For something like a taxi they’d pretty much have to be though. I haven’t really been following this stuff too closely, so don’t know how challenging weather conditions become for quadcopter automated landings.
I missed this the first time through, they’ll be manned:
Once the conditions are ripe, East General Aviation hopes to operate manned eVTOL commercial routes between Shenzhen and Zhuhai in southern China and launch more routes in the future, said Chairman Zhao Qi.
Oh I missed that as well. I guess they’re not ambitious enough to try and make it automated yet. I just assumed they were unmanned because every time I see demos of this stuff it just has a cab without controls in it.
At least at first, people have to trust that there is a human that wants to stay alive as well, piloting the thing. Even if they’ve worked out the weather issues, not having a human at all would be pretty unsettling for most people.
I can see that, knowing that a pilot has skin in the game is definitely reassuring. I do think that at some point we will get to the point where such taxis are completely automated. It does seem like this is a simpler problem than self driving cars. You have a lot more space to work with and there aren’t pedestrians, or random obstacles to worry about. The weather is the only really hard problem here. And if all flying taxis are automated then they can be aware of each other and plan routes around one another.
And electric flying taxis might actually work better for longer range travel than road based ones since they can cover a lot more distance in a short time. If you have predictable routes then you know exactly how much battery you need. Landing stations could even provide swappable batteries, so a taxi could land, swap out for a charged battery and be ready to go.
Yeah very much agree with all that. I’d personally prefer if this sort of tech was restricted to automated taxi services that are highly regulated. Opening it up to private cars sounds like a recipe for disaster. Definitely going to be interesting to follow how China develops this tech.
For something like a taxi they’d pretty much have to be though. I haven’t really been following this stuff too closely, so don’t know how challenging weather conditions become for quadcopter automated landings.
I missed this the first time through, they’ll be manned:
Oh I missed that as well. I guess they’re not ambitious enough to try and make it automated yet. I just assumed they were unmanned because every time I see demos of this stuff it just has a cab without controls in it.
At least at first, people have to trust that there is a human that wants to stay alive as well, piloting the thing. Even if they’ve worked out the weather issues, not having a human at all would be pretty unsettling for most people.
I can see that, knowing that a pilot has skin in the game is definitely reassuring. I do think that at some point we will get to the point where such taxis are completely automated. It does seem like this is a simpler problem than self driving cars. You have a lot more space to work with and there aren’t pedestrians, or random obstacles to worry about. The weather is the only really hard problem here. And if all flying taxis are automated then they can be aware of each other and plan routes around one another.
And electric flying taxis might actually work better for longer range travel than road based ones since they can cover a lot more distance in a short time. If you have predictable routes then you know exactly how much battery you need. Landing stations could even provide swappable batteries, so a taxi could land, swap out for a charged battery and be ready to go.
You’re probably right. Some things I would think that would need to be worked out:
China might be the best way to test all of this out since they have such control over their citizens, we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.
Yeah very much agree with all that. I’d personally prefer if this sort of tech was restricted to automated taxi services that are highly regulated. Opening it up to private cars sounds like a recipe for disaster. Definitely going to be interesting to follow how China develops this tech.
I guess we’ll find out soon. I wouldn’t want to be the testers though.