Here's your flying car

15 Oct, 2024

"Mark my words – a combination airplane and motorcar is coming." ~ Henry Ford

In the rare moments I enter a winner-takes-all, pro-progress, techno-optimist argument, you’ll find me quoting “if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...?”. While moon landing was the biggest technological highlight of 1969, there’s something else that happened that year. Concorde carved a stone in the history of aviation by flying its first ever supersonic jet in 1969. I can only imagine what it was like to experience the sonic boom at Mach 2, flying westward at the sunset, chasing the sun and experiencing it twice, gazing at the curvature of the Earth from 60,000 feet, the pushback during lift-off, and the sense of immense camaraderie during touch-down. Due to high operational costs, loud noise, the Flight 4590 crash, and the tragedy of September 11, the Concorde was ultimately retired. The project that was meant to conquer the skies ended up in the history books as a magnificent but unsustainable endeavor. In the wake of the Concorde's demise, the dream of supersonic passenger travel became synonymous with an overambitious embarrassment. People became generally pessimistic about progress in aviation post 9/11 and Concorde, resigning themselves to the "rational" normality of conventional air travel.

Credits - 1517?

01 - The Failure of Nerve & an Emerging Global Issue

Concorde was way ahead of it’s time. Airbus and major suppliers prematurely ended a major chapter in the aviation history by pulling out supply. Josh in “Where’s My Flying Car?” talks about the tragic “Failure of Nerve” among the elite intelligentsia, including both researchers and bureaucrats that eventually paved the road for the Great Stagnation.

Technologically, we as a culture became a lot less adventurous in the past half-century. Thus, to guess what we might have done, one must venture a step or two past the limits of the known possible, and speculate on what might have been discovered or invented. This is a project fraught with epistemological peril.

Concorde’s redemption is being engineered by companies like Hermeus with their hypersonic beasts aiming to take passengers from Seattle to Paris in just 90 mins at Mac 5. While these developments are pushing the boundaries of long-distance travel, a new challenge closer to the ground has been emerging: the growing congestion in urban transportation.

This is what an average day in London looks like. (London tops the Traffic Index with the worst traffic globally). Credits - The Street

In major metropolitan cities worldwide, roads are clogged due to a variety of factors like population growth, poor urban planning, and the prevailing large vehicle culture. To go from point A to point B within a city is becoming progressively inefficient and time-consuming. There’s only so many things we can do to fix this:

Building smart cities from scratch: many multi-national companies and wealthy governments have been interested in creating functioning cities from scratch. here’s my favorite DIY guide. The Masdar City, for example, is a newly created smart city. As the studies and numbers suggest, Masdar is not as functioning as we expected it to be yet.

Using underground tunnels: Use of underground tunnels to create high-speed transportation networks beneath cities can be a very interesting approach to remedy the congestion problem. This approach however is limited by the complexity of underground construction and high costs. More progress is expected to be seen soon.

Taking to the skies: Leveraging the third dimension, eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles) offer a paradigm shift for the future of mobility. While the roads are confined by fixed dimensions, the sky is infinite and open.

An estimated 30 trillion passenger-kilometers were traveled by road globally in 2023, translating to billions of individual trips. For example, in the U.S. alone, there were about 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled. On the other hand, approximately 4.5 billion passengers traveled by air globally in 2023. The fatality rate for air travel is ~0.000016%, while road travel has a much higher fatality rate. Air travel remains exceptionally safe.

02 - The Resurgence of Flying Cars

eVTOLs leverage the power of electric propulsion to take off, hover, and land vertically. The rapid advancements in electric propulsion technology over the past decade, driven by the relentless pursuit of higher energy density and efficiency, have made industry experts and investors increasingly bullish on the potential of eVTOLs to solve the global problem of traffic congestion that plagues cities worldwide. Around 200 companies are working on this globally. In the United States, companies like Joby, Archer, and Wisk are developing piloted and autonomous eVTOLs. Europe has players like Lilium, Vertical Aerospace and Volocopter, while China's EHang and AutoFlight are making significant strides. The technology is quickly penetrating the Indian markets with startups such as Sarla Aviation and the Eplane Company. Joby and Archer are scheduled to fly in Dubai and India respectively by the fourth-quarter of 2025. After all this time, our flying car dream is finally here.

Where’s my flying car? argues that the world was ready for flying cars from late 50s onwards. There were designs, prototypes, proven concepts, financing, and plenty of entrepreneurs eager to risk it all. Interestingly, eVTOLs are less technologically complicated than helicopters, which have been around for over 80 years. So why has it taken so long for flying cars to get off the ground? Legal liability is a major reason. Failure of nerve among the bureaucrats has made many companies hesitant to enter the flying car market. The loud propeller noise generated by early designs also made it challenging to envision air-taxis in urban areas. Moreover, public fear in general put a dent on the entire small-aircraft industry.

Fortunately, it’s 2024 and much has changed. The pioneering eVTOL companies are pushing ahead despite of legal hurdles, and organizations like the FAA have never been more optimistic about the future of air mobility. Joby, Archer, and Lilium propel their aircrafts at a remarkably low 45 A-weighted decibels (dBA), which is a thousand times quieter than a helicopter. To put this in perspective, 45 dBA is roughly equivalent to the ambient noise level in a quiet library or a gentle rainfall. There’s a shift in public attitude globally due to increased awareness about the technology and frustration toward ground traffic and carbon-emission.

03 - Epilogue

As eVTOL technology continues to advance and public attitudes shift, there’s little doubt that the dream of flying cars will soon become a reality. The spirit of innovation and sheer curiosity has successfully been pushing boundaries from Concorde to eVTOLs. There’s truly no limit to what man can achieve.

I urge everyone to watch Things To Come, a timeless classic by H.G. Wells. The film toward its close poses a question often asked by people in a perpetually progress-seeking, technocratic world - "Oh god is there never to be the age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"

The protagonist, with glare in his eyes, answered: "Rest enough for the individual man, too much, too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. This little planet with its winds and waves, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him, then the planets about it, and at last, out across the immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time - still he will be beginning."

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