thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos at the turn
of the 20th century people had all kinds of fantastical visions of the future
everything from weather machines to firefighters that looked like batman but
one idea kept popping up over and over again the flying car and now here we are
almost 120 years later we have real-time
video chat and robots that can clean your house hey we even have tinder too i
guess but flying cars still seem like almost as much of a fantasy today as
they did back then turns out it's just gosh darn difficult
to make a vehicle that's as good in the air as it is on the ground oh and then
there's the human element if you think the motorists in your city are bad at
driving in 2d just imagine giving them each a pair of wings but that doesn't
mean that more personal air travel will never happen passenger drones that aim
to make short trips a little easier are in development today but how do these
differ from the flying cars of our dreams well for starters passenger
drones are purpose-built for air travel only and unlike airplanes they usually
don't even have wheels instead they rely on vertical takeoff and landing or vtol
just like the drone collecting dust in your garage right now this means that
they shouldn't need airstrips or even a dedicated landing pad like helicopters
since they're so much lighter but what about safety well there are a number of
approaches to this similar to the hobby drones that people fly around to capture
video and spy on their neighbors some current passenger drone projects are
meant to be operated remotely by a command center the ehong 184 for example
doesn't even have any controls inside for the passenger except for a screen
that allows them to enter their destination others though like the one
in development from astro aerospace are fully autonomous and are designed to get
you from a to b safely with nothing more than on-board sensors to measure speed
balance and altitude essentially making them bigger versions of the retail
self-flying drones you can pick up now for under three grand so maybe it will
actually help matters that you won't have to rely on your idiot next door
neighbor to pilot the thing but there are other considerations as well like
their hobbyist cousins passenger drones aren't designed to stay in the air for
as long as 747s with many models currently in development intended for
quick trips across town or maybe to the next city over ehong for example is only
certifying their 184 for 10 miles or 23
minutes of flight not exactly eye-popping but certainly better than
driving 10 miles if you live in some horribly congested place like la or even
here in vancouver for that matter with that said gradual improvements to the
technology already have some pretty big names in the transportation sector
looking at the possibility of using passenger drones as the backbone of an
air taxi service in cities around the world uber for example is currently
looking for a third city to join la and dallas as launch locations for its uber
air service to debut in 2023 which will transport up to four passengers per
drone and airbus is looking to launch their own line of four cedar drones that
can cruise up to around 75 miles per hour and passenger drones may be able to
take you even farther and faster later on down the road as german company
lilium recently tested a small aircraft that combines vtol with actual electric
jet engines to travel across its 300 kilometer range in just one hour and
these guys also intend to market an air taxi
but of course there are many legal and political hurdles to clear before we're
all zipping around in the air in drones and it's likely that many of these drone
air taxi services will also feature human pilots on board until safety
concerns with fully autonomous flight can be completely resolved but even
though we might have to wait a few years and wait and see if these drones won't
just become another form of luxury travel for the rich the tech might have
real potential to make our cities a little less congested like a self-flying
benadryl tablet wait bennett who writes this honestly
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