They remain the butt of tech jokes, but flying cars will change the future.
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| © Opener Arguably the most exciting flying car that could end up populating the skies, the Opener Blackfly could go on sale as early as 2019. |
By Brian Cooley, Roadshow
Few things roll eyes like the mention of flying cars. They're the next big thing -- and have been since World War II.
But
we've reached the point where they are being pursued and invested in by
too many smart companies. Here are my top five reasons why I hope they
aren't all stupid.
5. Chore reduction: I
hesitate to put this on the list because it means a lot of people who
drive and deliver for a living may be out of work, but shifting
deliveries to big drones is a slice of the flying-car vision that makes
real business sense.
4. Friendlier cities:
Moving cars off the streets mean we can revamp them for people not
machines. A huge amount of why our cities look and function like they do
is because it works for cars and trucks. Moving much of that
functionality to the air could change the nature and scale of what's on
the ground. I rank this only at number four because I'm not sure a lot
of Americans really care, but in other countries this would be a big
consideration.
3. Shorter trips: Historians often fawn at how
cities like New York emerged around tidy grids, but a series of corners
is just about the longest way to get from here to there. Flying car
routes will be much more of a straight-line affair, reducing the amount
of travel to get somewhere. Crows have always known what they're doing.
2. Managed fleet: I think any credible vision of flying cars is one of autonomous flying
cars, and that paves the way for a highly managed fleet of airborne
vehicles. Freed of the wasteful vagaries of human navigation, indecision
and inaccuracy, airborne transit should be as efficient as commercial
air transport, which optimizes every mile, knot of speed and drop of
fuel.
1. Less congestion: This is the meta gain
of everything, moving transit off streets we have proven we cannot
unclog and simply getting it up and out of the way. Public transit is
great, but the central role of personal, point-to-point transportation
will not recede in our lifetimes. I don't relish the idea of sky
congestion, but traffic in today's cities and tomorrow's suggests at least some personal transit needs to move to the air.
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