Toyota invests $394m in Joby Aviation's flying taxis(bloomberg.com) |
Toyota invests $394m in Joby Aviation's flying taxis(bloomberg.com) |
All of those seem to have a large footprint with lots of rotors, meaning they will need dedicated landing/take off zones.
This seems to limit their usability a lot, turning them more into a short range point to point helicopter service.
Not to mention the noise pollution. Those things are all loud.
Combine that with limited speed and range, and I just don't see the concept taking off in a big way.
Some other competitors:
* Volocopter: https://www.volocopter.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs
* Hyunday S-A1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6K7GAG1Aas
* Bell Nexus: https://www.bellflight.com/products/bell-nexus
* Ehang: https://www.ehang.com/ehang184/index https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d66MoI4GdFs
* Kitty Hawk HeavySide (Larry Page pet project): https://kittyhawk.aero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mc3C19kE4
* Lilium (branded as jet): https://lilium.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qotuu8JjQM
The reason this will take off (physically and economically) is cost. If you can travel 40-50m quickly for about the energy cost of a cup of coffee, it's going to be a game changer in big cities. I can take an Uber across town in Berlin but it will cost me around 20-30 euros and take 50 minutes (worse in rush hour) and is not that competitive with public transport. The same journey with a flying taxi could be done in 5-10 minutes (just like with a helicopter) the difference will be vastly lower cost. The main cost will be the pilot who can now do multiple journeys per hour and at least short term still charge a premium.
There have to be rules where those taxis can start, land, in what direction, time frames and over which places in a city. You need some kind of air control and "traffic rules". Drivers need regulated training in simulators and there need to be emergency procedures.
I believe that in the first few years such things won't be allowed near towns and cities. There will be similar rules like flying drones [1], but a lot stricter.
And the time saved by such travel will probably decrease when the sky starts looking like in the 5th Element [2].
[1] https://uavcoach.com/drone-laws-in-switzerland/ [2] https://media.giphy.com/media/Bs2pZhpxf2168/giphy.gif
By "energy cost" do you mean something like "the price of a cup of coffee spent on electricity"? That seems surprisingly efficient but maybe here (Europe) the coffee is cheaper and the electricity dearer - what's the figure in kWh?
Additionally, autonomous flight is fairly common right now. There's less going on in the air than on the ground (or rather less surprises with small response time and high consequences). Planes even land and take off by themselves. The first plane to actually be certified to autoland was in 1968[0]. The tech has been around for awhile and been making serious development this entire time.
Details: http://datagenetics.com/blog/february62019/index.html
How can organisations this large get it so wrong? When is someone going to tell them that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes?
The link you provided mentions this in an odd way:
> With a single engine helicopter you don’t have this redundancy. However, on engine failure, the single massive disk of the helicopter is an asset. ... Close to the ground, this stored kinetic energy can be traded, through pulling up the cyclic, to allow a safe landing. This is called autorotation, and is practiced by all helicopter pilots.
The air taxi that succeeds, at any sort of scale, will not be meant or designed for skilled helicopter pilots pulling levers, at the right moment, as they speed towards the ground. They will be dumb, cheap to service, unskilled to fly, and have more than one point of failure.
A) rich people have a ton of power, they will get it legalized if they really want to use them
B) There are many sparsely populated areas where rich people would still be able to make this work...think rural islands of Japan or New Zealand, very mountainous areas, the outskirts of a major metropolitan area...I think these will find use in certain markets.
Airplanes have energy from their forward motion. Helicopters have energy in their rotor blades. This energy can be used to soften a crash landing. Without this available energy, and without a parachute, then how do you soften a crash and survive?
People say that electric motors are so reliable... But batteries can spontaneously combust.
I would like to know how these aircraft are safe enough to be treated the same as a taxi ride.
They went after shiny unrealistic options like Fuel Cells/Hydrogen and wasted their lead. The world would have looked very different now if they had invested in Electric 10 years ago. Their "plug-in" electrics have 20-40 miles of all electric range. Even Ford has vehicles with 200+ miles range.
Instead, they still have only concept vehicles and their exec VP still says “We haven’t changed our policy towards battery EVs. We are not shifting our focus to prioritise battery EVs, nor are we abandoning our FCV strategy.” source: https://ww.electrek.co/2019/06/07/toyota-electric-car-images...
Toyota’s failure to convert its early lead in hybrids into a successful EV business will be quoted in business schools and boardrooms for decades as a textbook cautionary tale.
Now think how a technical solution grossly inferior to both helicopter and a prop plane will fare in the market.
Why do we need to have startup founders and car companies try their hand at building a new experimental electric helicopter to validate whether or not the market wants to use helicopters for ride hailing?
If that's accurate, isn't this a huge step forward for an electric vehicle?
I wonder what happen if there are just 100 of them on the air at the same time.
More glorified complexity. I would pay more to ride in something with highly reliable simple hardware.
This is more complex than I summarised, containing hydrogen effectively being one issue.
Short term, these things will mean helicopters that currently service rooftops in many cities will be replaced by slightly more of these things flown by professional pilots that will have increasingly less to do as these things start flying themselves. I also expect an increase in heliports. E.g. Manhattan only has a few right now.
By the time these things start flying at scale, the coffee will be way more expensive than the energy cost. That's why most of these companies are investing in autonomous flight as well because short term that is going to be the cost bottleneck (that and training the army of pilots that they'd need).
Tesla seems bound to demonstrate that even semis are already viable with current technology, and battery research is bound to reduce price, weight and longevity further. We may find chemistries that rely less on materials like cobalt, nickel, copper.
Is it pride and inability to accept failure, or are there valid reasons for this and Toyota could still emerge as a big winner?
It seems unlikely to me for personal cars.
Hydrogen seems better suited for energy storage, trains and airplanes.
Japan (and China, Europe and other regions) are investing in hydrogren based mobility. Japan has a bit over 100 fuel cell stations right now, and aims for over 300 stations and 200k vehicles in 5 years. [0] Toyota is one of the companies creating both the stations and also hydrogen based vehicles. They also sold about 3k of their hydrogen-based Mirai cars [2].
German company Bosch only started hydrogen fuel cell production in 2019 [1].
This is all very miniscule compared to the electic cars of today, but a hydrogen economy has a few important advantages, IMO the most important one is that hydrogen production can occur at times when energy is in abundance, which gets more and more important with rewewables based energy networks. Vehicles can also be fueled just as fast as ICE vehicles today, and hydrogen has much higher energy density than current battery technology.
From a strategic POV it makes sense for countries to look at hydrogen.
[0] https://www.airliquide.com/magazine/energy-transition/hydrog...
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/15/business/corpor...
[2] https://www.hindustantimes.com/autos/toyota-nissan-honda-amo...
Autonomous flight is still quite rare. And even when it is used, there are still human pilots standing by to take over in case anything goes wrong.
FTFY.
I'm just saying that comparing autonomous flight to autonomous driving isn't fair. Flying is a lot easier for a machine. You already have tons of data streaming in from airports, other planes, and lots of equipment on the vehicle itself.
All your NNs are entirely completely utterly pointless when faced with inputs they have never been trained on. They always suck at extrapolating, and almost always suck at interpolating as well. So when an unexpected emergency happens, what exactly are they going to do?
And outside of NNs, The only thing we have are autopilots. They sometimes fail, and that is why real pilots mainly just babysit them as their main job.
I doubt the likes of Hyundai are looking to sell their things “in the hundreds to thousands” range.
It’d a a big change in air traffic and noise pollution.
You're also not limited to just those 469 heliports. The vertices of the convex hull they produce can all serve as jumping off points to go about a 100 miles further to heliports one may have in ones own home.
For the rich in São Paulo, that may be homes in places like Angra do Reis and Laranjeiras. Even places like those two (which sit between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, can serve as connection points to jump from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro with only one or two stops in between the two cities.
When you eliminate the time in traffic traffic to get to Congonhas or Guarulhos and the time spent in airport security, it makes a ton of sense for those with the means. Eventually as the tech progresses and becomes cheaper it will become accessible to more than just the very very rich.
Electric motors are simple and reliable and all these companies use multiples so have some redundancy. Multi-rotors require computer control for stability. With that done the piloting is easy.
Everything I've seen about this space is people with big checks trying to cut corners to enter a new market, and it seems ripe to fail much like the 737-MAX.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/insid...
And that's ignoring all of the problems with the market itself, not to mention regulations, as well as logistical headaches of transporting between rooftops (which by the way, many cannot safely support landing pads - so now you also have to retrofit skyscrapers with incredibly expensive infrastructure).
To be fair you answered my question and I'm just being belligerent, so thank you for the response.
FWIW I've interviewed at many of the eVTOL companies and found too much sizzle and not enough steak.
But to each his own. Ultimately it's just my opinion. Reality will assert itself regardless of what I think.
I was actually very let down by the metro of Tokyo compared to other Asian cities. Probably due to my high expectations.
You're basing this on a myriad of assumptions as eVTOL designs are barely at the prototype stage right now. Helicopters have been in use for decades, so we know how safe they are.
If they truly prove to be safer then that's awesome, but based on everything I've seen I don't believe that to be true.
Electric motors do not fail as often as combustion engines. Most eVTOL designs have redundancies that don't exist in a normal helicopter. I have flown R22s a handful of times and there were many times where an engine failure would have been disastrous.
