sincerely, “This flying car is expected to solve transportation problems in remote islands or mountainous areas, or problems in disaster relief operations and cargo transportation.”
Indeed, a “flying ambulance” that stops and flies may be the best destination for this invention.
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