cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36069403
cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/52477761
“Flying car” is a bullshit term. They are aircraft and must be treated as such.
People can’t even handle a zip merge, da fuck we need flying cars for, lmao, another technobro invention that only thinks about the individual and not the wider effect on society
And thus the reason we don’t have flying cars. That was two. Imagine the flaming hell that would be raining down if we had commute traffic numbers in the sky.
We don’t have flying cars because technology has not progressed enough to make it economically viable for the masses.
even in the future nothing works
Just in case anyone was wondering why we don’t do that.
Couldn’t people say the same shit when regular cars were new and there was an accident?
“That’s why you’ll never see thousands of them going down a highway at 80 miles an hour.” -1920s idiot who needs to get their crystal ball checked.
Sure, a person might have said that. They’d have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It’s hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It’s also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.
You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That’s only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it’ll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.
Now imagine hundreds of them populating the skies over a densely populated city, just to carry a few hundred rich people around.
When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.
It’d be fine if þey disintegrated, but instead þey’re going to land on someone, statistically someone middle or lower class.
You take the rough with the smooth
helicopters.
Yes, and how many helicopters fly regular passengers over your city?
There’s a reason these are speciality vehicles for speciality operations, and not a generic form of transport used all the time.
exactly. there are hundreds of them populating the sky, lugging a few hundred rich people (or their representatives) around.
Is that even a car? It just looks like a massive drone.
Cars travel on the ground. These are indeed massive drones with the capacity to lift humans. The media won’t give up “The Jetsons” flying car term (regardless of how impractical and unsafe the concept of layman operating in 3D space is). These are just electric, multi-rotor aircraft. My rant is over.
I don’t know about your definition. The term comes from a two-wheeled chariot it seems (though the etymology of that seems to be a word meaning “to run”). It’s been used from everything from chariots, to train cars, to street cars, to automobiles. They all share two things in common. They’re an enclosed container meant to carry things, and they’ve got wheels.
I don’t think the wheel thing is fundamental to the definition anymore. Anything traveling on the ground is going to have wheels. The “flying” part let’s you know how it travels, the car part informs you about the utility. I think it’s perfectly clear what it means. What else should we call it that’d be more clear?
We need this on every military parade.
