Self-Driving Cars

I'm going to bring this up because Silasw mentioned it in the AI thread. He mentioned that the reason we don't have flying cars is because of the human element, presumably that you need a pilot's license and that self-driving cars would solve this issue.

Which...yeah? I guess? But it doesn't actually address the tons of infrastructure and construction issues. Like, planes and cars are shaped differently because they have really different requirements. A plane with a body shaped like a car would be an awful plane. And when it's in car mode, the wings would need to be folded up, which would create a lot of problems in places with low clearance. And if you go the helicopter route, same problem with the car body being terrible for a helicopter, but you also have the issue of a weird-ass shape because you need the little rear rotor to keep it stable in flight.

And then you get into shit like where the fuck you land it or park it. You either have to build a city around it completely, which ain't happening, or you have to do super robust public transit to make up for there being only a few choke-points where people can land. And in that case, you might as well just do public transit and remove the need for cars at all.

Flying cars won't happen because they're a legitimately terrible idea and all the fictional ones that aren't inherently awful happen to involve hover-tech that we don't have and where it's pretty likely it kinda can't happen. It might happen, but we have no idea how it could work. We don't know the science at all. Which means that self-driving can't solve the problem of any flying car inherently being a shitty car that is also a shitty plane or helicopter.

Note that even the Jetsons made fun of the idea. Flying cars just meant the traffic jams are in the air.

The whole fantasy behind flying cars is thinking you can just fly over traffic. But if flying cars somehow became mainstream you would just have traffic in the air too.

Edited by M84 on Jun 18th 2023 at 5:00:21 PM

There is much more space in the air.

And it would get filled up quicker than you think. And do you really want traffic lanes on the sky as well?

Think about it. Building more lanes for traffic does Jack shit to lessen it. Why do you think flying cars would work any better?

The real solution to traffic is to encourage and support public transportation.

And yes, you would have to designate lanes and routes in the air for flying cars.

Flying cars are stupid zeerust bullshit like jet packs.

Edited by M84 on Jun 18th 2023 at 5:10:59 PM

It won't be free flight. It'll be "everyone has to stick to these defined flight patterns" because that's how planes work. There's other stuff flying around too and you get stuff like how, say, the monarch butterflies fly at pretty low altitudes right over a bunch of major cities every year. The only smart way to approach that would be to ban flying cars while they migrate and at that point, you might as well ban flying cars completely.

Flying cars are probably something I would call a "Plasma Candle", I've proposed something similar as a trope before. Better name pending.

But, basically, a "Plasma Candle" is when you have a technology in sci-fi that's given futuristic attributes for no real practical benefit. Star Trek provides a few examples:

• Literal, Plasma Candles.

• Sonic Showers

• Antimatter Fireworks

• Using Forcefields as Jail Cell Walls, arguably.

Rayguns and laser swords are also arguably this too.

Basically, they're filled with purely aesthetic "Futuristic Stuff" without a lot of concern for how this would actually be better than a more conventional approach.

Driving a car is one thing but flying a car is colossally harder simply because you also have to take into account that you have an additional Z-axis in play.

Oh god, and I just realized that the question of congestion is so much fucking worse with a ton of air traffic. What happens if someone's car breaks down on the designated landing space and it takes too long to get any others opened up? You'd have flying cars raining down from the air because they all ran out of power.

x5 You can have flying buses, too. (Depending on how fast they can take off and land.)

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 18th 2023 at 12:40:54 PM

You mean a plane. Like, a flying bus is literally a plane. It's a big thing that carries a bunch of people that can't land anywhere but an airport because it's big. A flying bus is a completely useless and asinine solution to a problem that could be solved by putting in robust ground based public transportation. Like, I am not kidding that while a flying car is a bad idea, a flying bus is an excruciatingly horrible idea that's completely unworkable if you've put any thought at all into the infrastructure required.

It is literally just a plane. It will have all of the exact same issues and limitations of a plane. Or it's a huge fucking helicopter that will need a ton of space to land in because it's a huge fucking helicopter.

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 18th 2023 at 5:42:58 AM

And the people who like flying cars and self driving cars hate public transportation in general anyway. They would not support public flying buses.

And, of course, self-driving will not solve any of these problems in any way.

I think flying cars are a product of what is likely an outdated vision of a future. Where the world population grew high enough that you had megacities with kilometer-high skyscrapers that went on for hundreds of square miles. Which meant the only way to effectively navigate them is by having many, many layers of traffic on top of each other traveling at speeds that are impractical on the ground.

However pretty much every serious projection of world population nowadays has world population entering a decline in the second half of the 21st century. To give an example the UN is currently projecting that world population will peak at 10.4 billion in 2088. That's nowhere close to the world population needed to support the sort of megacities of science fiction. No giant megacities and the cost/benefit ratio never favors flying cars regardless of how reliable they can be made.

...Apart from the energy burden of flying cars, which seems to me like it would be enormous;

I do think you could potentially solve the 'everyone flies in air highways, which get clogged' dilemma by having routes planned centrally to be non-intersecting, and the assigned routes flown by autopilot. It seems to me that there are fewer factors to figure in in the air (the term was coined for current systems that fly airplanes, after all).

However. That would probably be hell on birds, so a non starter from that direction. Would need to address failure modes - what happens when a flying car does malfunction or hit a large bird, can routes quickly re-route, etc. And it doesn't address parking.

Personally, I've always been a favor of being in the city and taking public transportation myself :p (I gave up my car once I moved back to a town I could do so).

Thinking about it I’m actually wondering if the problem with flying cars is that we don’t actually want flying cars, we want hover cars but keep saying flying cars.

There’s a fundamental mismatch between our language and our desire.

@Falrinn Ken Levine, the creator of the Bioshock Games, once said something I think might explain the idea.

In the early 20th century and such, the invention of the airplane was a huge deal. The technology was also advancing rapidly and was very hyped up. As such, the idea of essentially living in the skies ala Columbia didn't seem too crazy at the time.

I'd say hover cars probably emerged out of a similar mindset.

the thing is that floating continents seem way more practical than hovercars.

As for your proposed Plasma Candle trope concept I think going with a name derived from Gadget might work, in the vein of Gadgetbahn (which flying cars count as :V)

X8Airplanes are more of a flying ship.

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jun 18th 2023 at 1:34:14 PM

Straight up, you’re wrong. Zeppelins were flying ships. An airplane is a flying bus. That is what a commercial airplane is literally designed to be.

You should straight up drop this angle because you’re just showing off how little you know about this topic.

In the aspects we are talking about, I don’t really see the distinction between a passenger zeppelin and a passenger plane. The zeppelin is slower and bigger inside, so the passenger service is closer to a cruise ship then a (modern) jet, but they both cannot stop every few kilometres on their route all the same.

I was about to make a chart of sorts about land, water, land equivalents. So let's see:

• Motorcycle = Jet Ski = Small Plane, or maybe Paramotor?

• Car = Boat = Helicopter or maybe a Small Plane?

• Bus = Bigger Boat = Bigger Plane, like a Commercial Plane

• Train = Ship = Airship

Edited by Protagonist506 on Jun 18th 2023 at 11:37:11 AM

This makes no sense to say.

They aren't ships or busses or anything like that. They are their own things that fly and carry people and/or cargo.

That's like saying a bus is just a train that doesn't go on rails. No, busses and trains, (and this is true), are generally different things. Or saying a shark is just a wolf but in the water. Which, while middle ages people did occasionally say that because they had a hypothesis that every creature on land had a water counterpart, (thus "dogfish"), is clearly ridiculous now and saying "because these things exhibit similar behaviors they're basically the same thing actually" is kind of a terrible argument.

Yes, and Airbus is called Airbus, but that means suddenly cargo planes are what, busses that carry spaceship parts?

The front of a bus is not called a cockpit, it's called the driver's seat. You don't have bus pilots.

There's easily dozens of vehicles that go between places and don't stop between them, and have only certain places they can stop, and carry people and not-people, but they're not all "basically the same vehicle".

To say with unabashed confidence essentially "Zepplins are Ships and Planes are Busses, and if you disagree you're obviously stupid" when zepplins don't float for very long and planes can't be driven down a road is certainly a take you can have that's actively wrong.

Edited by Florien on Jun 19th 2023 at 12:45:13 PM

Zepplins were literally called airships, and in most nations militaries which heavily used them in the WWI and interwar eras were the jurisdiction of the navy....

The controls are called a helm, and they had a helmsan, navigator, and a captain...

Its quite fair to compare them to ships, it was done even when they were around.

Edited by Imca on Jun 19th 2023 at 12:36:56 PM

I mean, a lot of short-haul flights function like buses anyway. And you get buses that only really stop at the terminal stops at either end of the route.

I should probably have specified that I was talking about city buses. This is why I mentioned that to have flying buses the rapid speed of takeoff and landing is critical.