Flying Cars!

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant (who really hopes the links work today)

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1yKAPwNggRaxb

As much time as I spent immersed in other worlds as a teen, I can’t say I was ever into flying cars. Yes, I had posters of Mars and of Shuttle Mission patches on my walls when other girls had music and movie stars. And I had actual stars, and nebulae . . .

Flying cars just weren’t the thing that caught my attention in all the novels I read.

I still think the new Tesla Roadster is cool, and Nathan Brindle (have you read his novels? You should!) mentioned the suction stuff is very useful for low grav vehicles, so . . . check out the Moonmobile! (I call the Cybertrucks MarsCars, because they look like they’re meant to shed the Mars dust to me . . .)

Also, for added coolness, Elon Musk reposted our very own M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment on the test, which you may read here: https://x.com/mcahogarth/status/2110918617294360600 (Also you should read her novels, if you haven’t. Why haven’t you?)

What aspects of the new model look most interesting or otherworldly to you? Would you want one? I could fly over that guy going the wrong way on the one way street . . .

68 thoughts on “Flying Cars!”

  2. In someways, I’d love to have a flying car but when driving I always worry about the idiots sharing the road with me.

    It would be worse with the idiots sharing the sky with me. [Twisted Grin]

    Liked by 3 people

  4. It’s the end of the road, and I want to go (several mountain ranges) “Over There”. With no road. Sooo, I use the flying car to jump over the forest & swamps to get “There”. Ahhhhh………

    Liked by 1 person

  5. This could actually have real-life implications in terms of accident safety. Semi accident sends the car airborn, it can adjust and set down safely.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. I don’t see much use for that technology in a sports car. On the other hand, in an off-road vehicle, maybe at 38% of earth gravity (mars), or 16.6% (moon), or even less on some of the larger asteroids something similar might be very useful. Picture being able to hop over a canyon or out of a deep crater.

    This is a proof of concept, a prototype. Some version of the hardware and software might be very useful in an interplanetary economy.

    Liked by 2 people

  7. I probably would not a get a flying car even if available because someone would come up with some stupid reason as to why I couldn’t hang Sidewinders, Hellfires, and a Vulcan cannon off of it.

    Liked by 7 people

    2. Shouldn’t, according to some pantywaste pencil pushers sure enough. Couldn’t on the other hand, I’d need to see the engineering reasons as to why. Probably mass and ammunition issues, but that’s just math.

      Like

  8. The most fascinating thing about the new flying car, to me, is not the car itself.

    No, it’s watching all the online midwits who fall for every hoax, every false narrative, every talking point, suddenly decide they are “critical thinkers” and declare the car to be a fake and a fraud, and Elon a liar. And somehow, they have no cognitive whiplash.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. They don’t hate Tesla because they hate technology, they hate Tesla because Elon Musk is a traitor to them. To the Communist cause, they are insane of course.

      Like

        1. And they hate Elon for proving that it’s Big Government that’s keeping things jammed up in mediocrity, and that it’s the Fat Cat Running Dog Kyepitalyist Kulaks Pigs who actually keep the goodies coming.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. Elon is smarter than me, and could easily come up with a video that fools me.

      But if he has actually come up with something in the advanced air mobility (AAM) space, and sells it to anyone at all, that is something that certain parties will pay close attention to, document, and authenticate to a degree.

      To the extent that I care about that sort of platform, I can potentially verify for myself that it works, from the ground.

      If I was doing that sort of development business myself, I think I could imagine being jealous of him, or annoyed at him beating me to market. I would hope that I would make the same or better choice than I do with no investment, of being happy for him.

      I imagine that the haters for this are seething and not coping for reasons that are not anywhere near as informed.

      However, it is very interesting for him to have any results at all of this sort, because he has a reputation for doing mass production, and for getting the reliability high.

      As a promise for the future, it makes sense, and is wild.

      P.S. I would be fine with him not giving us a “Starship Troopers” future republic. I definitely do not want him to realize everything thing that Heinlein wrote about.

      Like

        2. He has actual physical artifacts.

          There is maybe no sane way to win a thing of trying to argue that he does not.

          Like

          1. I guess I have nothing but stupid wording in my future this evening.

            He’s clever enough to copperfield me with a video.

            He does not need to. There is no amount of legitimate skepticism that it is possible to have a need for, that would not eventually be addressable.

            Like

      2. The longer I go, the less I care about the thumbsucking pontifications of anybody who is not producing.

        Elon is producing, and at a world-historical level, on dozens of fronts. The “well, achshhhhually” crowd is making nothing but noise, most of them throwing tantrums because they aren’t having their feelings validated, and contributing nothing to humanity.

        Like

  9. Nuttin’ new here. Burt Reynolds drove a rocket-powered Pontiac Trans Am 48 years ago in Hooper. 😛

    Also, you’ve seen the idiots out there on the road. Do we really need flying idjits too?

    I’ve got a few technical questions about this:

    1. How long can it fly? How far? We’ve all seen the Bell ‘rocket pack’ with its whopping 30 seconds of flight time. I heard new, improved models can get close to 60 seconds.
    2. How long does it take to recharge the air tanks? How much power does that suck out of the batteries?
    3. Elon said he wants a top speed of at least Mach 0.5 — 380 MPH. That’s just slightly insane. 😃
    4. How much will it cost? $200,000? Half a $million? More?
    5. How long before the nanny-state bans them?

    I can see some advantages, like collision avoidance or escaping from road ragers. Setting your car straight down in a parking space would be fun, and getting out of a space after some asshole blocks you in would be a breeze. Although the exhaust might blow one of those POS Stupid Cars away. I’d consider that another advantage. 😁

    If you miss your exit, you could just hop over to it. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I have a few comments re: your comment. ~:D

      1. I don’t care. It’s a freakin’ flying car!
      2. I don’t care, not important, because FLYING CAR!!!
      3. It’s not insane, it is awesome.
      4. I don’t care, because I’ll never have one, but I’ll bet it’s less than a Bugatti. Which doesn’t fly.
      5. I’m sure it’s already banned in 53 states. But again, I don’t care. Because flying car!

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Our definitions of sanity may be slightly askew.

          For myself, speed? I have been to speedy, speedyfast, holyshit, and fuckinawesome, but I have not, yet, been to 380 in a ground based vehicle. Yet. There are places to Not Go That Fast, yes. But there are yet other places where it is Freaking. Awesome.

          Like

          1. When I was younger and bouncier, my idea of Fun usually involved Way More Speed than a thoughtful person would go. Once upon a time I was laying flat on top of my bike to cut resistance, figuring about 112mph by the tach (because the speedo pegged at 85, the wimpy thing) when I passed a CHP in a car going the other way. Tho I couldn’t possibly have actually seen it, I distinctly remember the look on the cop’s face: think Donald Sutherland pointing at that last un-bepodded lady at the end of the *Body Snatchers* remake.

            I slowed to 55 and watched the rearview, expecting him to come up behind me and just shoot me off the bike, but maybe he didn’t want to drive as fast as he’d’ve had to to catch me. I got away clean.

            Lord, I miss the 70s.

            Like

            1. “Lord, I miss the 70s.”

              Flying south down the Don Valley Parkway at something egregiously over the speed limit on my 650 Yamaha, I passed a cop radar. I had time to see him stare at the radar in disbelief and then whip his head around to see me blasting by.

              Like

        2. Current Top Fuel top speed in the quarter mile is ~340+ mph, set by John Force’s daughter Brittany last year, which is –awesome-.

          380 is even more awesome. Probably can’t do it in the quarter mile, but I’m not opposed to a flying mile in principle. ~:D

          Like

    2. Another advantage – vehicles traveling in areas with a steep drop on one side of the road (particularly if the road is slick or icy). If the worst happens and you go over the edge, then the jets can trigger and provide a safer “landing”.

      Like

    3. Dean Ing gave his protagonist in Pulling Through (well worth reading if you can find it) a Lotus Cellular which had fans powerful enough to let him hop over obstacles and even cross open water (nervously).

      Like

  10. Integrating cold gas RCS into a car sized vehicle and then flying it is awesome. The auto press implies in their tech reviews (https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-thrust-system-spacex-technology-explained) that the four cold-gas thrusters facing rearward will be a base option, with a larger COPV required for the full flying kit. Getting through crash tests on large COPVs would be nontrivial, so don’t obsess on either the rocket boost or on the flying stuff too much.

    The question that struck me on the 2G suction fans is what’s their duty cycle and power consumption/run time – i.e. what if you had four of those configured as lift (blow not suck) and good enough thrust vectoring, do you get a sustainably flying car?

    And third, imagine some of the systems in the roadster – electric drive, batteries, and cold gas RCS+lift, in something a little more SUV-shaped for lunar and Martian surface exploration, observing as always how single-minded Elon is on Mars.

    Like

    1. The suction fans are extremely impressive. That’s some serious performance.

      But I wonder how they manage FOD on the road. Even race tracks have crumbles next to the race line from rubber peeling off the slicks.

      On the third hand, I don’t really care if it’s practical. It’s too awesome to worry about the details. You don’t buy a Lambo because it’s practical.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. FOD is still a thing, but the details matter – in a gas turbine jet engine the spinny bits have to withstand a whole bunch of temperature, and as such need all kinds of high tech cooling and very expensive materials.

        But if there’s no combustion to generate heat, all you have is the heat of compression , and the materials can be less stiff at insane temperatures and more bendy and forgiving of those track marbles.

        The whole electric-drive low temperature materials part of impeller/propeller/compressor design are a frankly a new area for that field of design, and I bet pretty amazing performance will become possible once that gets sussed out.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Trying to reboot the memories, but one of the ’70s race car designers (Carroll Shelby) tried a (gas powered?) suction fan for a race car. As memory serves, it worked really well, but TPTB figured it was Totally Unfair and thus banned it.

          Reflects on Andy Granatelli’s Indy cars driven by gas turbines. Not sure any ever finished, but every succeeding year, they were forced to downgrade the engine.

          Liked by 1 person

  11. I think it is magnificent trolling to work on this a long time or a short time, keep it quiet, and then reveal “Yeah, we did flying cars aka advanced air mobility”. “Did”, “have done”, said as if it was an easy or trivial task.

    It says positive things about his abilities as a showman, a marketeer, an engineer or a technical manager, but those are maybe actually fairly old news.

    I’m not particularly interested in the car for its own sake. At least it means that Musk has not gotten too distracted, stale, or tired.

    Like

  13. “Would you want one?”

    I would like the motorcycle version please. Zero to 60 in 1 second? Hell to the yeah! My bike takes three seconds. Slowww…

    It’s an amazing thing. As the day goes on I’m hearing more about this car and what it did at the demo, it’s a Tom Swift moment in real life.

    M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment is exactly right. Some things, they don’t need to serve a practical purpose. You do them because they are awesome. A flying car that really freaking flies? Yes! Awesome! Do it again!

    And also, consider that if NASA spent a billion dollars they couldn’t do this. No way, no hope, no chance.

    Like

    1. There are other companies with products at various stages of development in the advanced air mobility space.

      Not in production, as far as I can recall. (It is very recent, and I have not followed the latest developments.)

      There are of course flight controls problems with this sort of things. But there are also sensing problems, and stuff.

      Whether he has had this quietly going on in house for years, or bought a company doing development work, or said “LOL, can we” and had the resources in house, I have to take my hat off to him.

      (I literally went and put on my hat to do so.)

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “I have to take my hat off to him.”

        Who else is doing stuff like this? Anywhere in the world? NOBODY!!!

        You could argue Red Bull, but this is another level from those guys. This is RedBull squared. Cubed, maybe.

        And who else launched a whole freaking car out to Mars orbit?

        Like

    2. I once had the joy of watching a kid (who really needed a good humbling) wind out the throttle of a friend’s bike from a standing start: It looped right out from under him and (as I like remembering it) left him hanging in midair like Wile E. Coyote.

      Liked by 1 person

  14. I get sick in small airplanes so I’d probably never want a flying car even if I could afford one. Very cool though.

    Like

    1. You never know what is triggering that stuff.

      Case in point from my recent research into electric vehicles (ended up buying something which burns liquid dead dinos), some have fake engine noises piped into the cabin, and there are some people who, if that fake engine noise is turned off leaving only the wind and tire noise and minimal electric motor noises, get motion sickness. Turn the sounds a back on and they are fine.

      Like

      1. Motion sickness is caused by a discord between your senses. This is why passengers get motion sickness, not drivers, who are watching the road, which moves relative to them, so the motion sensations are not discordant.

        Some people have managed to link up the engine sounds apparently.

        Like

        2. Also the reason why many first person video games include a static “aim point” (usually a cross hair) in the middle of the screen.

          VR can also cause pretty bad motion sickness if you move around an area within the VR, but your physical body is staying in one place (which is usually how VR works, since it means that you don’t need a large area to move around in).

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Why I am not a gamer. Early VR on screens made me nauseous.

            Normally being in a vehicle as a passenger is not bad, but there have been some gnarly twisty roads with a lot of hairpin curves that have gotten to me (points to one of the Redwood National Park access roads). One drives those road relatively slowly (maybe motorcycles are an exception). The west access of Oregon Hwy 242 is another, but I’ve been on it enough that I can mitigate the effect by knowing where to focus on the different corners.

            Like

      2. I read somewhere a long time ago that electric vehicles have external speakers playing engine noises, because drivers unconsciously expected pedestrians to hear them coming, and there were Unpleasant Surprises all around when low speed, dead silent cars snuck up on people in parking lots.

        Like

        1. The ones around here play sounds that remind me of the cars on “The Jetsons” — readily identifiable but not obnoxious or loud.

          Like

        2. Due to knee issues, I’m now quite familiar with the electric shopping carts. Most of those are damned quiet, and can create interesting situations on occasion.

          (One fun bit: they’re front wheel drive, and you can turn those wheels 90 degrees. A U-turn takes up little room and can be damned fast.)

          Like

        3. They don’t ,but I recently encountered a non-Tesla (Teslas make noise, but it’s more like a very large cat purring) presumably electric car that sang. Badly. Very creepy harmonics. I’d rather have the purring, thankmyou.

          Like

        4. An article I read said that the fake engine noise was to help blind people. They rely on the noise of a car engine to know when it’s safe to do things such as cross a street. A car with no engine noise is nearly undetectable to them.

          Like

        5. It’s a Federal requirement (yes there’s a bureaucrat in charge of car sounds, apparently) put in place after the deadly menace of silent Prius death machines was loudly complained about by Karens in supermarket parking lots everywhere, well, somewhere.

          Tesla engineers initially wanted to make that sound user customizable from a menu, so your Tesla could make the Jetson’s weeble sound, or the Tie Fighter sound if you paid a license fee to The House of The Mouse, while you were parking lot creeping, but the Feds Were Not Amused, and they made them get one Federally-blessed sound officially approved and can thus only use that one.

          All the electrics make a creeping sound now, by regulation.

          Like

  15. Big deal. Knight Industries had a car back in the early ’80s which could do the same thing and had AI too. I’d like to see Mr. Musk manage that.

    Like

    1. That was what I thought. Not really a flying car, but it certainly looks like it would do a lot that Trans Am did back then. And how do we know they aren’t also putting Grok in it?

      Hm. Considering the ages of the men involved… they might have been thinking even more of KITT when they designed that thing than they were of that flying DeLorean from the movie.

      Like

  16. Long before in 1970, there was Jim Hall’s Chaparral 2J. It had an auxiliary 5 hp engine coupled to two blower fans venting out the rear and a skirt maintaining close separation with the track, exerting 2200 lbs of downward pressure and enabling the car to maintain tire traction with up to 1.25-1.5 gees of side loading in turns. It did emit a high-pitched banshee wail and showered drivers of following cars with dust and debris. Halls answer to the criticism was “why don’t you pass me then…

    Like

  18. An engineering and industrial genius is blowing off some (cold) steam! Now, if you want to talk specific impulse …

    Elon Musk is having fun, showing off and leaving us wondering just what he can and will do next. And he’s given us a really wonderful show.

    How is that not a win-win-winwinwinwinwin?

    Like

    1. Heh. I did find one article where he was asked about the Knight Rider series, and he said it had been his favorite. The whole thing kind of looks like a group of men who had all been fans of that series getting the idea “why not build KITT? We can now do it…”

      But that seems to have been how a lot of recent innovations have come to be. Science fiction fans wanting something and those ones of them who become engineers then building it.

      Musk has been doing a lot of things which really give that vibe. He sounds like somebody who probably did read and liked Heinlein (even his urge to breed, Heinlein was always pretty strong with that idea, that having children is important), saw that 80s Heavy Metal movie (that god damn shooting Tesla into space – and then also adding to that Hitchhiker’s guide), now Knight Rider. And of course the whole SpaceX.

      He wanted to live in that future, and since nobody else seemed to be making it, he is now doing it himself. No idea what he may be like as a person, but even if he was as bad as the mustache bros of last century when it comes to anything else than building machines I could still relate.

      Like

  19. (Dramatic) “OH!” (Presses “A” button.)

    IYKYK

    Alas, the insurance industry will kill flying cars long before Fed/State Grundies do so.

    On the other hand, those flyers will be highly weight sensitive. This might finally get Americans off our fat asses and off to PT and salad bars. (Grin)

    I will stick with my HEMI.

    Like

Comments are closed.