The Long Road

06/17/2003 Archived Entry: "Flying cars"

Flying cars seem to be everyone’s de facto future replacement for ‘normal’ cars as a means of everyday transportation. But I think that it can never be.

The first thing that people think about when they picture flying cars is absolute freedom to “drive” around wherever they want. Wrong. If there were only 1 flying car in the world then maybe, but if they’re the replacement for modern cars then we’re stuck with a Back to the Future 2 style system where cars HAVE to fly on certain paths in the sky. Or else you’d have chaos. There are a much fewer planes in the world than cars in a city and planes have the entire sky, yet all flight paths are carefully controlled to avoid mid air collisions. If you have thousands of cars flying around in a city with obstacles (ie: buildings) everywhere, you would most definitely need controlled routes.

Here are my real issues though.

The Ford Model T was introduced in 1908, so cars have been mass produced for about 95 years. We’ve been building cars for a long time. But even with all these years of building behind us, cars still break down. Your car breaks down, its ok, you’re stuck on the road for a bit until the tow truck comes along; not a big deal. Imagine a flying car breaking down. You plummet tens of meters in freefall through the air. Certain death for you, your passengers and whoever you happen to land on.

Let’s assume then that we have a perfect car that will never break down. You still have to deal with human drivers. I have no numbers to back this up, but it’s probably safe to say that “human error” causes most car accidents. I would NOT trust humans to be flying thousands of cars above my head on a daily basis. Midair collision between two cars; they tumble down through layers of traffic taking others with them until we have a huge flaming ball of wreckage screaming towards the ground and pedestrians. Not a pretty picture. The solution then would be a perfect computer program that will drive flawlessly and never crash (also in the software sense). As a CS student, I wouldn’t bet money on something like that ever happening. The odds of that are about as good as having a car that never breaks down.

So to have flying cars we need cars that never break down and programs that never fail. Don’t hold your breath. I think that if we ever really have flying cars that they’d be only “floating cars”, hovering off the ground at 3-or-so feet.

My favorite futuristic traffic system? The one in Minority Report; it looked tres cool.

Replies: 7 comments

you're right, minority report's system was very good

i thought the general idea of a future transportation (the one we'll get to know with our own eyes...) was mostly with electric on-road cars and also with the recent invention that moves automatically according to the way your body is positioned!

Posted by Et_God @ 06/17/2003 01:13 PM EST

Remember the traffic system in 'The 5th Element'? HIghly dense, controlled flying traffic.

I've thought of this flying car issue before, myself. As for cars breaking down, parachutes! You know, to slow the fall of the 2-tonne piece of metal. Like the one the Batmobile had in the Adam West series.

As for human error, yeah. In my mind, they'd have to have a strict screen process where not many people could pass. The majority of people are too stupid, in my mind, to operate such a vehicle. They have enough trouble driving in two dimensions.

Posted by Romer @ 06/18/2003 12:58 AM EST

man ... i was going to bring up minority report and then you just threw it in there at the last second ..

thanks for stealing my thunder, rayne

i think with any system that we create, there will not be perfection and injuries are inevitable ... we are only human afterall

but .. if we had in air transportation ... perhaps we could lower the risk of head on collisions ... don't have cars that are running in the opposite direction running on a parallel plane ... that would definitely reduce a lot of accidents ... don't you think?

Posted by melpie @ 06/18/2003 03:18 PM EST

I haven't seen 5th Element in a long time so you'll have to tell me how it avoids the problems I've described. Or, if you're just mentioning something with controlled flying traffic, then here's 2 more: The Jetsons and Coruscant in Star Wars.

I somehow don't think that parachutes would work.

The number of people "qualified" for operating a flying car is probably close to the number of people that are capable of piloting a fighter plane...i doubt thats very many.

Posted by Rayne @ 06/18/2003 03:37 PM EST

I guess my point is that air-traffic (hehe) is a LOT more more dangerous than ground traffic.

ya different planes would solve head on collisions but how many of all accidents are of that type?

Posted by Rayne @ 06/18/2003 03:47 PM EST

Um these flying cars would be flown by GPS auto-pilot systems, which in commercial jets are just about failsafe. Also, it would only be richer, more educated people that could afford these cars, so it would be much more pleasent.

Posted by bob @ 08/12/2003 02:34 PM EST

You know, my Idea would be half the traffic on the ground and the other half will be in the sky, besides hovering cars could fly over other cars.

Posted by Shadman Sakib Barno @ 05/06/2004 10:23 AM EST