This was the only thought rummaging through my mind as I sat in my car waiting for crash induced traffic to clear on I-77. Standstill traffic feels much better than traffic that moves an inch at a time. With my luck, I always end up with the latter.
As we moved at a snail’s pace, we eventually got to see the gentleman who decided to park his car under a trailer on a Thursday morning. It took me twenty minutes to cross a mile. Now, this may be non-Newtonian kind of news to folks who live in a high-traffic highway metro, but Charlotte is not there yet. While crashes are tragic and a recurring theme on this highway, luckily there weren’t any ambulances. I presumed the gentleman was okay, so I returned to daydreaming about flying cars.
Why can’t we have nicer things like flying cars?
Over the past century, many have predicted that a day would come when we would have flying cars that effortlessly roam around buildings. A hundred years have passed and we are still stuck in the “it’s coming next year” phase. Why?
First, let’s look at the use case in favor of flying cars.
- Flying. Duh. The most obvious part. You just lift off from your home and land at your office. Like magic.
- No traffic. Unlike regular cars, there is no need to build infrastructure. All you need is a flat surface, similar to how drones operate.
- No choke points such as roundabouts or single-lane entries.
Now let’s see why this is a daydream.
- What would be a viable economic proposition for having a flying car? As with anything that has wings, the cost would be exponential. Once you include manufacturing, insurance it only adds up.
- How would I buy my Starbucks if I am just flying? Would there be stores in the sky?
- What do I do if my kid needs to pee? Do I just land wherever I want?
- What happens during a failure or an accident? Do these crashes cause more accidents?
- Cars as attacking vectors have limited targets, but flying cars introduce numerous vectors. How does one control these?
- What do these things run on? Petrol? Battery? What happens if either runs out midair?
- Once flying cars take over, what happens to roads?
I can keep going. The point is that the cons outweigh the pros. I personally feel this is due to the lack of a code or a process in place. While I do not want to go into the chicken and egg scenario of whether process comes first or viable options come first, we have neither today. That is the fact.
We either need to find the equivalent of traffic lights, lanes, and speed limits in the sky, or we end up ceding control and process to human common sense, which is faulty at best.
One way we could solve this is by creating an autonomous system that obeys protocols alone. There cannot be a manual option. Period.
The protocol would be open, and every flying car would adhere to the same standard. This way, we may have a chance. The system should take care of the billions of things that could go wrong and reciprocate solutions at every level, from Murphy’s Law to Isaac Asimov’s laws.
Even on the ground, we do not have a true autonomous driving system. True autonomy would also be autocratic. Until it happens on the ground, we can only look up and wonder whether flying cars are a “when” question or an “if” question.
Until then, let’s stare at the nice rear ends of the cars in front of us in heavy traffic while it takes a century to fly up.