Every time someone mentions flying cars, I wonder what they have in mind that a helicopter isn’t the answer to.
I remember helicopters for sale in Farnborough Air Show, probably 30 years ago now, the cheapest there cost about £100k. I assume inflation has quadrupled that, but I don’t follow that market and the stuff on eBay I am unqualified to gauge the quality of.
Hmm. I am not even slightly a mechanic, but people do seem to say electric cars need less maintenance than ICE cars. Would electric helicopters (and not just quadcopters) “take off”? I do see a lot of news-or-press-releases about passenger drones, but I can’t tell how realistic any of them are.
Electric helicopters would be facing the same problem as electric planes - energy density. Right now fossil fuel energy density is still some 40 times greater than batteries and I don't think conventional batteries will ever come even close to matching it. There would have to be some radically new type of a battery, if such a thing is even possible.
That becomes relevant precisely when the the battery mass is a significant fraction of total mass; for long distance flights, this would clearly be the case because even hydrocarbons are barely sufficient density on the longest flights; for point-to-point within a single city, which is how I expect Average Jo to use one if they were safe & available at affordable rates, I expect it isn’t an issue.
Less maintenance for the engines and a few other systems. Just as much maintenance for other components. For instance, the rotor blades have to be replaced every X hours and can cost as much as a car, each.
Mass production allows for more optimization than small production runs. Modern cars can go a long time with minimal maintenance, but it took a lot of R&D to reach that point.
The most successful small aircraft the Cessna 172 Skyhawk has averaged than 1,000 produced per year and runs ~400,000$ new. They could easily drop that to under 100k with modest levels of automation, but can’t justify automation with current levels of demand. Similarly only minimal levels of R&D is worth is at when the market is tiny.
It’s even worse in the Helicopter market. Presumably someone designing a flying car is going to take the R&D and automation risks assuming they will pay for themselves.
It's not even just the automation. There's so little demand that GA is really stuck in ancient standards.
I flew 172s for a while and I was really surprised how old most of the tech was. Built with rivets, engines still using leaded (or lead replacement) gas, still using manual mixture like an old car with a choke. Even the wired microphone in a modern (manufactured in the 2010s) C172 still has this ancient feel about it (not to mention that you couldn't use it anyway as the prop noise is way too loud to use a radio without headphones).
The instrumentation side definitely has caught up (like the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit) but the whole airframe + engine combo seems to come straight out of the 1950s. I imagine this adds to the cost as a lot of this tech is no longer mainstream so there's no economy of scale. You can see this in part costs too, and in the price and availability of AVGAS (some airports here really don't want to carry it anymore and if they do it's really expensive).
I've heard of C172s been retrofitted with modern turbodiesels with full FADEC but I really don't get why they don't come like this out of the factory these days. I did see that some of the lighting tech was upgraded though: The later ones did have LED beacons. But most of the tech was very old.
GA aircraft used to be way cheaper than they are now. Regulatory changes in the 80s (I think) shifted liability to the manufacturer in the event of an accident and everything got more expensive. It's not really fair to compare an uncertified UAV to a certified GA aircraft, because the electric aircraft is going to get a lot more expensive once you certify it for passengers.
I briefly worked with the FAA on their certification system and it’s surprisingly optimized for mass production. Which should be obvious as many aircraft components are needed in massive quantities even if the total number of commercial aircraft are quite limited. Aka the number of turbine blades is larger than the number of engines which is larger than the number of aircraft.
Unfortunately, this hits GA harder as they have vastly fewer components to worry about and small production runs are discouraged. That said, assuming flying cars are going to come from or limited to the US seems unlikely so the EASA also has a significant role.
With enough demand to produce 100k units per year, that would amortize well too.
But light aircraft are a hard thing to sell for really practical reasons. They have a lot of real world limitations for small overall improvements in performance vs ground travel.
This might be different for some air taxi services within metropolitan areas.
Most helicopters use jet engines. I think that is where a large part of the maintenance cost comes in. The rotor assembly is fairly complicated mechanically, but I don't know how often it needs to be serviced.
I think the pro-electric people are underestimating the maintenance requirements though, especially since anything flying has very conservative requirements put on it, so just saying "these electric motors will run fine for 10,000 hours" or something like that isn't going to cut it.
It costs >$100k (potentially much more) per overhaul of a turbine engine. That's a lot more than it costs to overhaul a reciprocating engine (probably 10x more).
I agree that they are more reliable though (part of why most helicopters use them, since loss of the engine is much more serious problem than in planes)
My understanding is that a "flying car" is pretty much just a lower-maintenance, easier-to-use, safer and less noisy helicopter. Any helicopter that doesn't have these properties wouldn't work as a flying car, but once (if) someone figures out how to do it, I guess it'll become a feature of other helicopter designs as well.
I'd like a flying car!