On Flying Cars and Why We Still Aren’t The Jetsons

“Flying,” Douglas Adams once quipped, “is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Welp…by that standard the ongoing drive to produce commercially viable flying cars is a can’t miss prospect, with the ground being hit every single time.

Washington Post:

Last week, the secretive air-taxi start-up Kittyhawk, run by Google veteran Sebastian Thrun, announced on Twitter that it was going to “wind down.” It was one of a handful of companies working to bring a “Jetsons” like reality to the world, where electric-powered cars, planes and helicopters become commonplace and offer clean-burning modes of transportation to a world of clogged and polluted streets.

After launching over a decade ago, the flying car company backed by Google co-founder Larry Page garnered fanfare typical of moonshot ideas championed by Silicon Valley titans — and was largely seen as one of the most likely to make a breakthrough.

“Silicon Valley [is] constantly putting out these ideas for how we solve the problems of transportation and urban life with new technologies,” said Paris Marx, a technology critic and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. “That has been an utter failure.”

Kittyhawk, like many of its competitors, made bold promises on its website of building a fleet of air-taxis that are “ultra-quiet and battery-efficient,” and could fly hundreds of miles on a single charge while being nearly silent within 30 seconds of taking off. “If anyone can do this,” the company’s site said, “we can.”

Representatives from Kittyhawk did not return a request for comment.

The start-up’s collapse highlights the challenges in mastering flying transportation, experts said. Battery technology needs to advance far past its current state. Getting regulatory approval for flying cars will be difficult. And the infrastructure to support a world of flying cars and vehicles is a vastly complex challenge.

“Even Elon Musk has said: everything works in PowerPoint,” said Peter Rez, an emeritus physics professor from Arizona State University, but “things are never going to work as advertised.”

Investors have poured billions into start-ups looking to change how people get around. In 2021, air mobility start-ups raked in record $6.9 billion in investment, a large chunk of which went to electric vehicles that take off and land, known as eVTOLs. The pace of funding slowed in the first half of 2022, McKinsey analysts noted.

Despite the cash, flying cars have suffered a string of major setbacks, according to media reports. A Forbes investigation of Kittyhawk in 2019 alleged the company was plagued with battery and safety issues.

Rez said lithium-ion battery problems will be a constant challenge for the industry. They output energy at a 50 times less efficient rate than their gasoline counterparts, requiring more to be on board, adding to cost and flying car and plane weight.

Companies are clinging to hope that battery technology will advance rapidly, he said, though it’s not clear when that will happen.

Transportation is a very complex field that works toward a very simple goal: Getting folks & things from point A to point B on time, consistently, at a price folks can afford, to do the things they need to get done. There are many technological, logistical, and regulatory challenges that have kept the flying car relegated to the occasional demo product and the Jetsons-style sci-fi scene. But the easiest explanation to why we don’t have flying cars, and won’t for the foreseeable future, is a much simpler matter: they are not practical and complicate rather than simplify the problem they are meant to solve.

All these “moonshot” Silicon Valley startups operate under the idea that any idea is solvable with enough money, resources, and engineering. Which is true in a way and works great on paper while looking tantalizingly within reach on Power Point. But things like transportation don’t happen on paper, they happen in the dynamic, ever-changing real world. Transportation is a business that is all about getting X person/thing to Y destination, in Z amount of time for a price. Individual transportation is mostly about need: getting to work, getting to the store, getting kids to school, getting home again afterwards. Transportaion for those businesses and folks are mostly cost-benefit calculations more than anything else, and top of the list line items on budgets. For every on-paper argument about “point-to-point” or individual mobility there are going to be dozens of counterpoints that don’t show up on the start up’s pitch pages about cost, time, infrastructure, regulations, unproven technology, capacity limits, and on and on and on. Maybe it is true all that can be overcome with near unlimited money and R & D, but the average business or average family doesn’t run off ifs and maybes, they are too busy getting from point A to point B because they have to survive by doing so.

Whenever these “moonshot” startups throwing out big ideas to rake in big time funding, the best thing to do is compare it with the readily recognizable revolution of the smart phone. The iPhone and following smart phones changed almost everything by making life simpler, easier, more accessible, faster to access and accomplish the things folks were already doing while opening up unlimited possibilities of new things. Thus, the first questions to always ask of these startups, even ones with very old ideas and aspirations like flying cars, is “is this removing barriers or adding them to get to the stated goal?” Flying cars fail that test on every level, as do many of the more ambitious startup “moonshots”.

“This is going to make life better” and “this will revolutionize how X group does Y thing” are great goals to shoot for with technological innovation. When evaluating the potential of the next NEXT BIG THING! some simple questions about the practical application usually help cut through the noise. If it makes life simpler, easier, more cost efficient for the targeted market, the chance for success is there. If it only makes the fundraising for capital investment with no practical path to a viable commercial concern anywhere in the near future, beware.

Flying cars have always tantalized the imagination. Imagination sells well in pitching moonshot startups to the well-heeled tech titans. But transportation is business of “it works, or it doesn’t”, point A to point B, of necessity and function over style and form. Imagination and reality occasionally cross paths and change the world, like the advent of sailing ships, automobiles, flying machines, and rockets that put humans and objects beyond our own world. But mostly they run on historical parallel tracks, and realizing the difference for the tech titans is proving to be a costly – mostly futile – enterprise. Those slide deck pitches, like The Jetsons, just have to look cool. Transportation has to work on time, consistently, at a price folks can afford, to do the things they need to get done. The world of nearly unlimited investment money isn’t the real world of spending very limited funds on rather expensive things like transportation needs.

Things that are different are not the same. No matter how much money you throw at it.