Still no flying cars, but this latest video from Corning is sure twenty-first century. Interesting that they have a British narrator for an American company.
13 thoughts on “The Glass Of Tomorrow”
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Still no flying cars, but this latest video from Corning is sure twenty-first century. Interesting that they have a British narrator for an American company.
Comments are closed.
Obviously British guys are much more handsome and intelligent. Don’t know where that leaves us Canucks. 😉
He has a British accent because he’s from the optimistic future where everyone will live in perfect clutter-free homes, dress like Steve Jobs, and speak with sophisticated, “educated” accents.
Personally, I think it would be fun to play against type and have Jeff Foxworthy narrate one of these videos. I’m willing to be there will be people in the future who still enjoy hunting, fishing, NASCAR, etc.
Still no flying cars
Grr. I hate that IBM commercial.
Scaled Composites is testing a flying car right now. A green flying car, no less.
Flying cars have been around for decades. Ford flew one in the 1920’s. And if you can go to Oshkosh, you can almost always find some homebuilder who’s working on one.
The reason flying cars aren’t popular isn’t the lack of technology, it’s the impracticality of the concept. A vehicle that’s well optimized for flying is poorly optimized for driving and vice versa.
Transparent aluminum!
Here’s hoping that Corning will also come up with a few Teeth of Tomorrow for those poor Brits…
Ideally, you don’t want a “flying car” anyway. Roadability is superfluous when you have a car-size, wingless 6-passenger VTOL that a fifteen-year-old can operate. Instead, you want an H. Beam Piper-style “aircar” — an aircraft (actually, an aerodyne — a vehicle with no fixed lifting surfaces) with the comfort, ease of use, and affordability of an automobile, something like the Spinner vehicle in Blade Runner.
And the danger factor people cite as a reason we’ll never have personal aircars is a joke. We lose 45,000 people a year on the roads today and nobody cares.
Besides, a practical aircar will probably be computer-piloted anyway: you hop in, the computer throws a map up on the wraparound glass display canopy, you touch-click the desired destination, then sit back and let the ATC system fly you there. And since the cost of the trip is debited from your account on a pounds-per-mile basis, you don’t even have to buy the car; just whistle one up with your cell phone when you want to make a trip and Hertz Local ATC vectors Unit #2543 to your lat/long. If things go screwy en route, say a loss of ATC link, the onboard computer pilots you to the nearest safe landing site. If you lose lift, the onboard computer pops the top on a canisterized heavy-lift parawing and you float to Earth safely. (If you lose ATC and onboard computer, you can deploy the parawing by pulling a mechanical lanyard.)
The obstacle to creating an aircar (not counting legal, bureaucratic, commercial, and mindset obstacles) is the powerplant. What’s needed is a cheap, modular version of the F-35 lift fan system — one that consumes fuel at a moderate rate and won’t deafen the neighborhood every time it spools up. Once we have that, we just build a lifting-body passenger cabin, suitable controls, and a multi-billion-dollar continental ATC network, and it’s Jetsons time.
I’ve always thought that once cars can drive themselves, virtually no one will own a car and will rent them just as you described above
I thought that was the point of the Google self-driving car: taxis. There’s an app for that.
Taxis are already self-driving. Whether the guidance system’s electronic or biological is an implementation detail. I don’t see why people would suddenly start to abandon their cars for taxis just because the guidance system changes.
Good point. I am assuming that electronic guidance would be significantly cheaper than biological guidance. I live in an area with no public transportation infrastructure…taxis are available but expensive. I will sharpen a pencil and see if my assumption has any merit…
I don’t forsee aircars being used in the local role. Short-range travel is best done by the forms of ground transport we have now. My idea of the aircar is centered on its role as a long-distance travel option, replacing both the corporate jet (which few can afford) and the airlines (which cannot and have never made a dime without massive public infrastructure subsidies).
Let’s say you and your family (wife, three kids, dog, cat) live in Texas and want to go to New York. Today you have to find four seats, pay in advance, schlep to the airport, park, wrestle your luggage into the hands of indifferent airline employees who don’t give a damn whether it makes it to its destination or not. (And don’t pack too much — the baggage surchrage is lethal!) You then wait in line for a boarding pass, wrestle your luggage to a federal government employee at an X-ray machine, stand in a long security line, disrobe, submit with your family to a humiliating strip-search (and/or a radiation zap) conducted by government-employed affirmative-action hires, let them keep your mouthwash and the camp knife your dad gave you when you were 12 years old, redress, bull your way through the crowds to the gate, wait, stand in a boarding line waiting for your number to be called, wait in a freezing/sweltering jetway, board the plane, bustle past the annoyed first class passengers, wait for the Arab family in front of you to negotiate their seating/stowage arrangements, find your seats, discover that they are not all together, sit, buckle in, wait for tower clearance and pushback, taxi, wait in the takeoff queue, take off, endure three hours of
Mexican-jail-style torturediscomfort, wait in the landing stack, land, wait for the Arab family to de-stow and deplane, grab your handbags, gather your family, lug everything down the aisle, wait in a freezing/stifling jetway, schlep to the baggage carousel, wait for the carousel, discover the carousel is broken and that your bags are at Baggage 4, schlep to Baggage 4, discover your baggage never made it, haggle with the lost luggage guy, drag the whole gang out to the freezing/sweltering curb sans equipage, wait in a car rank, discover your car service went out of business the day before, wait in the rank again, finally get a car, pay $50 for a ninety-minute, twenty-mile ride into the city, schlep into the hotel, get your key, and ta-da! Vacation time!You arrive exhausted. You have no clean clothes (lost with luggage), no pocket cash (car fare), no blood sugar level (inedible airline “meal”), and no desire to live. You even had to leave the dog and cat at home — the cost of shipping them by air was too high. They probably would have ended up in Billings, Montana with the rest of your bags anyway. You spend the rest of the evening in your room within a fog of hydrocodone and Scotch, watching the kids sulk and the wife snore.
In the aircar scenario, you pick up your phone, dial Hertz Skycar, and order up a ride. Ten minutes later a sparkling-new Packard Eight appears overhead and settles down to a perfect landing at the curb in front of your house. (The Packard Company has been revived in this ideal future.) Since the Eight holds eight passengers, there’s plenty of room for the whole family, including Rover and Puss-Puss. Take all the time you like to load your bags in the Eight’s roomy cargo bay — you’re renting by the hour, so it’s your money. (You can bring up to 250 pounds of baggage at no extra cost. And don’t forget a picnic lunch and wine — the Eight has a flip-up table in the passenger compartment so you can eat lunch as a human being ought.) All this done well, you load in the family (omitting the humiliating rad-zap and strip-search), hit the CLOSE HATCH button, and listen for the comforting hiss as the pressurized cabin is sealed.
You take your seat. (It is ergonomic, soft leather, and will recline into a flat bed if desired.) On the bubble canopy in front of you a Google-style map appears, accompanied by Hertz’s animated interface character, Sky (a charming anime-style moppet in a cute chauffeur uniform). “Where to, Sir?” she asks with a wink. You touch-zoom the map to the Essex House in Manhattan. “Destination conformed,” says Sky. “$1200 crowns have been debited from your account!” (Gold crowns have replaced paper dollars in this ideal future.) “Please strap in, everyone!” You and the family strap in. (Rover and Puss-Puss are in their travel pods in the pressurized trunk.) The engine spools up. Suddenly you are five hundred feet in the air and wheeling into the local traffic pattern, which follows the freeways (less to fall on if everything goes wrong). The car accelerates to 250 knots. A few minutes later local ATC hands you off to the transcon traffic servers of the Eisenhower Interstate Skyway System, Inc. (transportation infrastructure is privatized in this ideal future). You climb and maintain 30,000 ft AGL, and the aircar boosts to its cruising speed of five hundred knots. Lunch, then a nap. Ahh.
A few hours later you are standing in the rooftop garage at the Essex House on Central Park South. A uniformed porter is ferrying your bags to the elevator; your wife and kids have hurried ahead to your rooms. (You are carrying Rover and Puss-Puss — luxury hotels in New York allow pets in this ideal future.) As you shut the cargo bay door, Sky appears in the bubble top. “Thanks for flying with Hertz!” she says with a wink. You watch as the Packard rolls itself out of the garage onto the rooftop landing spot, lifts away, and joins the galaxy of moving stars in the Manhattan sky.
Did I tell you I had a really, really bad experience last time I was at the dental hygeniest for a cleaning? The ultra-sonic cleaner you ask? No, George Michael on the dentist’s office radio (“Wake me up, before you Go-Go, don’t leave me hangin’ like a Yo-Yo . . .) ba-dum-bum!
The guy in the video looked and sounded like a cousin.
I met Molt Taylor (inventor of the certified Aerocar) at Oshkosh back in the late 1970s. He was working with one of the Big 3 automakers to put the Aerocar into production until the regulators stepped in. It was a car so they mandated that it had to meet all of the new environmental and crashworthiness regulations that had come into effect since the Aerocar was designed. Things like 5 MPH bumpers and safety glass added a lot of weight (the enemy of all things that fly). It had to be licensed like any other car. And it was an airplane so it had to meet all of those regulations and required a pilot’s license (IIRC, it also needed a license for the aircraft radios back then). The wings and tail section were removeable so you could tow them easily, so that needed a license, too. When all was said and done, you needed something like 11 difference licenses to operate an Aerocar. The production deal died and so did a project Molt had been working on for almost 30 years. Ever the crusty old engineer, he didn’t have too many good things to say about bureaucrats. Molt built a total of 5 Aerocars. Three were Model Is (pretty homely little beasts), one was a Model II (not roadable but used to improve the aerodynamics) and one was a kind of cute little Model III, currently on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.
A man who flies out of my local airport owns the only airworthy Aerocar (a Model I). It spends its time between Florida and California because it doesn’t fly well in Colorado’s thin air. He also owns the Model II. He’s been tinkering with his own flying car concept for many years but nothing has come of it yet. There is a Model I for sale for a reported $1.25 million but it isn’t airworthy and the owner must be smoking something to want that much for it.