Dude, Where's My Flying Car?

podcast or maybe a past one. But no, today we're gonna talk about flying cars. I was trying to render the future perfect tints of mind blown, mind will be blown, mind will have been will have been blown? Yeah? Okay, okay, okay. Flying cars the ultimate futurism cliche, right, articles magazine covers that you know, you tube videos. Where's my flying car? I thought it would be the future. Where when am

I going to get my flying car? Well, today we're finally going to talk about it, So let's talk a little bit about first of all, the the whole science fiction angle of this. I mean, clearly, like when when I say when you hear the term flying car, what is it that you think of? Like, what's what's the thing that pops into your head? Blade Runner? Blade Runner a combination of like the Jetsons and the Fifth Element,

which probably explains a lot about me. See, I always think of Back to the Future, but but I totally I've seen all the other ones you've mentioned, and all of those also are somewhere in there. I mean, I love the design a blade Runner, and I love how how grungy the flying cars are in Fifth Element. Yeah, they're so grungy in all these movies. You wonder like, why why hasn't haven't people just been completely disgusted by

the idea of flying cars. The idea of it is so novel, or at least you would think it's novel. As it turns out, the idea of a flying car is pretty old. We'll get into that. Uh. The idea is novel enough in the sense that we don't have flying cars everywhere that I think people are still fascinated by it. But they love this idea of a future where flying cars are not only a reality, they've been around long enough to become mundane. And I mean, it

seems so easy just if you don't know anything. Sure, you just look at it, like we've had airplanes and cars for a hundred years before. Particle physics seems really easy if you don't know anything. Divorced from reality, science

is fun. Um well, science is fun anyway. And and also I mean that I don't think that anyone who drives has ever not had many moments in a day where they're just sitting in traffic and it's terrible and you you just wish that you could just rise up on jets and just fly right over the rest of

the rest of the grid. Luck. Yeah, No, that's that's a captivating well, especially if you live someplace like Atlanta or Los Angeles, someplace that is known for terrible traffic, and you get into that, you know, it's it's a Thursday, and it's the fourth straight day in a row, and you cannot you can see the exit that you need to take, and you know it's gonna be another hour before you can actually get there. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so

and that's those days. You can easily imagine a world where, um, you know, a flying car would be welcomed with great acclaim by the entire populace. Because it would, at least in theory, mean you would no longer be stuck on this road, stuck behind everybody else. And like we mentioned, you know, people have thought that this was a pretty cool thing for an extremely long time. Right. Um, I think the concept came up really just after the invention

of both cars and also airplanes. Yeah. Yeah, in fact, uh, I mean no, no, less of an authority than Henry Ford commented on this, right yeah in ninety he said, quote mark my words, a combination airplane and motor car. It's coming. You may smile, but it will come. Yeah. So if you look at the history of of cars, and you look at the history of airplanes, and then you look at the history of people trying to make cars,

what are airplanes? Uh? It turns out Henry Ford was kind of behind the times, actually, So you gotta go all the way back. So five is really when you get the You get Carl Friedrich Benz, who created the

first guest line powered automobile. Uh. And then you jump ahead to nineteen o three and that's when the Right Brothers had their famous flight, which, depending upon which authority you're looking at, was the first heavier than air aircraft that was able to fly the first fixed wing control, fixed wing powered heavier than aircraft as opposed to say, a balloon or something like yeah and eve, And even then you have people saying actually, but anyway, nineteen o

three was widely recognized as the first airplane flight. Well, you don't don't have to wait until nineteen seventeen. So just a little over decade later, when Glenn Curtis had suggested creating something he called the Curtis auto plane, which would have been more or less a plane that you could drive around. And in fact, a lot of the early flying car concepts were this level, right, this model. Even even these days, I mean we do have technically

flying cars, but all of them are really more drivable planes. Yeah, they're really airplanes that have detachable elements to them, and then you drive the vehicle out to an airstrip attach whatever those elements are. Usually it's wings and the propeller and maybe some other elements as well, and then you you take off as if it were just a regular light aircraft. Right. So, uh, you know a lot of

the early ones. Robert Edison Fulton Jr. Created one a year later, uh, consolidated vaulty developed the conveir Car, which was a two door sedan with detachable airplane unit that you could convert into a plane. Um. These were all vehicles that were kind of built in the prototype stage, never went into actual manufacture due to various problems, either financial or technological. So for example, Robert Dyson Fulton couldn't get UM funding, so I could never really go into production.

Whereas the convert Car crashed on its third test flight and that pretty much killed the project because yeah, no, no one wanted to risk the money in it, and uh, you know, risk is a big thing. In nineteen sixty five, you have Paul Muller who introduces the x M two, which was the first prototype of his sky car concept, which is like, it reads like a comedy of errors if you go through the whole ordeal, right yeah, yeah,

this is one where the idea was pretty cool. It was supposed to be a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, which is going to be something we'll talk about little bit later to that will be ready in time for woodstock, you know. But the idea was that it was going to be this thing that could take off from anywhere

and land practically anywhere. With enough clearance obviously, but that you wouldn't have to go to like an airstrip necessarily, and it was going to run on fuel that was similar to airplane fuel, and uh, you know, it was a project that was kicking around. Even as late as

two thousand three. They had a demonstration of a vehicle, but it really just kind of hovered it and fly and um by two thousand nine, there still wasn't a flying car to show off, and the company at that point had spent around a hundred million dollars in investment capital trying to do this and had not created a

successful car over four decades since. Yeah, can I say, honestly, when I look at pictures of this, it looks to me like they were just trying to create something that looked like what you imagine when you think of a flying car. So in other words, you think they were just kind of like from the appearance, you look at and you think, oh, that thing is meant to fly, But then you start to think, wait, how would that actually work? It looks like a sci fi illustration. It does.

And eventually Mueller would go and file for Chapter eleven protection, so bankruptcy protection. But the company itself is still operating, although in a much more limited capacity. So, you know, there were a lot of other attempts to create a flying car that all met with you know, kind of

limited success if any. Most of them didn't go beyond the prototype stage, or they had very modest flying capabilities, like it was more that they had a giant parachute and could use a fan to paraglide as opposed to powered flight the way we would think of like with a propeller or jet engine or something like that. Uh, there are a couple of companies that are still working quite hard to try and bring a true flying car

to the market. Uh there's the aero Mobile V two point five, which was a propeller driven aircraft that also acts like a car. So again more in the lines of those early designs where you have the plane that kind of strips down and then becomes a vehicle. Yeah, you have to take it to the airport or something like an airport in order to get in the air, right. And then there's a Terrafugia that is planning on bringing a car called the Transition to market by two thousand

and fifteen. Now this one, again is another one of those where you would have to take it to an airstrip in order to take off, and you would have to have a pilot's license in order to operate it, because I like sportcraft license. Yeah. Yeah, well, and we'll talk more about that in a bit too. But it's not the kind of vehicle that you would you know, pull out of the garage and then lift off the

driveway and blast off into towards your your workplace, right. No, I mean that's really the key here, and it's something we're going to talk about in a bit. But the problem is so many of these prototypes we've seen so far, well, you know, it's it's an airplane and it's a car, but it's not really what people are thinking about when they think about a flying car. That certainly includes vt

O L vertical takeoff and landing. It's something that you can lead you from your driveway and go across town. It's got versatility like a flying car. I think in the way we think of as as far as you know, the science fiction approach goes means that you can, you know, you can go from point A to point B without

having to go to an airstrip. On either side of it, uh, that anyone would be able to operate it easily, because you know, if you have to go through you, if you have to jump through hoops in order to get certification for it, then that's obviously a barrier that it would eventually be affordable so that the average person could own it. I mean, we look at these science fiction futures and everyone's got a flying car. No one's driving

a vehicle that is on the ground. So therefore, in that world, a flying car has to be around the same level of affordability as your personal vehicles are today. And and furthermore, something that not only flies that well, but also drives as fast as you could possibly want it to drive. Right, So it's not like it's not like, well, on the ground, it's got a top speed of thirty months per hour. Yeah, yeah, which is the case of lots of these practical examples that we've been talking about

that are coming out or in prototype stage anyway these days. Right, And the extremely simple requirement of it just needs to fit the normal dimensions of a car. Right, have wings or propellers or something poking out that's going to knock other cars windows off as it passes among the You can't park it anywhere, right, Yeah, so Tarafuccia is working

on well, at least they have a concept. It's not even a prototype, it's a concept vehicle called t f X. So this hasn't gone any further than the design, the initial design phase, as far as I am able to determine. No, but not at all. If there's any player in the

game right now, it's probably them. Yeah, if we're talking about a vehicle that the average consumer could use, and and it's because the t FX answers a lot of the questions, or at least is going to, assuming that it it comes out the way the concept is designed, it will answer a lot of these challenges we're bringing up right now, assuming that everything works a lot of assumptions. Yeah, well, I mean they're they're talking about that vertical takeoff and

landing um. And they're talking about a lot of automation, which is another thing, which is basically the second element that the three of us think is pretty important in getting this entire flying car thing off the ground. I didn't mean to, I tried not. I think it's I I do think it's the kind of thing that will be required in order for this idea to get any altitude. I mean, for this thing to launch, it's going to have to be automated. Okay, let's let's break it down,

all right's free. What are the major concerns with a flying car? What are they gonna have? What are the challenges they're going to have to answer before it is at all feasible for people like you and me. So

here's one concern, Joe. You know, it takes a lot of energy to maintain flight, right, It's not like I mean we can look to nature and see that this is the case, that it's not something that's a low energy kind of activity, even if you have the biological design for lack of a better word, to fly, Well, yeah, I mean it's hard. It takes more energy to jump than to take a step. So in order to get a vehicle into the air, it's going to require a great deal of energy, which in turn means you have

to get that energy from someplace. So if it's a vehicle that's running on fuel, there are fuel uh considerations you have to you have to worry about how much fuel do you need to actually get the power that you're that's necessary to get into flight and operates safely, right,

and and the amount of fuel. Okay, let's let's take for example, the Tarafugia transition and like a camera Okay, you're you're talking for for the transition that that light sport craft that they're thinking of releasing like like under a thousand pounds and a twenty three gallon tank. A camera weighs like three thousand pounds and only has a

seventeen gallon tank. That's the kind of kind of just difference in raw gas power that you're talking about, right, right, Yeah, it's I mean, that's you know, it's it's a big concern. And so along with just fuel consumption, that adds into a couple of other things you have to worry about, like emissions, What what kind of fuel are you burning? What sort of emissions are coming out of this car?

You don't want it to end up being a really, uh, the high pollution style mode of transportation because that's something that we don't want, right, And and also the expense of that kind of fuel. I mean, these days a lot of light sport craft can use auto gas rather than airplane gas. Um. But it's I mean that's not really more and more we're going like, maybe electric engines are the way to go because this entire fossil fuel

thing is an issue. Now. There are some designs that have proposed using a hybrid approach where you have some fuel for anything that requires a lot of energy, specifically taking off and landing. Those tend to require a lot

of energy to do safely. But then once you reach some form of of cruising altitude and speed, switching over to electric motors which would allow you to conserve fuel that way and also cut down on emissions, depending upon, of course, where you get your electricity, because as we all know, it's not just a closed system where you know, all the electrictity magically comes from a place where pollution

is just a bad Yeah. I think we should also think about the concerns that are involved specifically in vt O L and will takeoff and landing um. So one of the first things is simply safety. Turns out, vertical takeoff and landing is not easy, not just from like a fuel consumption standpoint, but it's difficult to do in terms of maneuvering of the aircraft. Uh, and it has caused a lot of safety problems in the past. That

the Harrier jumped jet. So that was a vertical takeoff and landing jet that was powered by a vector thrust turbo fan engine. So basically it sucked air through the body of the airplane and could point it downwards to lift itself up vertically. But the thing is, um harrier jumped jets. While they could take off vertically, that was not ideal. It was avoided under all circumstances, except when

it was absolutely necessary for emergency. I mean, what that sounds like to me is that you're you're lighting a fire directly underneath yourself and really hoping that the liftoff created from it is going to get you out of the way of the fire. You're, yeah, it's sort of. I mean it's um so it's difficult to do. You could take off from like an aircraft carrier that way

or something like that. I mean, the whole concept was so that a jet would be able to take off our land anywhere in the in case of nuclear war, which would end up you know, targeting military instace exactly. Yeah, you could. You could keep these things in a park somewhere or whatever, you know, wouldn't it wouldn't have to be But as it turned out, it was really hard to do. Yeah, and so that was considered an accident prone aircraft. There were a lot of incidents involving the

Harrier family and it was basically a dangerous aircraft. There's an other one, more recent, the bel V twenty two Osprey, which also has a reputation for being unsafe. Yeah, it has a very controversial safety record. So it had an early test period between two thousand, there were four osprey crashes. Uh, and together those killed a total of thirty people. And so the the airplane has been redesigned and so oh sorry, let me explain. The osprey is a tilted rotor, so

that's a different method of vertical takeoff and landing. What what that is is you imagine like a prop plane has two propellers out on the wings. Now a normal plane those would just be forward facing to generate forward thrust and that would that would lift a plane once you get enough velocity on a runway. But the way of the twenty two osprey works is they start off pointing up helicopter wings themselves tilt up so that the

propellers are facing like helicopter rotors. Yeah, so it uses that to lift up off the ground and then it can convert into horizontal plane flight as it's coming into the air, so like the like the shield Hell Carrier. Yeah, so there it did get a redesign, and it has at least on paper, been safer since then. But I know there's still controversy, was like how these accidents are classified.

There's also a scandal about officers military officers um asking for maintenance records to be falsified so that it would give the osprey a more favorable maintenance record and make

it look less prone for accidents mistakes. Yeah, essentially, what I've read is that some people allege that things that may have been problems with the airplane have been classified as pilot errors to be but we we don't know, I mean, to be fair, anything that's involved with you know, a one or two rotor aircraft is incredibly challenging to fly.

I mean helicopters. You'll you'll hear pilots who have flown both airplanes and helicopters talk about how helicopter ers are really tricky, Like it's it's not something that's easy to pick up, even if you're an accomplished pilot with a with an airplane and so one way that these flying cars, if they are ever made, could maybe get around that is by having multiple rotors to add more stability. You know, with a two rotor system, it's it's definitely less stable

that you see. Some of the drones UH and UH and even remote controlled drones out there that are for consumer use had between four and eight rotors to provide

that kind of level of stability. Definitely. Uh. Yeah. Another concern with the vt O L technology is, as we were just talking about fuel consumption, that uh uses more fuel than a regular takeoff and that's one of the reasons, say, like a Harrier, when it wanted to take off, even though it was capable of vertical takeoff, they would do a short runway takeoff sometimes just because that used less fuel. And then not only that, but it's it tends to be really noisy. Yeah, we all aircraft tend to be

really noisy, and so that's a big problem. Imagine you're trying to say, well, okay, I want to pull out into my driveway on the way to work in the morning and take off. So if you ever heard a helicopter takeoff or an airplane you know close, that's what your neighbor next door is going to be hearing when you do this. Now, hopefully they can. Because it's a smaller aircraft, it will probably be less loud than you know, like a Boeing taking off or something. Would hope, Um,

but still, you know, there's always gonna be that one guy. Yeah, it's still I can't imagine that they're going to be able to make it as quiet as just like a car, so and and then and there. You won't. I don't think you'll ever have a time where you'll be able to just take off directly from your driveway. That's exactly right. I think that the idea that you can do that

is just probably not gonna happen. Now you I can imagine we might have vertical takeoff flying cars where you don't have to go to the airport and get runway access, but you will have say like a launching area, launch designated area, because you would you would want to have enough clearance on all sides so that you're not worried about banging into a house, building, a tree, a power line, any of that kind of stuff. Even even Tara Fuji

is kind of optimistic. Estimate is that it would take a hundred feet or thirty meter diameter fifty feet on all sides. Yeah, I think that's pretty standard idea of you need at least that much just for safety and clearance. Yeah. Yeah, So in that case, what you would have is a designated spot where your multi rotor, which could become in the form of tilted rotors, it could be we we haven't even discussed like what form that this would take, mostly because we don't have a lot of examples to

point out that. There are a lot of different proposals. Tara Fuji is ideas tilted rotors. So it's like the V twenty two osprey. It has blades that point up when you're you're picking up, so it's like a helicopter that lifts you off the ground and then they transition over to provide forward thrust when you're flying. Um. But there are there are other ideas you could use, like ducted fans. That's one idea. I think that's what the

Moller skycar us I believe. So yeah, technically you could also have even a jet engine on one of these things that I don't imagine that we're kind of see that anytime soon. But there are unmanned aerial vehicles that use that kind of approach where they've got either a combination of rotors and jet engine, or some of them just have the jet engine because they launch straight from

another aircraft. But I don't we're gonna have cars that launch off of, you know, another flying vehicle, unless unless it happens to have the shield logo on it, in which case I totally makes sense. Now, one thing you you mentioned about noise pollution, I this is funny because it would kind of go the opposite of what you were saying about the hybrid fuel use, like, Okay, well it'll use fuel for for takeoff because that's the harder task, and then it will use an electric motor to power

it during flight. That does make a lot of sense. But also I wonder if you could help fight the noise problem if you could say, well, is it possible to do electric takeoff? I really based upon our battery technology right now, I'm really skeptical of that. I don't think you would be able to get enough juice to do it without having a vehicle so heavy that you have defeated the purpose because you had to carry so much battery power on board your car to to be

able to handle that. I think you're almost forced to go with the fuel approach for takeoff and landing for an average vehicle. I mean, I suppose you could try. But unless you're unless you're doing a aircraft approach type thing, like on an airstrip where it is the it requires less energy than vertical takeoff and landing, I don't know that you could get the vehicle light enough for you

to be able to do that reliably. Uh that is that is one of the things that Tarafugia is promising on this pie in the sky, an electric political I think that's how they're planning to get past the noise pollution. Yeah, that's to I mean, I mean, I mean you could approach it. You could approach it by um focusing on body designs, so like how light can we get You have to maybe going with like like uh, you know, carbon fiber type stuff, lightweight composite materials could maybe like

cut this thing into total minimum body weight. I can see maybe maybe you just really powerful motor. You have to make sure that that those a lot of tech would have to come together in order to make that anywhere near possible. UM. Not to mention the fact that. I mean we were talking earlier, you know, like I don't trust people driving next to me on Peachtree to to not completely kill me with their suv. I really don't want that guy in an suv to be fifty

ft above me. Well, I was going to say also that besides that, with the composite materials, you have to make sure that they're strong enough to withstand impact. So you have to they have to still meet all the

impact requirements of your basic cars on the road. So you have to make sure that whatever material you make is both light so that you can cut down on the requirements needed to get it into the air, and resilience so that if you're in a crash, say just driving around in regular car mode, that your car doesn't shred into pieces. Yeah, speaking of crashes and getting on board with what Lauren just said, I am going to go on the record and say I do not want

human beings piloting these things. I think these should be autonomous control or not at all. That that is my vote. So you're you're you're saying that you want computers to control this. I mean we've already seen, like with uh research that came out of Google and other other facilities, other other like Carmen. You've acturers that autonomous cars already drive safer than human Yeah. From Google's fleet reports. You remember that their autonomous cars, they were releasing the safety record,

and it turns out they've had two accidents. One of the times was when a human was driving the autonomous it was under manual control. The other time the autonomous car was not at fault and got rear ended. So yeah, so in other words, better than never been an accident after hundreds and hundreds of hours on the roads in California. No less, there have been no accidents with the car

under autonomous control. And as it turns out, like they've they've shown that autonomous cars have much better reaction times, are able to maintain the proper distance between other vehicles much more effectively than human drivers. So I can see where you're coming from. And Lauren, I think you agree with Joe right that autonomous control is really because, I mean, from what you were saying, you don't want, you know, Joe SUV to be driving a vehicle directly over your head.

But if it's a computer that's really really good at it, would you be less? I would be less completely terrified. Um, but you know, my my terror level just just based on the technology, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know. I can envision a future in which all of this has come together. All right, I'm coming down against both of you. Yeah, yeah, No, I'm going to say that I only want flying cars if they can be controlled manually. Uh, that's the only way I want it. I don't want

to fly. I want I want to be able to have the thrill of scaring the heck out of people by buzzing the Maverick style from top gun, but in a in a car, I want to have that experience of feeling like I'm in the fifth element maneuvering this car through complex city scapes and weaving my way through alley ways. That a robot lady is going to be yelling at you about the points on your license. I want the robot lady is Siri already does that? So

that's fine, that's we've already got that part. That part of the future is here. So I Well, part of this, I think is that I'm assuming I said the word license and and that the license that you would have to have for this would be a strong piloting license that you would have had to have received a certain amount of training for. See. Now, I also like that because it immediately restricts who else gets the flying car.

And while I am a man of some means, I would be able to get hold of one of these flying cars, and thus it would be a status symbol making me better than everybody else. Can you play video games? So you clearly already know how to pilot things. As long as I don't hit the Y button and prematurely bail out of the car, I'm good. You're good to go. Yeah, yeah, okay, Well I think you're insane. I I would not let you near a flying car, especially since you don't even

drive a regular car. No, I would only drive a flying car. I would. I would shell out the money to get the license in the car, and then I would laugh my way all the way to the ground, burning and fiery death. Here there's where I have to come out and say that I too, am completely on board with if if this happens, it has to be autonomous.

I mean, it's it's you, just anecdotally, even without looking into the actual facts and figures, just from a person's general experience there's a good chance that all of you listening to this have either been involved in an accident

or you know someone who has been. And it's one of those things that's common enough where you know, when we talk about autonomous cars, we're talking about trying to take that element out as much as possible and save human lives, which is, you know, that's something that's really important to me obviously, and I think for flying cars to be a reality so that we have this convenience, but yet we don't have this added risk of people who could be operating a vehicle under the influence of something.

Maybe there just suffering an impairment of some sort, or maybe they're just not a good driver that they are not going to put themselves and other people at risk with something that is potentially extremely dangerous. I have another question, Uh huh, how are now normally we think of, oh, man, I'm gonna get pulled over because I was going five miles per hour over the speed limit. So annoying. You know, I'm actually glad there are cops out there policing traffic.

It can it can make you feel inconvenience, but that's just you being selfish. Who is going to police the vehicles in the air well, if they're autonomous, that definitely raises some interesting questions because if there is an error,

who's at fault? Because if it's an autonomous vehicle and if I hit a if I program in the let's say it's GPS coordinates for the landing pad that I want to go to, and as soon as I get onto the lawn pad, the car takes over and it's supposed to get me from my point of of departure to my destination all by itself. If there's some sort of incident along the way, who's it fault? Well, if it's autonomous, i'd say the manufacturer. But if it's if it's if it's you piling it, obviously it's you. I'm

envisioning an incredible future without insurance. Whoa where it's all just manufacturer liability. This that thought just made me so gleefully happy. Um, how okay, all that insurance cost just gets rolled right into the costier vehicle right now. I

could totally deal with that. But but you know, legally speaking, if it is a vehicle that's under manual control, you would have to have some sort of special license, right right, okay, I mean as of right now, in order to fly a light sport aircraft, which is like what the what the Terrafugia Transition would fall into the category of Um, you know it's that's going to be a one to two seater playing in with a certain limit of size and power, and you don't you don't need a full

pilot license in order to do that. Basically all you need is a driver's license and to show up and prove that you're willing to follow rules. Um. But along with that, you're not allowed to do things like fly at night or just you know, like jaunt into any old airspace that you want. You have to follow very

specific regulations. UM. Once you get a medical certificate, which is the full f A A approved doctor checking you out and saying that you're of sound physical and mental health to fly a plane that could potentially wreck a lot of stuff. Um, you know that that's within certain classes.

When you start getting into being able to take more than just one person up in a plane with you and and fly at night and fly with instrumentation, which kind of falls under the category of automatic of automated vehicles, I don't know, so, so it's it's a weird conundrum. Like I, I can't imagine wanting to allow anyone into an airplane who has not had those kind of checks done and training done. But if we're talking about autonomous vehicles, then I don't know. And so here's a well, let

me offer one more qualification. Um I I imagine people will need even more certification if we're talking about the actual flying card, the vertical takeoff and landing, because that is tricky. Well, even if it's fully automated, I could easily see there being another level of licenses required to

operate such a vehicle. And uh, and part of that is just because you know, we're talking about another area where technology is beginning to outpace the legal system, which we see all the time, right we all we will see this where engineers and scientists and researchers come up with these amazing technologies that raise interesting questions of legality because the law doesn't apply to that sort of stuff because no one had thought of it back when they

wrote the laws. We are going to blow up this side. No, it's gonna be fine. There's not a law against it. Um So. Honestly, even light sport aircraft, which which covers a whole lot of different experimental craft that are really fun that we should totally do a whole episode on sometime. Um. You know, it's even the laws governing who gets a license for that are kind of in contention right now and and are sort of being outdated by the number

of people who are building their own experimental craft. Yes, so it might be a while before all these questions are answered, and it may turn out that, you know, sometimes the law comes up with answers that seem counterintuitive or that some that will actually prevent an entire technology

from flourishing. So if it ends up that that even with a fully autonomous flying car, that you have to have a certain level of pilot's license, clearly that would be a detriment because there will be a lot of companies would say, well, you've just eliminated a huge potential market for us, because not everyone's going to go through that kind of trouble to be able to operate this kind of car. Uh so why should we even go

into that business. We're not even gonna bother now. So it could be, you know, it could be at what some would refer to as a disincentive. I hate myself right now. But anyway, that's the you know, that's that's a concern, right that the law itself, that that even if we were to meet all the technological challenges there are, there's the chance that the law could end up preventing it from flourishing. And and and what about that price point. I mean, it's we've we've we've been talking a little

bit and during other topics about that. But you know, like if if a car costs what like thirty thousand dollars, if it's new days, um, decent average price to just pull out the air sure um, then uh and and your average light sport aircraft might cost say a hundred thousand dollars the number for example, going back to the Terrafugia. Uh, they're quoting that as a potential seven two seventy nine

thousand dollar cars? Are you talking about the one the transition, the the likely one, not even the ridic list one, Yeah, which doesn't have a price attached to it, because it's

just ridiculous. It's kind of a day dream at the moment. YEA, So two d and seventy nine thousand, when you could have bought a vehicle and a light aircraft together for less than that and essentially had all of the capabilities of the Tera Fugia, with the exception of the fact that you you would have to keep your light aircraft probably in a hangar somewhere, or you have to have a special garage built force to drive your other car

to that to the air to the airstrip. But you still have to have an airstrip to take off with that one. So you know, the convenience factor being able to drive your airplane home might not be enough for you to say I'm willing to spend another hundred thousand dollars on that and hundred thousand plus on that. So yeah, I mean, that's that's expensive. I mean you look at that vt O L technology and the vehicles that have it are not cheap. Now that the Harrier is a

little bit different because that's an older aircraft. I mean that that was developed in the late fifties and they started building them in the sixties. But when you look at the Osprey that was that's kind of another one. Another reason why it's so um uh controversial in various circles is not just for its safety record, which may or may not be awful. It all depends upon whom you ask, but also because it definitely went over what

they had projected it would cost. The original projection for that program was I think two point five billion dollars, not chump change, but it turns out that the whole thing is going to be closer to thirty five point six billion dollars, which is a big leap. Obviously, every single asprey costs around oh between sixty million and seventy million dollars every single one, and there's something like four d and eight of them that have been ordered to date.

But they're all full of gold toilets. They're not all full of gold toilets. One gold toilet apiece, you're your flying car will not need a gold toilet. So no, anyone, anyone who sees me in my flying car is going to have need of a goal toilet or at least a toilet, because that's how I'm gonna fly that sucker.

Um No. But the point I'm trying to make here is that this technology, while while you know, the the whole idea behind the osprey was they wanted to have a vehicle that could uh could land in remote locations without an airstrip that would be act like a helicopter whenever it was taking off or landing, but like a plane in every other case. And it turned out that achieving that ended up being a lot more complicated and

expensive and dangerous than they had first anticipated. So I would imagine that same sort of stuff, even though we've learned a lot since then, that it's still going to be one of those those technologies that, at least for the first few implementations, we're going to see some really expensive vehicles, assuming they ever make it to actual manufacturing lines.

Now Terafugia, for its part, they're saying that they'll be available by so it's not that long before we should start seeing these, at least in limited production runs, assuming that everything goes well. So and I just wonder what

kind of market there is for it. I mean, i'd like, I really don't think that anyone other than people who were going to buy a light sport craft anyway are going to pick These's about to say, I know some I know some people who have pilot's licenses for light aircraft, and they also are of a particular tax bracket where I could see them picking one of these up. Because I grew up in a part of Georgia that had a lot of affluent families. I wish I had been one of them. No, it's fine, I'm okay now that

I'm going to get my manual powered flying car. You were just turning into a little tyrant today, just imagining all of the suffering you'll gleefully inflict in the future. This is the kind of thing that gives people, not pilot licenses. Actually, that's that's I think. I think that that showing the glee and other people's terror is what an f a a doctor you would say, like you're not allowed ground check or they talk to all his friends. I'm really good at masking that glee when it comes

down to it. I've never seen you do that, but you are an actor, so I can. I can totally fake sincerity. It's the first thing they teach you. Okay, Well, the future is full of excellence and terror. I think. I think flying cars, I think are are one of those things that if we see them, uh, it'll be in a very limited capacity for the foreseeable future. And I think for the average consumer, I agree with you guys,

it's got to be automated. It has to be, because if it's not, then it's just it's just I can't imagine any company, yeah, taking that on. That's a huge risk, right, I can't imagine any insurance company offering up insurance for that future without insurance, but none the way you're talking, we're talking where you can't get it because no one will recover you, not that it doesn't exist. So um, yeah, I think uh, I think will be a while before

we see this. Now, that doesn't mean that maybe maybe in that magical twenty to fifty year time frame that we always talk about in the show, we finally start seeing them. It would be kind of cool. I mean, I think it would be a neat thing to see. Uh. And and these autonomous cars, like we said, have been proven themselves to be really safe, so at least on a on that level, I can imagine it. I just don't know what the time. As far as I can tell, the deal with flying cars is, there's not any magic

element missing. It's just like so many other problems, it's just a feasibility and economics problem. And how can you make this not cost of ba jillion dollars and not you know, super super energy hungry and all those questions. Yeah, I think that in a good couple of centuries will totally have them. Yeah. It's funny that it only took a little more than a decade for someone to first propose a flying car, and a century later we're still waiting for one to take off. All right, guys, so

we're wrapping this up now. You know you love the show. You wouldn't be listening to the show unless you love the show. So if you love the show, do you know what you would really love? F W Thinking dot com because that's a website where we've got all the videos the podcast like this one. Blog posts articles stuff where we go into a lot more detail on these subjects and we talk about stuff that we haven't even

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