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The first flying car, 'Model A,' approved by the FAA and it's 100% electric (www.usatoday.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/tech@kbin.social
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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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[+] 131 points 3 years ago (27 children)
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  • [–] 97 points 3 years ago* (18 children)

    The lengths Americans will go to to not build trains is astounding.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Someone should design an armored train that can be used by the military.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    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.

    See Precision Schedule Railroading

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    [–] 45 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    You know what it also is? A purely theoretical 3D rendered vehicle that doesn't exist.

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  • [–] [S] 26 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    What could possibly go wrong? (everything)

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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    • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (18 children)

    Will you also need a pilots license to purchase? I wonder where you would even be allowed to transition from driving to flying...

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago* (13 children)

    Driving down the highway, hit a traffic jam. Don't even slow down just go airborne over the jam.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    @Lantech

    @Ragnell @ExpensiveConstant

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    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.

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    [–] 17 points 3 years ago

    "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.

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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    I bet these will sell like NFTs, and be just as useful.

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    [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    It's also the first flying car (fully electric!) to kill 15 people when it crashes into a duplex.

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    [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    Yeah, no way that thing is real.

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    [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    People can’t navigate safely in two dimensions, and y’all want to add a third?

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    [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    People can barely drive in 2D, let alone manage 3D travel

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    [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    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.

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