Transportation

Flying Cars At CES 2020 And Gallery Of Photos


CES has become the show for advanced and automated automotive products sold to industry customers, not consumers. This year’s show had 43 LIDAR companies and a large array of concept cars and other services in the autonomous industry. At the same time, it really didn’t have a great deal of new things to display. This may be attributed to the supposed “pull back” among large auto OEMs on the development of full robocars, putting more focus on the ADAS market, because they now feel that will happen sooner and last longer, and because they feel a major threat as something like Tesla Autopilot has become a must-have in all but entry level cars.

Flying car, or e-VTOL (Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing) vehicles are quite different from robocars, and nobody has done much serious work on giving them autonomous flight abilities, but they still get associated as futuristic transport. As such there were a few such vehicles on display.

Two were large vehicles, meant to match the “Uber Elevate” profile with 4 passengers and a pilot to be used as a medium range air taxi. This included a much-progressed version of the Bell Nexus shown last year, and a new UAM vehicle from Hyundai. The Bell is a tilt-rotor, but they switched from the 6-fan prototype in 2018 to a simpler 4-rotor version, and let people sit in the prototype. Bell of course has great experience having built the Osprey tilt-rotor, but also tragic and negative experience. Hyundai presented a vision of a future city, combining their e-VTOL vehicles and self-driving pods which docked at hubs for a variety of purposes.

Uber Elevate doesn’t call for single passenger taxis or automated flying. Current designs expect a pilot, taking groups of passengers between vertiports. With the low cost of operation for electric aircraft, they hope for a fairly reasonable per passenger price, especially when you consider the much shorter travel time of flying over traffic in a straight line. At the same time, the cost of getting to and from vertiports, and waiting for a shared ride will negate some of those advantages. Combined with single person Ubers (or robotaxis) to and from the vertiports, with synchronized arrival and pickup, it could make sense.

At the other end of the spectrum, two tiny companies had small exhibits. They preach the true “flying car” vision, which includes a vehicle which can drive on roads and it in a standard parking space or garage. Driving on roads comes at a high cost in weight, and today weight is very much at a premium in e-VTOL designs. On the other hand it solves the problem of the transition from places you can land (which will accept your noise and privacy invasions) and the places you actually want to travel to and from.

Below is a new vehicle from an Australian venture called Pegasus which is very close to a traditional helicopter, and is not pure electric — the range of a pure electric helicopter would be fairly poor. Also present in a small booth was the Aska, which is a more modern e-VTOL vehicle with folding wings and tilting rotors and a car-like appearance. (I have been providing advice to Aska on an informal basis.)

The true flying cars accept the huge cost of the weight of the ground equipment because they feel it’s important to travel in the same vehicle all the way to and from your real destination, and because it’s an open question how landing spaces and storage will be managed for vehicles that can’t move on the ground once they land. (Some vehicles may have small, light wheels and be towed or capable of very slow movement to at least get off the precious landing spaces.) The field is still immature and there are many questions to answer about what the right solution is.

Each year for CES I generate a gallery of notes on other things I saw there around photos. You can peruse that gallery here in an online photo album. When viewing the album, use the “i” key or icon to turn on captions or it won’t make much sense. Several of these photos center on transportation and robocars, but there are many about other technologies from around the floor.



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