alt Hacker News"Distinguishing hype from reality is not easy. But recent developments mean that ambitious promises could be fulfilled. "
Just like AI is changing the world before our eyes, this may be just such a technology. Maybe I will come to resent them when they are omnipresent, but a person-transporting drone (EVTOL) flying on a solid state battery would be transformative in connecting people, and I cannot wait to see it happen. The EU has committed 500bn in inter-european railway investment by 2050. Maybe it will be entirely disrupted? Who knows.
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Maybe I am missing something, but I haven't seen a solution to the noise problem of air traffic (especially anything rotor based).
Might not be an issue for long distance connection in sparsely populated countries like the United States, but I don't see it replacing trains in Europe until this is solved.
In the way Boring Co. disrupted subways?
I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes. However I am still skeptical about the EVTOL form factor for mass scale transportation, at least on the short or medium term.
I think we are going to see a lot of fragmentation in modes of transport where we have jets going from international airports for long range, small electric planes in small airports for that 50-300km distance low-frequency destinations. And rail only for high-frequency destinations.
In fact I imagine that electric vs jet planes math will get so crazy that it might kill some international hubs that are too far inland, companies will want people off jets into electric propeller planes as fast as possible.
We have these things called helicopters, they are already made small enough for single occupants and have been for decades. Making them electric and automated doesn't make them less of a helicopter with all of the issues of existing helicopters.
For instance, I will never have any desire to risk the air traffic clusterfuck of hundreds of EVTOLs with different computers from different brands with different levels of maintenance trying to land/take-off in a Costco parking lot to grab a rotisserie chicken on their way home from work.
It isn't a technology problem. EVTOL only makes sense where helicopters currently make sense.
Rail is energy efficient and extremely reliable. You're not going to win on either of those metrics.
I had a chance to fly a simulator of the Beta Technologies VTOL airplane (they're a PartsBox customer). I went from horizontal flight into hover, and my guide said "oh, by the way, you are consuming a megawatt right now".
A megawatt. To hover.
That really opened my eyes to the reality: unless we have unlimited, clean and nearly free fusion power, flying cars are not going to be a thing.