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General Motors Says No Flying Cars Before 2030 At Least

Sci-fi fans that dream of ordering up a flying-car taxi service will be excited to learn that several major automakers, including General Motors, are actively working towards making that dream a reality. However, according to one GM executive, its unlikely anything will be launched prior to the 2030 calendar year.

Per a post from Reuters, the vice president of General Motor’s Global Innovation team, Pamela Fletcher, indicated that flying cars are still about a decade off.

“I think that there’s a long pathway here,” Fletcher said at a recent Reuters event. “2030 is probably a real commercial inflection point.”

“It’s a very nascent space,” Fletcher added. “There’s a lot of work to be done on the regulatory side, as well as the actual technology side.”

For now, existing flying car concepts feature things like zero emissions via battery-powered operation, as well as a vertical take-off and landing similar to a helicopter. The new flying cars could be used to transport either passengers, or cargo.

Back in January, General Motors unveiled the Cadillac Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicle (VTOL) concept at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Described as an “all-electric, single-seat, well-appointed aircraft,” the VTOL concept is said to be capable of achieving speeds up to 55 mph, providing quick transportation for business types eager to get from Point A to Point B quickly, bypassing ground-level traffic.

Hyundai is working on a similar concept powered by batteries and capable of transporting five to six people. Unlike General Motors, the South Korean automaker expects urban air taxis could be operational as early as 2025, or perhaps even earlier.

Toyota, Daimler, and Geely are working on flying car services as well.

According to the Reuters report, Morgan Stanley estimates that the total addressable market for urban air mobility could each $1 trillion by 2040 and $9 trillion by 2050.

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Jonathan is an automotive journalist based out of Southern California. He loves anything and everything on four wheels.

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Comments

  1. We can’t trust people with autonomous ground cars so the jetsons dream is just that a dream.

    Expect a working prototype but not much else outside a vehicle for a licensed pilot.

    Reply
    1. You know what? I could realistically see autonomous flying cars being implemented in 10 years if companies set up pre-approved landing/take-off zones. Flying is more complicated, but there is less traffic and therefore fewer rules for the systems to take into account.

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      1. These will be autonomous, not flown by the pax. All we need to develop to make these real is batteries with better energy density and a radio network to integrate the network to feed them with real time weather and GPS data that is bulletproof. I can easily see these in 10 years.

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        1. Not going to be common. We can’t get even an autonomous Tesla to ID a truck laying in the center of the road.

          We don’t even fly air liners with less than two pilots even with full auto control to even land.

          It would be like skeet shooting in many cities like Chicago.

          Maybe 50 years but not 10.

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          1. It won’t happen in 50 either, not because it can’t be engineered, but because the government won’t allow it. Do you seriously think the government will allow anyone and everyone flying around?

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            1. They allow that now. It’s called general aviation. You can even build your own airplane or helicopter and fly it quite legally all over the country.

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            2. Personal flying vehicles are not an issue. Paramotoring is not only legal but is minimally restricted despite dangerous consequences if they go down.

              It’s true governments will be worried, but they will get over that quickly when they see other countries approve it and reap all the benefits.

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            3. There is a big difference between anyone and everyone flying around and the general aviation of today. When I say “anyone and everyone flying”, I’m saying anyone that has a car now has a car that flies. This is unmanageable chaos.

              Drive by shootings are now fly by shootings. Littering can now set homes on fire and/or kill people. I could go on.

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          2. Interesting take, but you are clearly behind on where technology is, and also the risk difference flying from driving. We have drones flying all over today, and the autonomous ones today are very good at avoiding obstacles. I have a couple myself. I can load in the map, on my desktop and sent it one its way, using google maps, drive a mile away, and go pick it up. I have done this dozens of times with no faults. I can also plot a map, and send it up to photograph an area completely on its own, and 10 minutes later it comes back and lands on the exact spot it took off from. I just have a $1000 drones, not even a high end commercial one. Now to scale this tech up to carry people, it has to be more reliable, which is easy with higher grade, and more expense components, but the battery energy density to lift and carry humans with an affordable drone do not exist yet.

            As for airliners, commercial airplanes are designed for failure rates of “10 to the minus ninth”, which for you is one in a billion, reaching that for personal air mobility might take some time, but the technology exists. I am very up on this, and you can google and see Boeing and Airbus are both working on it. The issue for them is the factor of safety required, and whether it is imperative or not. If it’s not imperative, they are not going to do it, as the risk is too high with a plane full of people.

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            1. Add a million people and a million cars the sky and it’s no longer safer to fly.

              Reply
              1. Millions of drones up there now, seems to be ok….

                Reply
  2. I’ll believe it as soon as I take delivery of the jet pack I was promised 20+ years ago.

    Reply
  3. When there is a car crash now, the people inside of said vehicle(s) are injured. When a flying car crashes, it spirals to the ground and takes out a home, a business or a crowd of people. I see this entire thing being nothing but a pipedream.

    Reply
    1. Cars operate in a very person-rich environment. Other cars are in close formation, coming from virtually all directions. Pedestrians, bicyclists, all concentrated on structures called streets make this a very risky environment. The statistics back this up.

      Remember the Airbus that shed its vertical stabilizer and crashed into the middle of Queens NY? Killed 6 on the ground. That was a fully loaded airliner into one of the most dense areas in the US. 99.99% of small airplane crashes happen in uninhabited areas. Look at a typical area in the US on Google Earth; as viewed from above, most of the Earth is not very populated. The biggest issue for small aircraft accidents is survival during the day to a week it takes to be found out in the boonies.

      Reply
      1. The airbus you mention had an accident due to pilot error… The pilots were over using the rudder to correct flying issues, but quadcopter will be autonomous, no pilot error.

        Reply
        1. I think they (NTSB) found a broken Jack screw that operated the rudder. The over use was in part because of a prior aircraft taking off wake turbulence.

          If the manufacturers could set GPS waypoints and program them into the flying vehicles, autonomy should be an easy hurdle to overcome.
          I think the biggest issue would be hazards like birds. Knock a prop out and the quad chopper is going down.

          Reply
          1. Jackscrew? Are you thinking of Alaska 261? The vertical tail broke off due to a structural failure in the composite structure on the airbus in NY, The pilots had been using the rudder to correct for turbulence which Airbus’s flight manual had suggested never to deflect the rudder so far at that airspeed. Since then Airbus added more nannies to their flight control systems, so it cannot happen again.

            I cannot tell you where, but I have seen video inside jetliners during flight test where they are doing fuselage flutter testing which consists of stepping on the the rudder pedals at varying frequencies, as the frequencies pick up and you excite the structure, its amazing to look down the fuselage of a long plane and see the fuselage bending back and forth like a snake. These tests are done with all nannies off, and the flight controls in direct law… I would have something in my pants if I was on a flight like that. The flight test engineers buckle in tight for these tests. They have to do the test over and over at different speeds, and different CG. They do the same kind of testing with elevator inputs, and aileron inputs.

            Reply
  4. HOW ABOUT BUILDING ENGINES THAT DON’T BLOW HEAD GASKETS ??? FLYING CARS, PLEASE.

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  5. Equipped with auto-deploy parachutes, with auto pilot/GPS, I can easily see these out before 2030.

    Reply
    1. Exactly… They re coming.

      Reply
  6. Most people are to stupid to even drive their cars. Put them in the air and fatalities by auto accident jump 1000 percent. Flying cars won’t happen.

    Reply
    1. These are not flying cars, and the PAX will not be driving, its all autonomous, which autonomous drone tech is already in use today, just needs to scale up, and battery energy density improved

      Reply
  7. Wait…is it April Fool’s Day??

    Reply

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