Flying Cars - A reality check

Why don’t cars fly?

Do you know a Cessna 150 (light aircraft) take-off’s the runway at 100 km/h. Our cars go faster than that on highways! So what makes an aircraft fly? Why don’t cars fly? 

Video Credits: CNBC

This may seem to be a crazy question, but many have this question in their mind. The main point to be noted is that lift that could raise the mass of the aircraft above ground. 

How does a wing generate lift? 

A wing is basically made of a structure called airfoil. The airfoil uses the fast moving air stream to generate lift. Have you ever kept your hand out of a fast moving car or bike? 

You may have felt your hand being lifted up a little. The hand acts as a flat plate. Its the same way an airfoil works, yet with a small difference. An airfoil is designed in such a way that it extracts more lift and doesn’t stall so soon. 

In contrast there are cars that can fly and they are known as flying cars, and for your information flying cars are for real. Ever since there has been flight, people had this vision, and I think you and I had this vision.

"You're on the highway, you're going like two miles an hour and you just desperately want to push the button to go vertical and take off over this."

It's just an irresistible fantasy that all drivers have had. Instead, we continue to waste hours stuck in traffic, fantasising about flying cars. Yet, we don't have them, even though the potential market is huge.

The market for urban air mobility is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2040. Companies like Boeing, Airbus, Toyota and Uber are recognizing the need for more efficient travel and injecting millions into developing VTOLs, or vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.

Though these operate more like massive drones or helicopters than they do cars, VTOLs have the potential to fundamentally change the way we commute in cities.

So what's taking so long?

And will we ever be able to push a button and zoom over traffic with our car/plane hybrid? The biggest challenge, according to engineers,

in creating a flying car is to create a machine that is robust, rugged and probably heavy enough to withstand the rigors of the road.

The bumps and the occasional fender benders, and at the same time, a machine that is light enough and aerodynamic enough to be safe in the air. Most engineers claim that although it was an interesting problem, it was not a solvable one.

The balance would always be wrong, or the weight would be wrong, and you could never do better than creating an inferior car that would also be an inferior airplane, and that you were much better off making an airplane and making a car and keeping them separate. 

Andrew Glass is an author and illustrator who spent years researching flying cars for his book. He says that initially, the notion of roads seemed far more far-fetched than flying cars. Even though there were sort of rudimentary cars and rudimentary planes, there were no roads to speak of.

And so there was this fascinating kind of archaeology of a period where people couldn't even imagine a complex, comfortable highway system. But what they could imagine was bolting the wings of a rudimentary airplane to the top of a rudimentary car and flying over the countryside until they got to a landing strip where they would land, disengage the wings and drive to where they were actually going.

People have been trying to build car/plane hybrids since the early nineteen hundreds. In 1917, the Curtiss Autoplane debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition in New York. The Autoplane had a removable fuselage, wings and tail and actually looked like a car when it travelled down the road.

But with World War I in full swing, priorities quickly shifted from building a flying car to building military planes, and the Autoplane was eventually dismantled for parts. In the mid 40s, public interest in flying cars was re-sparked after Robert Fulton flew his Airphibian prototype.

The Airphibian used the same controls for flying and driving and required that drivers leave their airplane parts behind, when you drove it like a car. Three years after its first flight, the Airphibian became the first flying car to receive certification from the Civic Aeronautics Authority, predecessor to the FAA. But in the end, the Airphibian's high production, cost meant it was never made on a wide scale.

Still, the Airphibian became the inspiration for Molt Taylor's Aerocar a few years later. The Aerocar too earned the green light from aviation authorities and complied with all road vehicle codes that existed at the time.

It was everything that people hoped it would be. It was safe. It was versatile. It was an actual good looking car that was comfortable and easy to drive. It was also a plane that was functional and would take you three to five hundred miles, but he just could not find backers for it.

Ford was curious about the Aerocar, and in 1970, even commissioned a study to gauge the market interest in such a vehicle. Ford predicted they could sell about 25,000 Aerocars, but the company eventually decided to pass on the project after engineers and lawmakers raised concerns.

When the Department of Transportation heard about it, they went a little crazy with the idea that Ford was getting ready to put a lot of drivers flying over suburban areas. And the engineers at Ford came back with the usual criticism that to make this car safe enough to meet all the safety standards, it would become too heavy to be an effective airplane.

And so the technology there just took a dip. It's revived, I think, with the notion of self-driving cars. Flying cars have kind of become this byword where people say, 'they promise me flying cars and all I got was...' you know, fill in the blank.

Why don't we have flying cars?

So, we're close, actually. We're closer than we've ever been. So I think that it's a hard problem. They have be be certified in order to be commercially relevant. And that's that's really the key. And the other thing from a technology standpoint, it just wasn't there, even 10 years ago it was barely there. 

And the batteries, the motors, to make these things affordable and reliable, electric propulsion is kind of a key enabler. And so that's really the differentiator that that's making it possible. There have been a number of innovations through hardware, software, telecommunications and infrastructure that have led to this acceleration of both capital and early commerciality and proto-commerciality of urban air mobility. 

A few of these things are weight reduction, carbon fiber composites, more dense and higher energy density batteries, which improve the power to weight. Smaller, lighter, electric motors, more powerful micro motors, for what they call, DEP or distributed electronic propulsion.

An electric motor also has the ability to, you can control torque, right? That's sort of the power that the motor throws off and you can control rotation speed very effectively. And so for something like a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, where you need a lot of power to get the vehicle in the air, you don't need a lot of power in what you call cruise, right.

As the vehicle transports through the air. And then you need a fair amount of power to get the vehicles back safely on the ground. An electric propulsion system and really high-technology motors and motor controllers are perfect for that mission.

Commercialisation of military tech!

These were technologies that really only existed in a military application until recently. And we're now seeing it come out of the DOD and DARPA and the military field into the commercial market.

Adding to that then, lower priced and higher capability for sensing compute.

So all the things that you would see in an autonomous car prototype can be applied in an urban air mobility vehicle. And autonomous operation?

Experts don't see this as too much of a challenge for VTOLs, since these vehicles will be doing a lot of repetitive tasks. Autonomous control technology has matured to a stage where we can put it to good use. The mission is very simple.

Just take off, carry some people safely and then land. And so for a simple mission, flying the aircraft should be simple. And so we think that it is ripe for application of autonomy. This level of autonomy is not any, it's not too far-fetched anymore.

All these advancements in key technologies have led to a number of flying car prototypes. Massachusetts-based Terrafugia has managed to get road and FAA approval for its Transition model, though it's not yet commercially available.

Slovakia-based AeroMobil too has not sold any vehicles and is awaiting approval from the European Aviation Safety Agency for its Aero Mobile 4.0 car. However, both of these companies seem to be turning their focus to VTOLs.

Terrafugia's newest model, the T F-2, will have removable pods that can be docked to either an air vehicle or car wheels. Meanwhile, a rendering of AeroMobil's latest model, the AeroMobile 5.0, shows a car that drives to a helipad before it takes off vertically.

Experts say engineering a hybrid car/plane is really difficult because the two vehicles are designed for opposing goals. When you design cars, your objective is to find friction with torque.

When you design airplanes, your objective is to fight gravity with lift. This leads to different kinds of solution. Sticking wings into a car doesn't make them good airplanes, anymore than sticking wheels onto airplanes.

In addition, a hybrid air and road vehicle in the U.S. would require certification from both the FAA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which can be hard to achieve.

That's why many companies have turned to VTOLs. The Vertical Flight Society, a trade association for the advancement of vertical flight, has been tracking electric VTOL designs since 2016. Its website lists over 250 different designs for eVTOLs.

Industrial Giants in the Market!

One well-known company working with eVTOLs is Uber. The idea is that with the new technology that's been applied to cars, that have made electric cars possible, like powertrains, batteries, electric motors, we can make a new class of aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but uses multiple different rotors instead of one large one that allows it to have kind of built-in, inherent redundancies that actually make it both safer to operate and cheaper to operate at the same time.

Uber is not building any of the vehicles itself. Instead, the company is collaborating with established manufacturers, including Boeing and Hyundai, to bring Uber's ride-sharing platform to electric flying vehicles. Uber says it hopes to have its eVTOLs up and running by 2023.

Another big name in the space is Airbus. The company is testing City Airbus, an all-electric, four-seat, remotely piloted flying taxi, which has so far performed more than 100 test flights.

Toyota also recently invested $394 million in electric air taxi startup Joby Aviation. And Porsche has announced that they are exploring creating a luxury, electric, flying vehicle with U.S. plane-maker, Boeing. Startups Opener and Kitty Hawk have come up with their own versions of VTOLs.

Both startups are backed by Google co-founder, Larry Page, and promise a personal flying vehicle that doesn't require a pilot's license. Companies see enormous opportunity here. 

People are conscious about environmental impact. They're tired of congestion. They want to travel faster, quicker. And they're more receptive to ride-sharing.Even with all the buzz, experts agree that there are many challenges that manufacturers must face before they can bring an urban air mobility vehicle to market.

In order to have longer distances and faster charging times to keep that utilization up, w e're gonna need pretty significant improvements in power to weight of the battery. Another one that doesn't get a lot of attention, but should, is noise.

You don't want to fill the air with these whizzing, buzzing, high-frequency vehicles. The third one is privacy. While many in the public might be comfortable with autonomous vehicles covered with sensors that could facially recognize pedestrians, the thought of something being in the air at night, flying around your home or in your neighborhood or, you know, between businesses may introduce a new genre of privacy and safety-related nuances that are yet to be explored and will ultimately go into the courts and the regulatory bodies.

Then there's the question of safety and regulation!

Airplane safety is two or three orders of magnitude more than car safety. A car engine may not be reliable, like my first car. It may break down. But it's safe because you can just, you know, pull over and wait for emergency services. 

But not in airplanes. If something goes wrong, that's it. That's the end. It's a life-threatening event. Not only for people inside, but those on the ground. Even futurist, Elon Musk, seems to be hesitant about the idea of flying vehicles. There is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the the wind force generated to be very high.

Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety reducing situation. You're thinking like, did they service their hubcap or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they are flying past?

Our dream is that this will help solve the worldwide transportation crisis. Where, you know, it's impossible to get from here to San Francisco in rush hour traffic right now. And the regulatory system is basically setup so this aircraft can't meet that need right now. 

"But it's not because of capabilities."

Flying cars are capable, right now, of actually flying to San Francisco, landing and recharging and coming back or even landing and coming back based on the distances. But the problem right now, is the regulatory environment has not caught up with the capabilities of this kind of aircraft.

Because honestly, this type of aircraft was just invented. But regulation seems to be catching up. I want to close with some thoughts on the next very, very innovative piece of technology that we see emerging, and that's urban air mobility.

As I mentioned, these are aircraft that fill that void from 30 miles to 300 miles between the small drones and the commercial aircraft we know today. And probably the biggest question I get on this is, 'is this real? Are they really happening?'

"Yes, this is more than just hype."

This is more than just promotional videos. We have at least six aircraft well along in their type certification, which is the first step in introducing the new aircraft into operation. In 2019, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency released a special condition certification for VTOL aircraft.

The condition applies to vehicles with nine passengers or less and a max certified takeoff mass of 7,000 pounds or less. As for if flying cars will ever fill our skies? Right now, that seems unlikely.

I don't imagine that this is ever going to happen where people actually accomplish this dream of a flying car in every garage. It was a kind of self-contained fantasy that wasn't going to be a reality for very many people. It seems as if trying to design a dual purpose road car and flying car is just not economical and not the optimal technological solution.

So if you look out 10, 20, 20, 30 years, the future of transportation is a mesh of high-speed, automated, efficient, electronic and sustainable terrestrial transport and then working as a mesh with electronic, automated urban air mobility for various applications.

With so many big name companies invested in developing VTOLs, there's a really good chance that commuting over traffic will become a reality, even if flying cars remain a fantasy.

(Note: A major portion of this article has been adapted from "Why Don't We Have Flying Cars Yet?" video on YouTube by "CNBC", thus neither the author nor this blog claims any authorship of the content in this article. It is solely shared with an intention to create awareness.)