Many of us have wished for a personal flying machine to lift us out of infuriating traffic jams and deposit us on our driveways. With recent advances in materials, power sources, and automation, those dreams may become reality more quickly than many of us realise. Earlier this month, US aerospace start-up Terrafugia unveiled the TF-X, a concept design for a radical new type of personal air transport vehicle.
Terrafugia is just one of a number of companies proposing personal aviation and it has been taking orders for an earlier design – the Transition, a road-legal aeroplane with foldable wings – for several years. The TF-X design is more futuristic, but is more likely to provide what most of us dream of when we think of flying cars.
One of its main selling points is the ability to take off and land vertically like a helicopter. In car mode, the plug-in hybrid can rely on its electric motors and battery packs. For lift-off it needs extra power from its hydrocarbon combustion engine. Folded winglets are extended. Two huge motor pods on either side of the vehicle are pointed vertically up, and the propellers provide lift. Each pod has 16 independent electric motors, with its own controller and battery pack, meaning a failure is not catastrophic.
The TF-X has a maximum speed of 200 miles per hour and a proposed range of 500 miles.
Carl Dietrich acknowledges the concept is a long way from becoming airborne, but he says discussing the idea early is a way to shorten the time it will take to make it a reality, which he currently estimates as between eight and 12 years.
Reservations are being taken for the TF-X, although its price tag has not yet been revealed. It's a fair bet that it'll cost more than the quoted $279,000 that the Transition will set customers back by.
“If you could levitate just some of these cars, fly them through the air and deposit them somewhere else, you could remove some of the major road congestion,”Dietrich says. “Just removing 10% or 15% of the cars would help it all flow again.”
What do you think about this new concept of a car?
Is technology going so far that primitive cars will be soon forgotten? Is this correct?
Is technology going so far that primitive cars will be soon forgotten? Is this correct?
Technology is developing so fast we can’t even adapt to so many changes. Flying cars is one of the most popular thoughts when imagining how the future will be.
ReplyDeleteYears ago the mere thought of a flying car was considered a project beyond human’s capabilities; however, manufacturing a car that can actually fly isn’t a farfetched idea. Besides, some researchers have already come up with some impressive prototypes.
The first cars were also revolutionary at their time; the idea of such a vehicle back then is arguably like the thought of a flying car today. In spite of all difficulties inventors had to go through, the first car was invented and in the same way, a car able to fly will be available to all of us in a matter of time.
A major drawback about cars is the moment you are stuck in traffic, in that precise moment is when people start thinking of an alternative way of moving, and luckily flying cars are now an option to start taking into account. Few examples of this kind of transport would allow the traffic to flow naturally again. This two types of cars should be complementary, in other words, traditional cars wouldn’t have to be forgotten because the point of reducing traffic jams is to distribute the amount of vehicles both on air and on the road.
Lastly, whenever there’s a step further in technology there is always the ethical point of view. In this particular case I don’t see why flying cars wouldn’t be a good idea; what’s more, it’s a sensational idea. Flying cars won’t pollute more than a normal car, they are designed in such a way that if a motor fails the car won’t crash and it will open our minds to other technical projects we can’t even imagine in our society as it is.
It's one of science fiction's greatest unfulfilled promises, right up there with teleportation and time travel.
ReplyDeleteEverybody, since we were kids, has dreamt about this dream becoming true. And it has finally happened. Everyone used to think “in a far away future” this would happen, but anyone expected to happen so fast. Although it was only a matter of time, probably, due to films, we only could imagine this in many centuries from now. But the reality is that technology develops awfully quickly.
This revolutionary prototype is just the start of something that goes beyond our imagination. Imagine you’re flying over Manhattan skyscrapers. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
In fact, the point of these flying cars is to make peoples lives much easier. You could go everywhere you wanted without worrying about traffic jams or having to start driving very early just in case you were late to your destiny.
Besides this great expectation, I think it should be necessary to remind us that technology isn’t yet so advanced to finish this project. There are some drawbacks as the security. Imagine what would happen if the car’s engine suddenly stopped. There’s no way to stop this kind of airplane; it hasn’t got brakes as in normal cars.
Even though, I’m completely sure that once security improves and the prototypes are cheaper, an automobile revolution will start and we’ll start seeing flying cars across the sky.
As we all know we live in a society that is constantly determined by technology. Every day we depend a little bit more on our mobile phones, on internet and on our personal stuff that we all have in our computers or even in our social pages. Technology is a concept that is developing everyday faster that sometimes we aren’t used or we don’t know about the existence of a lot of things or products that are now in our market. We are surprised many times because of this great development that the technology has done in such a short period of time.
ReplyDeleteThis new car showed on the notice is strange now for us, but I think that in future cars will fly and we won’t travel by the street, we just flow through the sky for going from one place to the other. However, I think that this will happen a long time ago. Or maybe I just have this thinking because of all the films and other stories that have been done with the idea of making or producing cars that fly in a proximate future.
On the other hand, I think that maybe these cars could make the original and traditional cars disappear from the market, but I also think that people and the consumers will have to take a time for getting used to them. I am not able to imagine that we will travel by the air and that the cars will fly as we were in a plane. So, for that reason I think that if finally these cars are produced they will star functioning and being sold a long time ago, because of all the new inventions that are the cars companies making nowadays