This article is from WeChat official account:Love Faner (ID: ifanr), author: Zhu Hai, title figure from: SkyDrive
Friend, have you experienced the despair of traffic jams?
In my last job, it took me more than 3 hours to drive to and from get off work. I didn’t get home until 8:30 in the evening. After having a quick meal, it was around 9 o’clock. If I do something else, I can basically wash and sleep. .
When there is no traffic jam, it only takes 24 minutes to drive to the company. In order to relieve my depressed mood, I played Joey Yung’s song more than once in a loop during traffic jams: Believe me l can fly, I am singing in the sky…
Pan ah pan, just a few days ago, the manned test flight of the flying car developed by the Japanese SkyDrive company succeeded, and I left tears of excitement.
Full of future feeling
When I saw the flying car developed by the Japanese SkyDrive company, it was difficult to associate it with a car running on the ground.
It is 2.9 meters long and 1.3 meters wide. Viewed from the side, it has a shark-like streamlined fuselage, with the open top of the cab likeThe shark’s fin has two landing gears at the bottom.
From the front, the front face of the flying car is composed of four slightly curved sections, a bit aggressive but with a little bit of love. The four black propellers are evenly divided around the fuselage by white horizontal bars, rotating at high speed. It is almost invisible to the naked eye at certain angles.
Although it is a flying machine, the space occupied by a flying car is not large, only the size of two ordinary cars.
Overall, a flying car is like a flying machine of the future. Takumi Yamamot, the project’s design director, said that the design was inspired by the word “Progressive”.
10 meters flexible turning in the air
The test driver raised the flying car to an altitude of up to 10 meters, and the flying time lasted about 4 minutes.
Different from large passenger planes, flying cars can take off and land vertically. They don’t need long runways and telescopic landing gear, and they are relatively stable in lifting and landing.
With the help of “electric vertical take-off and landing(eVTOL)” technology, flying cars can rotate flexibly in the air, move horizontally and linearly, and “reverse” “Warehousing” is no longer a big problem.
It is reported that the control difficulty of flying cars is much lower than that of airplanes. Similar to ordinary cars, a considerable part of the control is done automatically by the flying car system.
This year, Japan’s SkyDrive company has made a breakthrough in research and development and obtained a new financing with a total financing of 3.9 billion yen. It plans to commercialize flying cars in 2023.
Flying cars are not a new thing
Autoplane
As early as 1917, G. Curtis showed the world a new type of transportation for cars and airplanes, named Autoplane.
This flying car has a pair of 12.2m aluminum three-layer wings. The car engine drives the four-blade screw at the rear as a propeller. Due to the technological level at the time, Autoplane can only fly short distances. Style jump.
In 1937, the waterman Aerobile, the world’s first flying car that successfully took off, came out, but at that time airplanes were the focus of attention, so the project was difficult to continue.
Waterman Aerobile
About ten years later, in 1946, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss designed a combined flying car. When it needs to take off, the car and the huge wing can be combined directly.
Composite Flying Car
Until 1986, the flying car invented by the American Taylor obtained the government’s flying license, which marked the official acceptance of the flying car by the market. However, because the flying car invented by Taylor takes up too much space on the road, the wings are also easy to sweep obstacles. It has not been used for civilian use.
Before the 21st century, the significance of flying cars lies in exploring cutting-edge technologies. It is difficult to find urgent application needs in reality.
In the 21st century, traffic jams have become more and more obvious, which has seriously affected traffic efficiency. Flying car projects have once again entered the public’s attention. Many cars or airlines have acquired related companies to deploy flying car projects.
For example, Geely Automobile acquired a flying car company——Terrafugia(Taili), and the developed flying car wings are foldable and equipped with It has a gasoline engine and a lithium-ion phosphate battery. It has a range of 640 kilometers in the air and a top speed of 160 kilometers per hour. It uses electric power when it changes to car mode.
Folding Wing Flying Car
In July 2018, Boeing acquired the aerospace technology company Aurora Flight Sciences, announced the restart of the flying car plan, and established the Boeing NeXt division.
Flying car developed by Boeing
At the same time, Internet companies have also begun to compete. Intel released a flying car at the 2018 CES show, equipped with 18 rotor devices, which looked like a round pie from the sky.
A flying car developed by Intel
The most representative one is Kitty invested by Google founder Larry PageHawk(Little Eagle) project, the founder is Sebastian Thrun, the initiator of Google’s unmanned car project.
Kitty Hawk
According to a former Kitty Hawk engineer, due to too frequent technical failures, flying cars have to be repaired every few hours, and even caused a fire at Google because of battery fires, so Kitty Hawk had to refund the personal booking deposit , No longer selling products to individuals, from “personal mounts” to “urban short-distance peer-to-peer shared aircraft.”
The car goes to the sky? Not so easy
From the perspective of the Kitty Hawk(Little Eagle) project, there are still many problems to make cars go to the sky. solve.
Technically speaking, there is a big problem first, the battery.
According to the current battery technology, the flying car developed by Japan’s SkyDrive can only last for 5 to 10 minutes on full power. This is why the test flight only took about 4 minutes. If fuel is used as power, the cost will be It becomes very high, and the difficulty of driving will also rise sharply. Today, cars are beginning to “de-oil”. If the flying car as a future transportation tool still uses fuel, the meaning of creation will be greatly reduced.
In terms of practicality, the flying height of a flying car is currently not as high as that of an airplane, which puts it under a lot of restrictions in large cities with tall buildings. Actually, it can only “float” the car on the road and expect to directly pass the building. Flying to the destination is still unrealistic.
In this way, the experience improvement of “traffic jam on the road” and “traffic jam on the road” is not much improved, and it may also bring many new traffic problems. The supporting traffic regulations must also be thorough innovation.
Flying cars are still restricted to ground roads
Even Kitty Hawk(Little Eagle) project founder Sebastian Schlum(Sebastian Thrun) said in interviews: “We don’t know (where can flying cars find parking Field).” It can be seen that in addition to the technical problems of flying cars, there are many social rules and infrastructure to be improved.
If flying cars can fly at high altitudes in the future, privacy, airspace, and noise issues will become acute again. I believe that most people don’t want flying vehicles to fly around all day long. The driver took a look from time to time.
From a safety point of view, once an accident occurs, flying cars will cause much more damage than ordinary cars, and it is easier to “injure the innocent” when falling. If dangerous elements turn flying cars into an offensive weapon It is much more difficult to prevent and intercept. This is why many countries are very cautious about opening airspace below 1,000 meters. After all, even micro drones are enough to worry major airports.
Tesla CEO Musk once publicly stated: “If the flying cars of the future are as common as today’s cars, people will not always maintain their flying machines carefully until a loose hub cap falls from the sky and kills someone. An unfortunate passerby… If there are 10,000 flying cars overhead, then (noise) is as terrible as a hurricane.” p>
Where is the future of flying cars?
Discussions about whether flying cars are promising.
Kitty Hawk(Little Eagle) Project founder Sebastian Thrun firmly optimistic about flying cars: “(No traffic jam) This is the advantage of the sky. We can plan virtual highways in the sky and stack them vertically, so that we don’t have to be bothered by traffic jams.”
Tesla CEO Musk believes that flying cars pose a huge safety hazard, and his own Loop and Hyperloop underground high-speed tunnel traffic systems are more reliable and can really solve the traffic congestion problem.
In my opinion, the direction of the flying car is wrong, and it is destined to only become a subdivision leader.Niche products of the domain.
Before the invention of the automobile, people only wanted a faster horse. This example shows that people’s fantasy of transportation is often limited by their thinking and cognition.
In fact, people want revolutionary transportation, not faster horses
At present, most of the flying cars made by companies seem to be a bit “nondescript”. The flying car is still an airplane in essence, but a civilian miniature airplane. Relying on the wings, and on the wheels when landing, the difference lies in the range of movement of the aircraft after landing.
To create an ultra-modern appearance for a flying car is like coating a horse with gold powder, making a styling, with a cool saddle, and telling people that this horse is an innovative hybrid breed.
The birth of a revolutionary tool must meet two criteria: essence and subversion.
When people driving a carriage say they want a faster horse, the inventor can see the essence. What people actually express is the desire to break the ceiling of transportation efficiency. Obviously, if you continue to do horse breeding Articles cannot be realized.
On the other hand, when most people see this new thing, they feel that the inventor is “crazy” and “impractical”. After the experience, they feel “really delicious” and feel that their thinking has been subverted. The explosion must be like the kind that is completely overthrown from horse to car. The flying car is more like a combination of a car and an airplane. If we still “play” according to the existing “rules of the game”, many new problems will arise. For example, should we use aviation-related regulations or automobile traffic regulations to manage it?
Going back to the essence, when we say that traffic jams are really painful, do we really want a flying car? This is worth pondering.