Get the latest tech news
Are flying cars finally here?
They have long been a symbol of a future that never came. Now a variety of companies are building them—or something close.
The air-taxi idea goes like this: you book your trip through an app; you stroll a few blocks to the closest vertiport (an existing helipad for now, while municipalities or contractors construct new infrastructure); you stow your bag in the “frunk,” climb in, and fasten your seat belt tight across your lap; the taxi ascends in a hover, transitions to forward flight, and joins a zippy procession of other craft along an established aerial corridor, probably one that follows a highway below. David King, the Arizona State professor, noted, “Air-taxi routes could help rejuvenate some rural economies, if the cost was such that you could legitimately live ninety to a hundred miles away from your work.” Matthew Clarke, the engineering postdoc, told me that, as someone from a minority background, he tends to be skeptical of shiny technocratic solutions, but he sees something real here. Warner, watching the jumpers, was reminded of an old joke: “The good thing about when your parachute doesn’t open is that you have the rest of your life to solve the problem.” Idle conversation turned to plane-crash survival: a Serbian flight attendant who fell from thirty-three thousand feet and lived; those who walked away from the 1999 crash in Sioux City.
Or read this on Hacker News
