Google’s Into Flying Cars Now?

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Flying cars are a staple for futuristic magazine covers—mostly Popular Mechanics—because even though the idea is unlikely to ever work, writing about lost causes just has an irresistible entertainment value. Now, as the exciting world of electric airplanes emerges, we have a new opportunity: just change the definition of flying cars.

That’s what seems to be going on in the daily press and today’s example of it comes from Bloomberg News, which reports that Google billionaire Larry Page has invested in a company called Zee.Aero, which is developing what Bloomberg described as “a small, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.”

Earlier, Bloomberg, impressed with the Icon A5, declared it to be “the closest thing to a flying car yet.” Well, yeah, if an LSA amphib you tow to the lake on its trailer behind another car qualifies as a flying car, then sure, it’s a flying car. While we’re stretching definitions to make a VTOL a flying car, well, isn’t a Harrier a flying car? Or is it disqualified for having guns and ordnance aboard? And how about an R-22? It’s a VTOL and can land in a parking lot?

I’m not sure where this urge to stretch comes from, but I think its recent surfacing may be a result of genuine technological innovations in distributed electric power. These are real and on the cusp of commercialization. More on that in a moment, but first, the standard boilerplate explaining why flying cars have never worked. In aviation, we know it’s primarily because of antagonistic engineering requirements and I think these are actually diverging, not converging. Because of structural weight limitations and power considerations, you end up with a design that’s both a lousy car and a lousy airplane, with the performance of each mode so compromised against even average performance of a dedicated machine for either purpose that it’s just technically and commercially unattractive.

Let’s unpack the Zee.Aero. Nothing in the patent summary suggests it’s a flying car or intended as one. It’s yet another variation of what we’re seeing a lot of—and will see a lot more of—in the electric airplane world: a multi-rotor with distributed power and sophisticated automatic flight stability. This technology is well advanced and widely in use. What’s happening now is that it’s being adapted to carry humans.

Evidently, the Bloomberg writers assumed that since the Zee.Aero has wheels and appears to be parked between two cars, it’s a flying car. The reality is that a VTOL-capable multi-rotor can easily land between two cars. It doesn’t have to be driven into the parking slot, although doing so is actually more efficient than flying it there. Perhaps the most daunting barrier to making the Zee.Aero a car anyone would want to drive is giving it sufficient performance and meeting increasingly stringent crashworthiness requirements while still keeping it light enough to fly. Or to fly far enough to be useful. You can throw all the carbon fiber and titanium you want at the problem, but at some point, you’re going to need mass for protective structure, crush zones and stuff like airbags. In a VTOL, all of that ramps up the battery energy requirement or the energy budget from wherever it comes.

In this reporting and others like it, I keep seeing acolytes getting reporters to nibble on the idea that big things are going to happen within the next five years. Excuse me, but I don’t think so, at least not in the commercial sense. The time frame is longer than that, like closer to a decade. Battery energy density remains a show-stopping reality and there’s nothing on the horizon in the next decade that will change that, so a device like the Zee.Aero concept has endurance similar to the VoloCopter we’ve reported on several times. Right now, that’s about 20 minutes. Three years from now, it might be 35 minutes, although better with hybrid solutions that are just now coming into view. Other technologies will also boost endurance, but not within the decade.

At the Sustainable Aviation Foundation conference in Redwood City last month, I reported on one presenter who said his project autonomous electric airplane project could work with current battery densities. Perhaps, but when he said “work” he meant technically; marketability is something else entirely and the technical guys tend to make assumptions that people who are expected to buy these things simply reject.

Increasingly, the concept for these things is shifting away from discrete modes of transportation and toward on-demand mobility provided by whatever works. This makes much more sense to me than clinging to flying car idea as an enduring idea. Did I just type that? It is an enduring idea. It’s just one we’re never likely to see happen. But what the hell, flying car is a way juicier search term than on-demand mobility.

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