China's latest flying car prototype showcases a breakthrough in urban air mobility, offering a glimpse into how low-altitude flight could soon integrate with everyday transport.
Submitted 3 days ago by IamNobuddy@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.utubepublisher.in/2025/04/flying-cars-in-china.html
Comments
Bezier@suppo.fi 3 days ago
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 days ago
A lot of posts here lately are kind of silly ideas that China tries to sell as the next big thing because it‘s cyberpunk. We should be more cautious about these stories.
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com 3 days ago
The PRC stans have really kicked up over the past couple of weeks.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 3 days ago
Even in cyberpunk these flying cars are only for big corpos and the rich.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Special licensing that is on-par with a helicopter license is needed immediately. They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars. Delivery drones and flying cars without corridors just means debris fields.
The alternative is autonomous AI trafficked flying cars that is networked with all commercial drone traffic, but that is 5-10 years away from being reliable and possible.
Regardless, the big issue is safety, a helicopter can land without the engine running. A flying car can also land without power, but not as softly and with less survivability.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The alternative is autonomous AI trafficked flying cars that is networked with all commercial drone traffic, but that is 5-10 years away from being reliable and possible.
50-100 years is more likely. The complexity of automated low altitude flight is exponentially more complex than driving on the ground.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars.
Wasn’t there something EU <-> UK?
hume_lemmy@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
People are so good at driving in two dimensions, I think we should add a third.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Jesus F. Christ the BS that gets posted and upvoted in this community is getting more ridiculously Chinese propagandist by the day. Freaking air taxis? Really? Germany has like a dozen of those dumpster fire startups that chew up subsidies like it‘s no tomorrow (because for them there really isn‘t).
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
No, ain’t going to happen and stop trying to make it happen
Gregorech@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fetch…
venusaur@lemmy.world 3 days ago
As a drone hobbyist, this is absolutely terrifying
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I’ve read the same promise 5 years ago.
caffinatedone@lemmy.world 3 days ago
25 mins of flight on a charge, and that’s not going to be at max speed , so we’ll ballpark it to 15 miles of range perhaps and that’s assuming no “traffic” or delays on landing. Not terribly practical like pretty much all of these flying car concepts.
Oh, and if anything goes wrong, you’re likely dead.
_druid@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I’ve always been afraid of being killed by a drunk driver, or dying while at work. Now both of those things can happen at the same time.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 days ago
Yes, what I need is ever more noise pollution.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 3 days ago
All I see is fully exposed propellers at groin/knee level.
Forget about a birdstrike, you hit ANYTHING and you aren’t taking off or landing.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
When the chances of dying in a car are just too low…
cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
We have had flying car for decades now, its called a Helicopter
muusemuuse@lemm.ee 3 days ago
It’s not that we can’t do this that has kept it from happening yet. It’s that it’s never been practical.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Yeah, this just looks like they upsized a drone without actually solving any of the practical issues with flying cars.
softcat@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Maybe there’s a place for this with air ambulances or something, but in a crowded city I only see this integrating into buildings or the people below.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The problem with an air ambulance idea is you need to make it big enough to work on a patient and it needs to be big enough to hold enough battery to have enough range. You could maybe have one big enough for working on the patient, but with a shorter range, with the only advantage over a helicopter being a smaller area needed to land.
I think it will be a Segway of the air, meaning only “rich” douchbags and sightseeing companies use them in America until enough people die. Opulent presenting countries will use them for headlines like Dubai and SE Asian countries will have them for the police tactical units.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
That’s what a helicopter is.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I have gotten to the point that when a scifi world is made futuristic by having… traffic jams in the sky, and futuristic cities have to have magic sky cars in their skyline with ZERO thought towards futuristic mass transit I just shut it off.
We already have flying cars that people use as their primary vehicle, it is called living in the middle nowhere Alaska and owning a bush plane. The thing is, that is actually the only kind of situation where everyone owning a flying car makes sense, extreme isolation, huge empty distances and no roads.
The whole point of a city is NOT to need something like a flying car.
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Man, Rotten’ll have a renaissance if they plan on keeping the propellers that way…
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 2 days ago
What kind of a backward ass piece of shit country would allow these things to fly all over the place? This entire industry is ridiculous and doomed to fail from the start.
fubarx@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The ground level weedwhacker blades could do double-duty clearing out brush (and pesky pedestrians).
alanjaow@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Even if the tech was perfect, they’d be far too loud. Drones are already pretty loud, but you wanna make em huge and everywhere? Ugh.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I still don’t understand how helicopters are not flying cars.
If you want everyone to have a flying car, we should talk about everyone having a helicopter first so we can quickly come to the conclusion of why that’s a bad idea.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You are 100% correct that helicopters and their issues are the exact reason why flying cars are a terrible idea for the general population. I even like to point them out as the same thing when people talk about flying cars. There are some technical differences between people’s image of a flying car, which is closer to a drone with the multiple lift producing drives than a singular giant spinning blade, although the little ones would be comparably dangerous in a crash.
That said, helicopters aren’t flying cars because you can’t drive them around on the ground.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
The problem with a flying car for the general population is that people are already bad at navigating in 2D and that any technical failure in the air means a vehicle drops onto something and the average person is not going to do a proper checklist and rigid maintenance schedule on their private vehicle.
Litebit@lemmy.world 3 days ago
hovercraft, too.