Could ask KJbushway to build it I guess?
"I can't believe they haven't invented it yet!"
- Thread starter iBender
- Start date
Could ask KJbushway to build it I guess?
You're darn right we were promised flying cars. - Back to the Future lied to me!
Except that any energy saved due to lack of friction is more than offset by the power needed to drive fans that produce the air cushion. Besides, road friction is useful for things like, you know, stopping.
When I was a child, I often thought about rebuilding the roads to be magnetic, and re-designing the cars to have a magnet you can switch the magnetic field... The same as the road to repel/hover, and the opposite to park/stick to the road... I grew out of that idea though. Although I wouldn't mind having a magnetic track and a hovering train with the same principles.
You mean maglev? It’s here already.
Ooo.
- This 'Maglev' is new to me but at first glance, very interesting. - Am glad somebody invented it at last, to be honest. 
That's an impossibility on both scientific AND moral grounds.
I've got one: the Car-B-Q. Cook while you drive!
I agree.
What if vehicles were suspended from cables, and swung from cable to cable, like tarzan.
Like flying cars, there would be no road friction. And better than magnetic levitation because the cables and their A-frames wouldn't consume power since the vehicle would be responsible for connecting/disconnecting the cables itself. The vehicle would need to provide only minimal thrust to keep up it's forward momentum.
Haha, so is an Airbus or a Boeing... You know what I want though...
A Cessna or Piper would be a better example.
There actually have been several "flying cars" developed which work pretty well. The Terrafugia Transition is chugging through its legal obstacles pretty well so far, for one thing. There's also a "powered parachute" car which was being developed for hopping jungle obstacles I read about a year or so ago.
The trick for both of these, of course, is taking an aircraft and making it road-legal, rather than taking a car and making it fly.
I don't think flying cards realistically will happen en mass in our lifetime because of the FAA and the skill set needed to fly them. However, I'm still waiting for 'auto-drive,' on current cars. All of the computer applications I'd think exist to make it reality today. e.g. GPS tracking, on-board radar. Shit some modern cars even adjust the cruise control and the speed of the vehicle based on other cars. I don't understand what the delay is in implementing auto-drive because such a device could dramatically reduce the 40,000 annual fatalities that occur in the US annually driving.
For routine operations, not much skill is needed, honestly. The majority of the time spent in pilot training is learning how to respond to emergencies, and how to make better decisions so that emergencies do not arise in the first place.
For a flying car to exist it would likely have to be more like a helicopter than a standard airplane. I've heard anecdotaly that helicopters are much more difficult to fly than an airplane. Is this true?
Perhaps modern on-board computer systems would take a lot of the 'thinking,' out of the process though?
Auto-drive cars would be easy to do if all road vehicles were required to be auto-drive. (and even easier if centrally managed) It becomes much harder when you introduce the random actions of human drivers.
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