Flying cars always struggled with practicality imho. Nevermind takeoff and landing space requirements, you should know air regulation is a large hurdle for the everyday, every man, flying car. Look to what governments are trying to implement for tiny drones...
I agree. At this point flying cars are nothing but lousy airplanes molded to a clunky car (so the worst of both worlds) that still require a full pilots licence to fly, so really the practicality isn't there.
The evolvement of the systems to the point where the operator of any automated vehicle is trustworthy enough to be considered as truly autonomous, reliable, and
101% trustworthy (the biggest kicker) is where my opinion wavers. I don't see us getting there in the near future.
Like I've said...yes, it's possible now, but the very video at the beginning of this thread (where the system stumbles) along with more than a little evidence (
two Tesla autopilot deaths, the crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 where
AutoLand was deemed to be a primary contributor of the death of 9 people) to mention but a few is what will make people, and more importantly....regulators, to question things.
In both of those situations (the Tesla crashes, and the Turkish Airlines crash)
more attentive people at the controls (not the opposite) would have resulted in both situations never happening to begin with, so the argument of removing the people (the human factor) from the equation as being the solution doesn't seem to be the case. My earlier Gimli Glider story also plays true - a computer wouldn't have pulled that off...people did.
I do recognize that increasing automation in the land of all things vehicular is inevitable, but I do firmly believe that it's going to be firmly at the level of
operator augmentation for a long time to come,
not operator elimination. Certainly not within the timeline before I retire, anyways.
???
