Concept vehicles are a staple of auto and motorcycle shows. These sometimes dingbat creations aren’t meant to be serious design efforts, but flights of fancy intended to create buzz and garner press attention. Aviation shows rarely have the equivalent, at least from major manufacturers.
The last one I can think of is the Cessna NGP. Remember that one? It was to compete in the Cirrus space with the SR22 as an updated version of the 206/210 idea. It differed from automotive concepts in that it seemed to be a serious project and actually did a much-written-about flyby at AirVenture in 2006, only to disappear into the warrens of Cessna’s Wichita works.
This week, Airbus launched a concept of its own, which we reported on in this story. ThePop.Up is yet another take on the flying car, this time envisioned as a hybrid modular system in which a quadcopter latches onto to a pod-like car with roller skate wheels and transports it hither and yon automagically. Just whistle it up on the inevitable app. Listening to the promo video leaves the impression that the idea emerged from one of those meetings where a bright young MBA announced that Airbus isn’t an airplane company, but a transportation company. The full-circle outcome of such things is sometimes a grizzled old corner office dweller saying, “How about we stick with what we know? Airplanes.”
Will this one be any different just because Airbus is involved? Do the designers think it’s serious or are they just feeding the buzz machine? You can rarely tell by looking from the outside in. But what’s undeniable is that the flying car concept car will not, despite the limits of physics, aerodynamics and a fickle market, go gently into that good night. The shimmering promise of breakthrough technology just over the horizon has always sustained the idea and continues to.
Personally, I have always been doubtful—I’m being generous with that term—of the flying car idea because as an opinion writer, I have a binary choice. I can write about it as though I think it’s serious or I can dismiss it as yet another sketch pad flyby. I’ve tended toward the latter because I’d rather be proven wrong as a doubter than rudely brought to back to earth as a starry-eyed acolyte. It’s just coded into my DNA.
But, personally, this Airbus idea has reached the stage of gaslighting. This is a term much in fashion that involves a level of clever psychological manipulation that causes one to doubt one’s own sanity. Maybe Airbus is the sane one here; the rest of us are either nuts or lacking in enough vision to see past our noses.
That said, the technical challenges of Pop.Up actually are not deal breakers, in my view. The batteries aren’t quite there yet, but will eventually be, either as next-gen storage devices or some form of hybrid drive. The autonomy and swarming control is also doable and you saw an example of that during the Super Bowl halftime show in January. We may be some years away from perfecting this for human transport, but it seems technically feasible, including approvals from regulators. Eventually. Airbus and its design partner, Italdesign, say as soon as seven to 10 years. That sounds optimistic to me.
Stipulating that technical issues can be resolved, I think this idea’s bigger challenge is economics. Such projects require huge investments to develop and if they’re to be profitable, or at least not lose too much money, they require a certain market density that’s more than just early adopter uptake. My guess is you need volume in the thousands, not the multiple dozens, to make a viable business case. I see it as a complex set of metrics related to whether an idea like Pop.Up has just the right mix of range, cost, comfort, speed and intrigue to customers tired of stewing in traffic to reach critical mass.
And remember, even though it may be a “mobility concept,” the damn thing still flies. My observation over 40 years of doing observations is that when people get within 50 feet of flying machines, their brains turn to mush and they lose the normal ability to reason, especially with regard to how much things cost. That means even the smartest MBA—and maybe especially the smartest MBA—underestimates cost by more than half and overestimates market interest by four times. If you graph this out, the line probably parallels the inverse proportion of drag vs. speed. It’s not a physical law, but it should be. It’s also possible that this is just a throwaway trial balloon meant to give people like me something to write about.
Nonetheless, ideas have to come from somewhere and to get a few good ones, you have to advance a lot of bad ones. Will Pop.Up be the former or the latter? Beats me. I feel my sanity draining away as the sheer number of these flying-car-cum-mobility concepts, driven by emerging electric drive ideas, wear down my normally robust skepticism to the size of that odd period between Pop and Up.
