It's long, so I'm skimming a little and... flying cars. If you don't know why we don't have flying cars, you're not a good engineer.
It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems.
[Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars require a 10x energy breakthrough.]
The article is responding to claims by CEOs of car companies, industry and business press, and other hype sources that keep predicting flying cars next year or so. It's predicting that, against this hype, it will not come to pass. Not sure why you've worded your comment in such a way as if the article was hyping up flying cars.
Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface).
Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves).
So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.
I'm not sure that this disproves my original point that self driving cars and flying cars don't belong in the same list because they are fundamentally different engineering problems.
Not quite. It's about 3x. It also depends on whether you're talking fixed wing or rotary wings.
A modern car might easily have 130 kW or more, and that's what a Cessna 172 has (around 180 hp). (Sure, a plane cruises at the higher end of that, while a car only uses that much to accelerate and cruises at the lower end of the range - still not a factor of 10x.)
As another datapoint, a Diamond DA40 does around 28 miles per gallon (< 9 litres per 100 km) at 60% power cruise.
The article is not optimistic on flying cars. The prediction is that an expensive flying car could be purchased no earlier than 2036, and notes a strong possibility that it won’t even happen by 2050. Plus states that minor success (aka 0.1% of car sales are flying cars) isn’t going to happen in his lifetime.
The author also expands on this:
> Don’t hold your breath. They are not here. They are not coming soon.
> Nothing has changed. Billions of dollars have been spent on this fantasy of personal flying cars. It is just that, a fantasy, largely fueled by spending by billionaires.
It’s worth actually reading the article before trashing someone’s career and engineering skills!
Engineering is about focusing on what matters. There's no point in talking about flying cars: they will exist when portable fusion exists, so just talk about that.
It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems.
[Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars require a 10x energy breakthrough.]