Alef Aeronautics’ ‘Model A’ has a driving range of 200 miles and a flight range of 110 miles. The company plans to start delivering cars by late 2025.
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The lengths Americans will go to to not build trains is astounding.
It isn’t even that dramatic.
Statistically close to all trips are within a couple of miles of home. US average vehicle miles traveled per person per day are a staggeringly high 25, yet still, nearly all trips people make are very close to home. Good pedestrian and bike infrastructure is enough to cover virtually all of those trips. You don’t need roads for cars. You don’t really need trains. You don’t need personal aircraft for sure. You don’t need autotaxies or any other weird techbro drone solution. You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes where you won’t feel like at any moment you may get mowed down by a F250 SuperDuty. But we deliberately design spaces to be unpleasant and unsafe for anyone outside of a car to stop people from walking even though designs like that are WAY more expensive for the taxpayer.
High-speed rail and intercity mass transit are super neat and I’d love to see more of it. And that’s definitely the kind of trip a “flying car” is primarily confronting. But it’s not even the real problem that needs fixing. Trips to a park, grocery store, and bar are the trips that need fixing, and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
and bar are the trips that need fixing (…) and the fact that we encourage and sometimes even force designs where you NEED cars to make those trips is madness.
It’s utterly baffling to me that bar culture is so alive in America where we have to drive everywhere. It seems like a fucking obvious problem that everyone just ignores. Under what circumstances is a person driving themselves to a bar, parking there for a while, then leaving unimpaired? People should be protesting this in the streets; why does no one seem to care?
It’s worse than that. I would venture that in nearly all US places where a new bar can be built there is a required mandatory minimum number of parking spaces to build next to it to ensure it’s “easy” to drive to. Which doesn’t even work, but that’s a separate screed.
Most civil engineers and urban planners don’t even think about it because that’s not the job as they see it. The professions surrounding urban planning and development largely just consider the codes and manuals to be received wisdom and so carry out their teachings uncritically.
You just need maintained, pleasant bikeped routes
Weather, though. Not every place is California.
They can be in the shade. Besides, bad weather causes car accidents anyway
Other countries mange this with proper clothing and a variety of alternative public transit options.
Rain Capes are a popular solution for rainy weather when cycling.
Or you chose to avoid the bike that day and take the bus/streetcar/metro/etc.
I live in NYC and by far my favorite aspect is being able to decide between a variety for transit options that best suit the specific trip I’m making. For example, I typically commute by bike, but if it’s raining I can easily switch that trip to be on the subway.
There’s very little correlation between cities with good bikeped culture and cities with good weather. The only factor that’s highly correlated is quality of the bikeped network. This idea is a flat-out myth.
Someone should design an armored train that can be used by the military.
First, the US would need to have more locomotive manufacturers than you can fit in a single sprinter van. We’ve abandoned rail so thoroughly that we have to have foreign companies manufacture most of our rolling stock these days.
We’ve abandoned passenger rail, but not freight rail. The USA consistently ranks as one of the top users of freight rail (and by many metrics it is the top user of freight rail). The issue is that most American cities outside of the northeast corridor tend to be far enough apart that you are going to be better off flying. High speed rail hasn’t really caught on yet, but I suspect in another 15 years it’s going to be lot more common now that it’s starting to look commercially viable
We have just about the dumbest freight rail operators, though. They care so much about cost curves that they regularly turn down highly profitable expansions because it would make the line go down. Being highly profitable isn’t good enough when the line isn’t going up. It also makes them absolutely allergic to capital expenses, not to mention how extreme their cost-cutting measures are (especially re: labor) even at the expense of safety. Cutting $10 of cost by rejecting $20 of new business is a bargain in the eyes of these morons.
Not to mention the pure madness of the track & right-of-way being privately owned. That shit is just bonkers.
I wonder how much worse our rail mode share would look if you did a comparison of countries without including unit trains. I suspect very, very much worse.
Also average rolling stock age is what, 20 years? And there’s still units from the first days of modern roller bearings in service? Yeesh.
I am not at all expert in the matter, but aren’t freight rates heavily regulated? That would likely put a damper on expansion – if you can’t easily increase price in response to demand, the default strategy will be to milk your existing resources for every drop. Any expansion will detract from profit margin.
I wouldn’t say that at all. I would describe it as the opposite, an unregulated hellscape.
They build and maintain their own tracks at their own discretion except when the public steps in to fund a particular project. There are rules about operating their right-of-way… many of which they have a standard practice of completely ignoring and nobody does anything about it, especially when it comes to the law that they give passenger rail preference.
They mostly can set their own prices, with only market competition controlling what they set them to. The STB is pretty toothless even when there is a complaint of anti-competitive behavior.
Outside of a small number of high-volume passenger corridors, they have complete freedom to set their own schedules. In the last decade, they’ve started increasingly operating trains unscheduled and calling it “precision scheduled rail”. In actual practice, PSR is just running the longest trains they physically can and having them leave the yard exactly when they’re full and not according to any clock. They theoretically need to show right of way to passenger service, but their trains have gotten so big and long that they are physically unable to show right of way and so they just don’t.
The mandatory safety rules are pretty minimum, especially when compared to things like air travel. Enforcement of Environmental Protection rules and post-incident safety reviews are pitifully enforced.
They’re also the only private industry specifically exempt from the NLRA. Just the rail industry has a largely weaker set of worker protections than every other American gets.
I’m sure I could keep coming up with more examples. But as far as I’ve ever seen, the only thing stopping them from expanding service is an unwillingness to do so. Regular Old Market bullshit short-term financial goals are preferred even if they are not sustainable and long-term sustainability is unacceptable because it would hurt short-term financial goals.
The industry doesn’t really need more regulation though. Because what it needs is nationalization, at least of the track and ROWs.
Just in case you’re not aware, armored trains are (or were) a thing. In the US they were used from the US civil war to early in the cold war (at the end there to transport nuclear weapons).
In the rest of the world… the most recent use is by Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.
The US has loads of trains. This is a huge misnomer. The US has one of the most complex commercial-industrial train networks in the world. The problem is the commuter one uses the same tracks and is massively underfunded.
America has one of the worst run freight rail networks in the world. Plighted by decades of deferred maintenance and destruction of existing infrastructure in service of the all mighty operating ratio.
Amtrak would be far more reliable without the American freight rail industry clogging up the lines with massive super trains and refusal to make capital improvements to the network.
Trains can’t fly, gottem.
But muh liberty…
Agreed
Their biggest investors are people who think they’re “smart” for not buying the Brooklyn Bridge from that guy they met in a bar.
Do they speak in an unnaturally deep voice and wear black turtlenecks?
Literally all VTOL ideas are like this. People are totally oblivious to the fact that helicopters are VTOLs, so anything that tries to mimic that ability is just building a terrible type of helicopter.
Pretty sure these people are trying to build a stylish helicopter more than anything else.
Not to mention people are bad enough drivers when limited to two dimensions. Could you imagine adding a third?!
Yea, I’m having a hard time believing those claims. Beating gravity requires a lot of energy, and oil still has a very high energy density, so that’s why no one’s really talking about electric planes. Driving range of 200 miles and flight range of 11 miles would’ve been plausible to me.
Netflix might as well start getting the graphics ready for the documentary
You know what it also is? A purely theoretical 3D rendered vehicle that doesn’t exist.
The company, founded in 2015 by Dukhovny, Konstantin Kisly, Pavel Markin, Oleg Petrov in Palo Alto, California, has been test driving and flying the car’s prototype since 2019.
“The constraints were: it has to be a real car (driving in driving lanes, parking in parking spaces), it has to have a vertical takeoff (otherwise it is not a real flying car), it has to be affordable for most people (not just the rich),” Alef said.
The following year, the first sub-scale prototype was built, and in 2018, the first full-size “skeleton” took to the skies.
It’s for real this time. Whether or not it will be a Tesla lemon, time will tell. But the FAA is generally EXTREMELY safety-conscious.
Cool, wheres that footage?
Guess we’ll see. I don’t have 300k to throw away getting one.
I remember a video we watched in an engineering class back in the early 2000s about a guy who was making “flying cars” that were tested and “flyable”.
They still don’t have a practical prototype.
There’s a suspicious lack of real photos and video of this soon-to-be-ready vehicle that’s set to ship to consumers in just 2½ years. Surely they’re not still in the very early R&D phase, right?
The best actual photos I can find is of an oversized drone with a basic frame the size of a car, a “cockpit” in the middle that will barely fit 1 person, 8 propellers where the entire “car” would normally be in a car, and some light-weight foam side panels slapped on. No car engine or car wheels (except some small castors to roll it around).
Along with the (paraphrasing) “it’s supposed to be a slow-moving vehicle while on the ground” comment in the article, I guess they’re building a big drone with a small lawn mower motor to move you around on the ground.
What could possibly go wrong? (everything)
There are strict rules about flying. If it is an airplane then you need pilots license, which involves a lot of training. I’m comfortable with someone who has a pilots license having one, but it isn’t easy to get a pilots license and you need to follow strict rules of where you can fly. Large parts of most cities have complex rules on where you are allowed to fly, so most trips will not be practical in the city as you can’t get close to where you want to go.
Either that or it is an ultralight, which doesn’t need a pilots license, but has strict rules on where you can fly (no cities, or something like that), and even stricter max power rules, also pilot only no passengers.
Either way, it is only practical if you are a farmer, fly to inspect your fields, then fly to the nearest ‘big’ city for shopping. (Big city may be 30k people). The slow ground speed and limited flying area makes it a toy for most people, not 'practical transport .
The above assumes that it actually goes on sale, that is not a scam.
If it works then I can see it being used how you say. I’m … skeptical (at best) that it will work though.
Maybe lazy rich people will want one so they don’t have to get off the plane or out of the car when traveling. Between a state or two.
It looks like it’s a giant quadcopter with wheels and a car shaped shell. It’s hard to believe it has the lift to lift multiple people anyways…
I’m betting on ultralight. And toy for rich people, not for practical use.
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Someone should try to convince him to get into the submarine game.
He looks like Nicholas Cage
Will you also need a pilots license to purchase? I wonder where you would even be allowed to transition from driving to flying…
If you drive too far forward in a parking space and grind on the parking block, or someone dings your door, do you need an A&P to repair it?
Driving down the highway, hit a traffic jam. Don’t even slow down just go airborne over the jam.
Aside from the $300k price tag, sadly….
The car will be a Low Speed Vehicle, meaning it won’t go faster than about 25 miles per hour on a paved surface. If a driver needs a faster route, they will be able to use the vehicle’s flight capabilities, according to Alef.
People’s driving senses are so fucking bad, I can’t imagine them flying. It’ll be in the news often I guess “car crashes into building while trying to back up.” “car flies into power lines thousands without power” well I guess that’s fairly typical already.
What the hell is the point of a car that can’t do more than 25 mph? This thing can fucking fly, but it’s as capable as a golf cart on the ground?
I’ll believe this when it actually exists (the thing they’re promising, not a skeletal prototype), and I’ll believe that the FAA is cool with flying cars when I see them on my commute. None of this currently passes the bullshit check.
I imagine that it’s supposed to be flown and is only temporarily used on the ground. Same way airplanes don’t have a higher ground speed
Airplanes have a plenty high ground speed. They gotta go pretty dang fast for take off. ;)
Lol ok true, I meant more of a maneuvering at speed. Even then, thinking about it my analogy is terrible :/
K well there are a few key differences between cars and airplanes… If planes could drive around on the road, nobody would buy a car. That’s kinda the whole goddamn point, that’s why people want a car that can fly.
I take issue with a “flying car” that’s not a fucking car. What the hell is the point? If you’re spending $300k, why wouldn’t you actually become a pilot instead of buying some half-baked car that isn’t actually usable as a car?
I think it’s mostly an expensive toy. They made it VTOL so it does not have to go fast enough on the ground to become airborne. That’s ok, it doesn’t need a runway to take off, but VTOL is way to make things fly that really have no business flying. Airplanes have a certain shape because they have to. This thing looks like a bar of soap in comparison. I’m sure it uses a ton of energy to stay airborne, it would have the glide coefficient of a rock.
This is a ridiculous comment. Are you intentionally missing the point? Why are you applying airplane design principles to a car? It’s not a plane…it’s a car.
Glide coefficient? In what scenario do you imagine this car gliding? Do you see wings? They didn’t “make it VTOL” because they couldn’t design a functional airplane, they designed it as a VTOL from day one because a flying car that isn’t VTOL capable wouldn’t be viable. The very concept of a flying car is based on VTOL. It can only work as a car if it’s VTOL. A fixed-wing flying car would be asinine, where the hell do you expect people to take off?
Look I am not a supporter of this thing. It has too many glaring issues, like the fact that it doesn’t currently exist. You cannot, however, criticize this vehicle based on its merits as an airplane, because it’s not an airplane.
You ABSOLUTELY can criticize it as an airplane. It’s a vehicle that flys. And as a VTOL, it doesn’t have much if any of a glide coefficient like deaconblue said. Which is extremely relevant if power goes out and instead of being able to glide to safety, it just falls like a rock on whatever is below. Saying “its a VTOL, so it doesn’t matter” puts you on the same safety standards as that submarine guy.
Okay, then I’m going to criticize you as an airplane. You’re a fucking piece of shit airplane, dude. You don’t even have wings, what the fuck are you doing? You can’t produce thrust, you can’t generate lift, what good are you as an airplane? Get outta here, stop wasting everyone’s time.
See how fuckin’ stupid that was?
Yes, there is an inherent risk associated with aircraft that cannot glide. What’s your point? Cars can’t have wings, it simply isn’t viable, so what do you propose? You want them to design a car-shaped object that can magically glide without wings? Think about it for more than a second and you’ll see the issue there. What you’re suggesting cannot exist within the currently-understood laws of physics. In order for flying cars to become reality, there is a certain level of risk that must be accepted.
Saying “its a VTOL, so it doesn’t matter” puts you on the same safety standards as that submarine guy.
You don’t know a fucking thing about me, so how about we steer clear of character assumptions? Maybe show me the courtesy of just arguing facts on this one?
That guy knowingly and intentionally broke all of the rules. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not suggesting any rules be broken or any safety standards be forsaken, I’m simply pointing out that you cannot judge this concept based on a fundamentally different type of aircraft.
It’s a vehicle that flys.
Ever seen a fuckin’ helicopter? Hot air balloon? Blimp? Turns out there’s more than one way to get and remain airborne. Think…
Your name is well chosen. I think you just wasted a lot of time essentially making the same points I did.
Reading comprehension has always been a struggle for you, I take it. It does not matter how it compares to an airplane, because it is not an airplane. It’s not a boat either, you imbecile, do we need to dissect that one as well?
What about insurance flying low over populated regions? Air traffic control? I don’t think the physical flying capability is the problem with flying cars
It’ll probably use VFR rules, like a helicopter. I’m thinking the target is rich guys who eventually get pilot licenses.
yes. flying cars have existed already. basically they’re treated like planes.
“Approved by the FAA” is overstaying things a bit. The only thing they were approved for was testing; there’s a lot of road (pun intended) between that and certification.
I bet these will sell like NFTs, and be just as useful.
It’s also the first flying car (fully electric!) to kill 15 people when it crashes into a duplex.
Yeah, no way that thing is real.
BREAKING NEWS! Flying car piloted by CEO Jetson Bankroll and 5 others crash into the Empire State Building! Over 2000 people reported dead or injured, passengers still missing and efforts to find them in the rubble are underway.
I don’t even trust people in the current two dimensions they drive in, why in the fuck would I want them in a third dimension. Seems like a bad idea.
People can barely drive in 2D, let alone manage 3D travel
People can’t navigate safely in two dimensions, and y’all want to add a third?
According to the article, it’s available for preorder. Hmmm.
If I worked for that company, I’d be strongly tempted to “borrow” that preorder list. After all, it’s basically a directory of rich people who also happen to be imbeciles. I have zero experience in running scams, but considering how easy the targets are, I think I’d be successful anyway.
I’ll just leave this here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fcWOivJ6bsEvery 3-4 years, for at least the last 25 years, the WSJ has run a story like this where someone has finally solved all the problems of flying cars. Lots of people throw money at them; nothing ever happens. If you give two seconds of thought to the horror that would result with thousands of people rising into the air every morning to make their commute, you’d realize how absurd this notion is.
