Airbus Reveals a Modular, Self-Piloting Flying Car Concept (techcrunch.com) 85
At this year's Geneva Motor Show, Airbus has revealed a concept design created in partnership with Italdesign. "The demonstration vehicle offers modular functionality, meaning it can operate both on the ground and in the air, and Airbus thinks it's one potential answer to the growing problem of urban traffic congestion," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The concept vehicle is intended to work with others to form a network that can be summoned on demand, with passengers hailing a ride from an app on their mobile device. The capsule-based design can connect to either ground or air conveyance modules, letting customers specify their preferred method of transit. It's also designed to be used in concert with other existing transportation methods for maximum efficiency. Airbus and Italdesign call their creation the "Pop.Up System," which includes the artificial intelligence platform that uses what it knows about any individual user, and available routes and transit options to determine the best travel options. The main vehicle itself is a passenger capsule, which holds the rider and which can be paired with either ground and air modules, as well as, Airbus suggests, with hyperloop systems down the line once that tech becomes more widely available. There's a third part of Pop.Up that ensures this whole project touches all bases when it comes to current tech hype -- an interface that will respond and interact with the user in a "fully virtual environment" while in transit. They've thought of everything.
Parachute, please (Score:1)
But we, who pay for the tickets a lot of money still do not have anything. No safety system in the air at all.
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Even Russian military pilots have got an ejection system for more than half a century.
Because the government of russia has, like any other government (except for the japanese kamikaze pilots in WWII Japan perhaps), invested years of training into that pilot, and the pilot dying would be a severe loss for them. But for a fat lazy civilian? No way, they are dispensable.
Re:Parachute, please (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I've come around to view them as kind of inevitable.
1) There is a strong push, and will continue to be, from delivery services for permitting delivery drones. Bit by bit, they'll get it.
2) The economic case will keep causing them to push for a permitting process for larger and larger drones. Bit by bit, step by step, they'll get it.
3) Once you start having drone payloads in the hundreds of kilograms range, people are seriously going to start asking "Why can't you haul people with these?" And then will come all of the financially interested parties pushing, bit by bit, for permission to do so.
That said, this concept ticks all of the wrong boxes.
1) Quadcopter style = inefficient in flight. Even small scale delivery drones are moving away from it. It's fine for toys and little video cameras, but not for scale delivery with any sort of significant crossrange requirements.
2) Requires everyone standardize their cars to a particular drone. Not going to happen.
3) Requires everyone standardize their cars to a particular chassis, and more to the point bans monocoque. Not going to happen.
4) Requires everyone to use other peoples' chassis. Regardless of their condition. Without even knowing what condition they're going to be in.
5) Requires at least one spare chassis be at the destination when you get there. Something complicated by the fact that people can change their mind (or be forced to divert), throwing off estimates of what will be at a location at a given point in time. But at its most fundamental level, constraining people to much more limited destinations.
6) Requires such an integral vehicle connection - the body and chassis - be done in some "rapidly and automatically removable" fashion. Same with the critical connection with the props (albeit with lower mass loadings)
7) Doubles up powertrains. I hope you think battery packs are cheap, because this proposed system means (if done electrically) that you have to have two of them per vehicle, assuming an average of one "drone" in operation per "car". I'm assuming that you're leaving the battery pack behind, since that's a heavy element. Of course, that means when you get to the destination, you're using someone else's battery pack as well.
No, I'm not a fan.
Drone helicopters exist. Are you talking about "at scale"? Because scaling up relatively new technology doesn't appear the instant you snap your fingers.
A better question is "why doesn't everyone fly around in helicopters?" in general. And the answers are pilot skill, noise, space requirements, safety, regulations, and cost (including insurance / liability, and the fact that the fuel is very expensive). These are in general, however, interconnected problems and with technological solutions at varying stages of maturity. It's clearly a barrier at present, but I hardly see it as a limitless one. Large, yes, but not unbounded. IMHO, electric is a big potential boon toward scaledown, at least where short flight times are required, as electric motors can be made small, light, and reliable, with very high power densities (making redundancy easier as well), plus they run on dirt-cheap "fuel". Battery mass is a big problem on long flights, but not short.
BTW, helicopters aren't that much less efficient than cars. A 4-passenger helicopter may get ~7 mpg (40 l/100km). But it goes in straight lines and doesn't wait in traffic.
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Interesting points, and I admit many of them are correct. But I don't deny that autonomous flight would never happen - just that "self-flying cars" won't happen. We already have airplanes that have extremely sophisticated autopilot and auto-takeoff/auto-landing capabilities. It's a short, but demanding, jump from there to autonomous mass-flying with human supervision on-board and/or on the ground.
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It's a short, but demanding, jump from there to autonomous mass-flying with human supervision on-board and/or on the ground.
No it isn't. Simple math on energy costs means it will never happen.
ie. It takes orders of magnitude more fuel to keep something in the air than it does to roll it along the ground.
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2) Requires everyone standardize their cars to a particular drone. Not going to happen.
3) Requires everyone standardize their cars to a particular chassis, and more to the point bans monocoque. Not going to happen.
4) Requires everyone to use other peoples' chassis. Regardless of their condition. Without even knowing what condition they're going to be in.
Ever heard of containerization [wikipedia.org]? Kind of swept through the shipping industry and completely changed truck, train and ship industries. No reason it couldn't happen to transportation.
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Standardized cars will go over with the market about as well as standardized housing has. Actually worse because the needs for different types of cars are vastly varied; there's a huge amount of car form that follows intended function. An economy box is not a sports car is not an offroader is not a pickup truck is not a luxury SUV is not a courier van.... (on and on and on). Every usage intent has serious repercussions across the vehicle.
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Standardized cars will go over with the market about as well as standardized housing has.
I didn't say standardized cars, I said standardized transportation. Do you hold out for a specific model of Uber? Or taxi? Or bus?
If I want a car, I want a particular car. If I want to get from point A to point B I mostly care what it costs and how long it will take.
Transportation is to driving as shipping is to luxury cruise.
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No reason it couldn't happen to transportation.
Huh, So everyone is going to drive a jeep wrangler?
Because if the answer is "no", you have your reason why it isn't going to happen.
(and yes I own a jeep wrangler)
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I'm having trouble parsing what you wrote. You seem to be talking about autonomous navigation at the beginning of the sentence but are describing something flatly contradictory with the concept of autonomous navigation by the end.
And for the record, by and large, air traffic does go in straight lines (or more accurately, great circles). There's some diversion (occasionally large, but generally small) for weather, and of course on approach you need specific vectors, but by and large it's "from point A to p [youtube.com]
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What's that happening from midnight to 3 am over Turkey and Romania?
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>No, I'm not a fan.
Are you a turbine?
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(( sound of a tumbleweed being blown across the desert by a flying car ))
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I'm keeping my day job.
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Training a pilot is expnesive. Losing an economy class passenger is cheap.
Changing building codes and zoning so that residential buildings are built close to workplaces in quantities the yield affordable housing is even cheaper.
Re: Parachute, please (Score:2)
If French will have vodka, there will be an ejection seat too
Re: Parachute, please (Score:2)
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Some light aircraft do have a parachute system for last-ditch-effort crash landings, but you are heavily restricted on the weight of the aircraft and also the airspeed at which the parachute can be deployed.
Re:Parachute, please (Score:4, Insightful)
Weight. Pure and simple.
Ejection systems are *heavy* and adding two ejection seats to such a concept as this would dramatically increase the lift needed, and in turn the thrust needed to generate that lift.
A commercial jet with ejection seats or an ejection capsule for the passengers simply wouldn't be economically viable - think along the lines of an economy ticket costing the same price as a first class ticket currently costs.
Whole plane chute (Score:2)
Commercial jets aren't indeed doing ejection seats.
But some *do* consider adding chute that could try to e.g.: save the cabin in care of dramatic loss of engines etc.
Glider (Score:2)
Planes become gliders when the engines fail.
(I might not be a pilote but I have a vague notion of the physics involved)
Just like helicopters become autogyros when their engine fails.
(also: as long as the engine didn't take the commercial airplane's wing with it when exploding)
(also: and some fighter jets have enough body lift [and avionics to compensate] to afford losing a wing)
I wasn't commenting on the merits of whole plane chute, just mentioning that these are being developed.
(But currently, the only reports I've came across are from the manufactu
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Parachutes are totally a thing for smaller planes:
http://cirrusaircraft.com/flig... [cirrusaircraft.com]
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/... [cnn.com]
The landing is still pretty harsh and I'm sure gliding down to a landing would be preferable when possible, but it seems to work pretty well.
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Commercial jets aren't indeed doing ejection seats.
But some *do* consider adding chute that could try to e.g.: save the cabin in care of dramatic loss of engines etc.
Exactly,
I'm not sure that when we talk about emergency safety system in case of commercial airline failure, ejection seat always come as "the solution". Airliner aren't going at Mach 2 with a AAM at their tail. Of course they aren't a commercially viable option.
A parachute for each person weight way less than their luggage. It's not a economical problem, it's a engineering one. How can you make a system that "will" save live "without" the risk of failure that could "cost" additional lives?
For instance let's
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One of the other things that goes along with safety analysis though is looking at both the consequences of some failure as well as the probability of that failure happening. There are so few instances of commercial aircraft going down in such a way that ejecting passengers would have saved more people than attempting a controlled crash landing that it's a safety system that just doesn't make sense. Even if you could implement it for free, on the (incredibly rare) instances it would have to be used everything would be so far out of operational parameters that it probably wouldn't accomplish much.
Again, engineering problem.
If the calculated survivability of using parachute is on par with not using them, that mean two things :
- R&D can be done to raise survivability of the said parachute
- R&D can be done to raise the efficiency to detect an absolute death condition required to deploy to said parachute to be sure you won't deploy it for people that would survive without it
And. as I said, this is exactly that sort of "we have done some research and our conclusion is that this is impossible" att
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You're neglecting to calculate how often a condition will happen in which a parachute will be able to save more people than a controlled crash. System safety 101 tells us that risk = severity * probability. Not running the probability numbers means you're only getting half the picture. It'll very quickly lead down the road of "if it saves just one life...", and the only thing you'll find there is madness. My argument is that the probability of conditions occuring in which a parachute would be beneficial is so small as to be basically zero. You'll get greater return in terms of lives saved per unit of engineering if you spend it elsewhere (e.g. adding more redundancy to the aircraft, safer airframe design, smarter health monitoring, etc.).
I've read your comment and I could respond it by copy-pasting the last one I've wrote. Did you really read my comment?
Let me ask you something else then. Are you 100% certain that it's absolutely impossible (even in a millennium) to design a safety measure that will safe all passager that are alive in a plane (to discard to one that have been killed by a bomb or something) before it's inevitable crash?
If the answer is "Yes", then you're absolutely right and we should completely neglect any further R&D a
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I've read your comment and I could respond it by copy-pasting the last one I've wrote. Did you really read my comment?
I've read your comment and I could respond it by copy-pasting the last one I've wrote. Did you really read my comment?
Let me ask you something else then. Are you 100% certain that it's absolutely impossible (even in a millennium) to design a safety measure that will safe all passager that are alive in a plane (to discard to one that have been killed by a bomb or something) before it's inevitable crash?
In this way lies madness. It's the "if it saves just one life" argument I was referencing in my previous post. You might as well be asking why we can't just build the aircraft out of the same indestructible material the black box recorder is built from (har har). Here, I'll make one more attempt at explaining this to you before I give up:
I think it's fair to assume that parachutes will b
Re:Parachute, please (Score:5, Informative)
Additionally, ejection systems are dangerous. The ejector seat mechanism compresses your spine to the extent that people who have ejected from a plane are measurably shorter than prior to ejection. If you're a healthy adult in good physical condition (i.e. the sort of person who is allowed to fly fighter jets) then you can do it a few times and survive (whereas you probably can't explode in a fireball a few times and survive, so ejecting is a better option), but if you eject more than a few times you'll be grounded on medical reasons. If you do the same with a typical commercial aircraft passenger, there's a reasonable chance that they'll die, whereas many commercial aircraft crashes are survivable.
As to just having a parachute, you'd probably only be able to jump from the rear exits without being sucked into the engines. You can't jump without oxygen until the plane is a lot lower than its cruising altitude, and if it can get down low enough to jump and stay there long enough to get 300 people out then it's probably able to manage a survivable landing. Landing from a parachute jump isn't that difficult, but generally requires a little bit of practice - at least some passengers wouldn't be able to do it. The bit after landing is also difficult, as you have to disconnect the chute quickly to avoid being dragged along and you must remember to disconnect the chest straps before the leg straps or you'll end up being strangled. And given that someone always panics and inflates their life jacket inside the plane, in spite of being repeatedly told not to, in simulated crashes, what's the bet that someone wouldn't pull the chord on their parachute by accident (actually surprisingly easy to do when putting the chute on) on the plane and kill / injure other passengers (those springs contains a lot of energy).
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Crap I should have patented this (Score:2)
back in the 80's when I had the idea. Only mine used public maglev instead of hyperloop. You would drive your little electric pod down to the maglev highway, get on and it takes you to within driving distance of your destination.
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The 1980s was 37 years ago. Your patent would have expired by now.
In any case, the article talks of a "demonstration vehicle", but really there is nothing more than a CGI movie. Is that what they're demoing at the Geneva Motor Show? A giant screen with a CGI concept on it? If so, it's highly disappointing.
I would have at least hoped for a semi-working prototype, even if it's only a one-off.
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Also to make it more feasible, I think Airbus should come up with a one-seater version with a lower profile (in addition to the two-seater design it already has), plus a storage area that is only part of the lower driving module.
It should make the bottom part self-driving without the main module on top so that it can drive itself safely away from other cars/people before the main module gets flown in on top of it. For that, it should have little flags on wires just like those flat bikes have so that they a
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I remember proposing quadcopter flying vehicles with computer-controlled balance between each prop's thrust to a pilot friend when I was a teenager. My friend laughed at me like I was an idiot, saying you'd never be able to achieve stability on something like that.
I still smile a bit whenever I see a quadcopter because of that conversation ;)
"designed with practicality in mind." (Score:3)
Hah. Where's the energy storage for those 4 hungry fans?
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Hah. Where's the energy storage for those 4 hungry fans?
I presume it's in the big fat blob in between them. You wouldn't have the energy for sightseeing, but you could make a short hop at high speed.
Mind you, unless there's a recovery parachute included in the design, I'm not getting in there. Thanks.
Concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Concept. Nothing, in other words.
Move along, everybody...
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Concept. Nothing, in other words.
"Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."
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It's not even a serious, realistic concept. The flying part is too small to contain any batteries or a large enough engine for flight. The battery pack seems to be in the base of the car that is left behind on the ground.
Concepts = Art, not Engineering (Score:3, Funny)
I have a concept of a FTL spaceship with no engineering behind it.
Surely that's much better than a concept of a flying car with no engineering behind it ?
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What makes you think there is no engineering behind it? Just because actual metal hasn't been cut? Engineering also has a theoretical side to it as well, and this has definitely had engineering input within Airbus.
Never the twain shall meet (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from the obvious differences, car and aircraft design pull in completely opposite directions regarding weight. For a car crash protection is a high priority - that adds weight. Not something you want in an aircraft. Ditto airbags with explosive charges. A way this has been skirted is to license the vehicle on the ground as a quadricyle which doesn't need to meet many (any?) of the safety requirements of a car. But frankly I wouldn't want to drive one.
I really don't see the point of these vehicles - they're going to be compromised both on the ground and in the air and if you're rich enough to buy one you can probably afford a rolls or bentley than you can park beside your Bell or Sikorsky at the airport.
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That completely defeats the point of flying cars - ie you can land then drive off the airfield onto the road. If you leave the car part behind at departure then its pointless.
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My guess is that a system like this acknowledges that most of the time people will be taking off and landing at airfields that support this modular system. When you take off, you leave behind the drive module and when you land you mate with another drive module. "Your" drive module left behind gets used by someone else.
As you point out, it doesn't work for driving to some location, taking off, and landing at an arbitrary location which doesn't have a drive module. But then again, neither does a helicopte
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Airbags and roll cages aren't useful in an aircraft. So there is literally nothing left to re-use between them. The passenger might as well get out of the car, and get into the coptor. Ooh, they can re-use the cupholders and CD-player!
Correction: it should read (Score:2)
"Airbus revels [in a] Self piloting, modular [Concept] Car"
Uh... this is just a 3D animation (Score:2)
Why is this on Slashdot? Is it because the 3D render looks pretty?
I prefer all the "concept vehicles" in Star Wars, personally.
And there are sketches on DeviantArt that are more detailed.
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Why is this on Slashdot? Is it because the 3D render looks pretty?
Because it's technology. Dumbass technology that won't go away, but technology nonetheless. Like 3-D movies.
Airbus investments are paying off, big time. (Score:2)
Thought of everything? (Score:2)
Except a proper name. Who wants to right a system with an acronym of PUS???
Actually, their video shows vehicles with a capacity of two people. Useful for business people heading downtown to work and back home (or just someone going to work in general). But terrible for many other uses. A family can't use it without going into multiple vehicle. But is a parent going to let a couple of younger children fly alone in one while they fly in another with another child? Or maybe they will have a four person v
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>So many of these concepts that I've seen are only for two people or single people in a row.
The vast majority of driving is one person, perhaps with a few bags. The standard vehicle ought to be something that can cover 95% of work commutes and also allow you to stow a few bags of groceries. It doesn't need to go highway speeds either (or be crash-rated for them).
The trick is to make that vehicle (which has been done a few times already) and to get legislators to make said vehicles legal on a standard l
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Hyperloop Alpha is two seats side by side (2x14 seating), so I'm not sure what you're talking about. And that's for the smaller, passengers-only variant. They didn't list seating arrangements for the "passengers + vehicles" variant, but given the size increase it's probably at least three abreast.
CG makes anything possible (Score:2)
Energy consumption (Score:2)
I have, fairly recently, come to the realization that we are consuming *far* too much energy. Now, I'm guilty of living in a society where cars are the norm, and I still drive probably more than I need to, but I'm making an effort where I can to reduce energy consumption. What does this have to do with flying cars? Everything. A single car consumes an enormous amount of energy, not just in just running it, but in building it, and the infrastructure to support it. The idea of a flying car is only going to bu