Silicon Valley needs to stop talking about flying cars
(The Kitty Hawk Flyer.Kitty Hawk)
Flying cars are all the rage in Silicon Valley. The latest broke cover this week — it's produced by a Larry Page-backed startup, modestly called "Kitty Hawk." (The Wright brothers are so stoked!)
There's just one problem: It isn't really a flying car. It's basically a drone with pontoons and some controls. Check it out in the photo above. Does that look like a flying car to you?
Here's a rundown of all the buzzy "flying cars" that have been making news. There are some big names in there, including Airbus and Uber. But only two vehicles could properly be termed flying cars — because they can both fly and drive.
Included in our roundup is the company that has made the most progress on a proper flying car: Terrafugia, a Massachusetts-based outfit that has been in the flying-car game for about a decade. I covered its progress when it first rolled out its Transition, a flying car that was destined to sell for a few hundred grand, that would run on regular gas, and that didn't require much flight training to operate.
(The Terrafugia Transition.Terrafugia)
The Transition was, strictly speaking, more of a "roadable aircraft" than a flying car — but at least it could be driven like a car. The idea was to provide people with a way to drive between the small airfields that dot the US landscape while covering greater distances in the air.
The Transition simply refined and extended the actually rather long history of inventors putting wings on cars. It's not a complicated principle: If you can attach a wing and a rudder to a car and figure out how to control the flight surfaces, physics will get you airborne and keep you up there.
The historic problem is twofold. Until Terrafugia came along, flying cars were usually adequate as cars and lousy as planes. Even the Transition is a fairly awkward car. But at least is embodies the notion of transformation. This is how flying cars are meant to work — it's how they work in the movies!
(A real flying car, as imagined by television.ABC / Agents of SHIELD screencap)
In the movies, however, we see a lot of vertical-takeoff flying cars, a daunting engineering challenge because cars have to be pretty heavy, while aircraft are supposed to be light. What works on land militates against what succeeds in the air.
From what I can tell, many of the so-called flying-car projects coming out of techtopia are vertical-takeoff-and-landing designs. And so their creators have cut to the chase and decided to skip the whole roadworthy aspect and go straight to a car-as-metaphor angle, while preserving the romance of flying cars. So what we're seeing are personal VTOL contraptions that would function more as replacements for cars and planes.
They would fly everywhere and drive nowhere.
(Harry Potter's flying car used magic.Warner Bros. Pictures)
The arrival of larger and larger drones has enabled this type of thinking, to the detriment of true flying-car enthusiasts. But it's nothing new. For decades, you've been able to buy ultralight aircraft that require little in the way of pilot training to operate. Small helicopters and autogyros have also been around for ages. Nobody called them "cars" — because they aren't cars! And their creators and fans had humility!
Not so with the "flying car" frauds of Silicon Valley. They are either repackaging technologies we've already seen or doing the drone-car mashup thing, surfing the lastest gadgetry trend.
Somebody needs to put a stop to this, and that somebody is me. I know a flying car when I see one, and I'm sorry, Larry Page, but your pontoon drone is no flying car.
NOW WATCH: The newest flying car is backed by Larry Page — and you can buy it by the end of the year
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