Flying Cars

Answers
1. San Francisco
2. Palo Alto
3. Oakland
4. Los Angeles (LA)
5. Malibu

Transcript
Automakers throw the word mobility around like crazy, especially at CES but this year Hyundai decided you know what we’re gonna go one step further and create our own air taxi.

The SA1 is Hyundai’s air taxi that will transport four passengers. Now initially it’ll have a pilot but the plan is to make it autonomous because of course in the future everything will be autonomous. Uber and Hyundai have partnered together for this vehicle. This is actually the first partner that Uber had that has the manufacturing prowess of Hyundai and in the future, we’ll be able to get in this air taxi and get away from all the traffic and apparently all the regular people were trapped on the earth.

The SA1 will have a cruising speed of about a hundred and eighty miles an hour and it’ll fly within elevations about one to two thousand feet and it’ll have a range of sixty miles. You’re not gonna fly this from say LA to San Francisco but you might use it to go from maybe San Francisco to Palo Alto or to Oakland or LA to Malibu and of course that partnership with Uber means you’ll be able to book one of these things through the app.

Now when you have a lot of these in the sky which is what Uber and Hyundai and a bunch of other companies want they’re gonna come up with some safety issues. Hyundai says that because of all the propellers if one fails the other ones will pick it up. There’s a lot of redundancies built into this air taxi plus it’ll have a parachute. So if everything fails on this EV, it’s an electric then it’ll just float to the ground. Hopefully not on your house.

Now the way this thing works is it’s not like your typical drone where all the propellers are always pointed up as it’s a bit like a Harrier. Those back to propellers when you take off they are pointed down but once you get going they turn and when those turn it propels the SA1 forward. Now Hyundai and Uber have thought beyond just a flying machine they are talking about a hub there’s the S hub where these things will take off and land and to get to those they have these little autonomous pod’s.

Hyundai during its press conference said that they would like these little pods to be as iconic as San Francisco’s cable cars. I don’t know about that. I don’t know how much regional flair you can add to well a tiny metal. It looks like a pill. But it will create this sort of hub-and-spoke situation where people from this part of town can go to a hub, be an autonomous vehicle and then get in a flying machine.

That may or may not be autonomous of course, all of this is in the well far future it’s gonna be a while before these things take off literally. During its press conference, Hyundai said that they want to democratize air travel. It’s tough to see how that will work, though because these things will only hold 4 passengers. We’ve seen air taxi concepts before. What’s interesting is this is from a major automaker Hyundai has the manufacturing prowess to pull it off they build a ton of cars they might as well throw in a few air taxis. For more automotive and air-taxi coverage, be sure to subscribe to doing gadget

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: There’s not really anything new in the car industry. Just to give you an idea, Henry Ford started selling Model Ts in October of 1908. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Selden Day a patent for a flying or air car eight months earlier. And, since then, the idea has essentially only flown in our imaginations.

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GLINTON: The ’60s futuristic cartoon, “The Jetsons,” by Hanna-Barbera put a visual on the flying car for most people. A flying car with a bubble that makes that funny sound.

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GLINTON: Meet Samuel Schweighart. He’s one of the founders of Terrafugia. Terrafugia is Latin for escape the earth. The company is trying to make the flying car a reality. They call it the Transition.

SAMUEL SCHWEIGHART: Not quite fully a Jetsons car. We’re not taking off from the top of our apartment building or have a big bubble. But we think it’s the first step towards the Jetson car or towards a true flying car, however you envision it. So, we want to be known as the people that got it there. The Wright brothers of flying cars, you could say.

GLINTON: And by first step – and the Transition is genuinely a first step – it has big, fold-up wings and it vaguely looks like a car that flies.

SCHWEIGHART: Or more like an airplane that drives.

GLINTON: Now, that seems like an important distinction.

SCHWEIGHART: We think of it, first and foremost, as an aircraft. That puts us in the right mindset of both the expectations of what it does and just kind of how it looks, so it flies. You land in an airport, but it has the added capability of (unintelligible) out of the airport, you can fold the wings up and drive it on the road. It’s a street legal car. Take it home. Take it to where you’re trying to go. Take it to the store.

GLINTON: I met Schweighart on the loading dock of the Jacob Javits Center in New York, where they’ve taken the Transition to this week’s New York Auto Show. It’s amazing how people responded to the idea of a flying car.

Tony Monico(ph) was one of the teamsters on the dock. He’s done 17 auto shows. He says he can’t imagine driving or flying the Transition in New York, but maybe.

TONY MONICO: Something where you can start to fly when you’re in the desert and you just take off and go. Never seen one yet like this. This is real nice.

GLINTON: The car looks like a plane with the wings folded up. On the ground, it goes about 80 miles an hour, about 100 in the air. And at $300,000, it won’t be clogging the skies yet.

GEOFF WARDLE: Certain everybody, since they saw the Jetsons, has wondered why we haven’t got flying cars yet. And it seems like the ultimate form of freedom, a way of beating all of the traffic gridlock.

GLINTON: Geoff Wardle is a professor of advanced mobility research at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. That means he thinks and teaches about how we drive now and in the future. Wardle says there are some very hard design challenges that keep cars on the ground.

WARDLE: There’s a difference between a fender bender on the 405 Freeway and a fender bender at 8,000 feet.

GLINTON: Wardle says there’s an even greater challenge with infrastructure and educating people about flying.

WARDLE: Why do we want to take the problems that we have on the ground at the moment with the number of vehicles that congest our streets? Why would we want to move that problem into the sky?

GLINTON: But there’s no fun in that, is it?

WARDLE: Well, that’s a good question. It depends. You think driving in Los Angeles on the 405 at the peak hours at the moment is fun?

GLINTON: Wardle says he firmly believes there’s a lot of fun to be had here on the ground, but he says this car is a first step and a boy can dream.

Adapted from Flying car glides to reality by NPR News