Electric 4 seater made by Hyundai

Have they solved:

1. Noise issues? Like it or not this will never go away and we will never have flying cars landing/departing peoples homes, not with any of the technologies we have.

2. Isn't rooftop heli operations banned in some places?
 
bnt83 said:
Have they solved:

1. Noise issues? Like it or not this will never go away and we will never have flying cars landing/departing peoples homes, not with any of the technologies we have.

2. Isn't rooftop heli operations banned in some places?
Click to expand...
1: Money will fix the issue.
2: Money will fix the issue.
 
After the first accident litigation will destroy any attempts of air taxis.
 
I'm very curious about this. We already have a very good system of VTOL aircraft with highly-trained crews. We call them "helicopters." Yet, we very very very rarely see helicopters operate other than airports, hospitals, and rescue areas.
There are certainly people where the cost of a helicopter is not an issue.
As bnt83 says, the noise is a major issue. If people don't like leafblowers, they sure won't like electric VTOLs.
 
G-Man said:
I'm very curious about this. We already have a very good system of VTOL aircraft with highly-trained crews. We call them "helicopters." Yet, we very very very rarely see helicopters operate other than airports, hospitals, and rescue areas.
There are certainly people where the cost of a helicopter is not an issue.
As bnt83 says, the noise is a major issue. If people don't like leafblowers, they sure won't like electric VTOLs.
Click to expand...
It will be interesting. A craft big enough to lift and carry 4 people will make quite a sound.
 
OkieAviator said:
After the first accident litigation will destroy any attempts of air taxis.
Click to expand...

You are well on your way to joining the “cranky cynical old bastage” club (I’ve been a voting member for the last couple years, I can sponsor your application).
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
You are well on your way to joining the “cranky cynical old bastage” club (I’ve been a voting member for the last couple years, I can sponsor your application).
Click to expand...
There are a lot of us. We've been around long enough to have seen far too many promises of "revolutionary" technology that never materializes, including plenty of VTOL stuff, electric stuff, ion drive magic stuff, and so on. Growing up 60 years ago I read a lot of Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated and Sciecne and Mechanics, and they were always full of breathless articles about the newest invention that we'd be driving or flying within a year or two. Still waiting on that. Those magazines were driven by the same thing that journalists are driven by now: anything, no matter how ludicrous, as long as it sells papers or magazines or air time and attracts advertisers, and hopefully makes the journalist lots of money.

c956bee3171b90906ea56270f6f22198.jpg


flying_cars_003.jpg

Cover.jpg


il_570xN.1186671207_kn55.jpg


There are hundreds of these things. And what do we have? Airplanes and helicopters that look and fly pretty much like they did 60 years ago. Auto and aircraft engines that still have pistons and cylinders and crankshafts like they did 120 years ago. Electric cars that have (relatively) short ranges like they did 100 years ago. All of this is because battery power density is still far behind that of fossil fuels, though it's improving---just not fast enough.
 
Reviving an old thread. Hyundai says it will be ready by 2028.

Story here. The article answers some of the questions that were asked in this thread before.

"The company says its aircraft will operate as quietly as a dishwasher, emitting 65 decibels in vertical takeoff and landing phases and 45dB while cruising horizontally."

"Supernal, the automaker’s eVTOL division, says its S-A2 concept can cruise at 120mph and reach an altitude of 1,500 feet. It packs enough battery capacity for the type of 25- to 40-mile trips that helicopters commonly conduct between downtowns and airports for wealthy business types."

Supernal_CES_2024_Press_04.jpg
 
Lowflynjack said:
Reviving an old thread. Hyundai says it will be ready by 2028.

Story here. The article answers some of the questions that were asked in this thread before.

"The company says its aircraft will operate as quietly as a dishwasher, emitting 65 decibels in vertical takeoff and landing phases and 45dB while cruising horizontally."

"Supernal, the automaker’s eVTOL division, says its S-A2 concept can cruise at 120mph and reach an altitude of 1,500 feet. It packs enough battery capacity for the type of 25- to 40-mile trips that helicopters commonly conduct between downtowns and airports for wealthy business types."

Supernal_CES_2024_Press_04.jpg
Click to expand...

Wonder how many people are going to walk into those props?
 
But guys, it's got to be real this time. They have a full-scale mockup!
 
Ed Haywood said:
Wonder how many people are going to walk into those props?
Click to expand...
Maybe they stop before they land. Either way, it's kind of like the old Harley Davidson joke. You say your Harley is reliable, but would you ride in a Harley airplane? I'm not getting in a Hyundai airplane!
 
How does that bad boy handle after one or more of those props/rotors are FODed? And it carries 4 passengers and zero pilots?
 
37 hp BD5 territory. Nice model or maybe render.
 
Salty said:
With current tech, not for very long.
Click to expand...
Please explain how current (or future) technology will make multiple rotors supporting a 3,000 lb load do so quietly. Moving large amounts of air through a propeller disc has been creating significant noise for over a century. Pitch, diameter, and RPM are pretty much the only variables. I'm curious.
 
3393RP said:
Please explain how current (or future) technology will make multiple rotors supporting a 3,000 lb load do so quietly. Moving large amounts of air through a propeller disc has been creating significant noise for over a century. Pitch, diameter, and RPM are pretty much the only variables. I'm curious.
Click to expand...
You have never stood in close proximity to a turbine or piston engine? They make a lot of noise.
 
Ed Haywood said:
You have never stood in close proximity to a turbine or piston engine? They make a lot of noise.
Click to expand...

I don’t think Hyundai specified if the noise rating was inside the cabin or not in their noise statement. Nor did they state at what distance that measurement would be taken. But I digress…they have no actual data to backup their claim, so let’s just call it marketing hype for now.

But I could see sound insulation and cabin ANR technology potentially being a path to a quiet interior.
 
3393RP said:
Please explain how current (or future) technology will make multiple rotors supporting a 3,000 lb load do so quietly. Moving large amounts of air through a propeller disc has been creating significant noise for over a century. Pitch, diameter, and RPM are pretty much the only variables. I'm curious.
Click to expand...
Vaporware makes no noise at all, I've noticed. Just turn the speakers off.
 
MIFlyer said:
Lotta folks live where 15 miles can be > 1 hour drive. Some like this gets really interesting
Click to expand...
Yes. But these things are constantly being presented as existing and successful, when they're not. Sometimes a prototype exists but hasn't flown; some might fly, many won't. All of it, until it flies at Oshkosh and carries a good load a useable distance, are just fantasies, like these from over 50 and 60 years ago:

1705334403377.png

1705334470741.png

This last one, the Skycar, was created but spectacularly unsuccessful:

1705334763966.png
That's all it ever did, tethered to a crane (you can see the cable) so that it wouldn't crash if more than one of the eight engines quit. 800 HP and it still couldn't perform safely. Even after 40 years and $100 million spent.

Lots of folks don't learn from history. In cases like these, lots of folks were fooled by articles and promises, and many put down deposits on them, never to see either the machine or the money again. So, like I say, be skeptical until it does what they are promising it will do. You save your money and you don't end up looking gullible.
 
MountainDude said:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/06/hyu...witter_impression=true&recirc=taboolainternal

60 mile range at 180 mph
Click to expand...
Here's my rub.

We have air taxis already. They're called Helicopters. Unless electric powered ones can make it as cheap as $20 across town, there is no business model that will make these profitable in any city other than the ones that ALREADY have helicopter air taxi services (NYC, for example).

And unfortunately, there's no physical way to develop a new aircraft of any type that's cheap enough to fly and carry passengers for this cheap.
 
MIFlyer said:
Lotta folks live where 15 miles can be > 1 hour drive. Some like this gets really interesting


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
But are they willing to pay hundreds of dollars to save that one hour. I would be willing to bet very, very few would. Which is why heliports in the US are so rare outside of lower Manhatten. It's just too freaking expensive.
 
JVerb said:
We have air taxis already. They're called Helicopters.
Click to expand...
And helicopters can autorotate when the power fails. Multicopters cannot, so they have to have multiple robust systems to avoid a fatal failure. That's not cheap. Making it worse is the inherent inefficiency of small rotors. An electric helicopter would make far more sense, and even then it would need great gobs of battery capacity.

Hyundai makes a great car. I've had one for a long time, one of the best vehicles I've ever owned. But I'm wondering if they've fallen into the multicopter-hype-flying-car race off the cliff. They are not, after all, experienced aircraft builders, as far as I know.
 
JVerb said:
But are they willing to pay hundreds of dollars to save that one hour. I would be willing to bet very, very few would. Which is why heliports in the US are so rare outside of lower Manhatten. It's just too freaking expensive.
Click to expand...
But, would it need to be "hundreds of dollars" if it's electric and hops back and forth between two spots? For example, North Seattle to the Microsoft campus in Redmond? 1 hour drive or 10 minute flight and the thing could just go back and forth for 2 hours in the AM and two hours in the evening. Lots of scenarios like that.

No one is arguing that this replaces the car, but if this started to turn into a $50 trip the math looks good for a lot of folks. Or Seattle to whidbey island. I could see a huge business just in the little corner of the world I'm in.
 
MIFlyer said:
But, would it need to be "hundreds of dollars" if it's electric and hops back and forth between two spots? For example, North Seattle to the Microsoft campus in Redmond? 1 hour drive or 10 minute flight and the thing could just go back and forth for 2 hours in the AM and two hours in the evening. Lots of scenarios like that.

No one is arguing that this replaces the car, but if this started to turn into a $50 trip the math looks good for a lot of folks. Or Seattle to whidbey island. I could see a huge business just in the little corner of the world I'm in.
Click to expand...
I want to give a plug for my friends in Arlington,WA. They do fly from the San Juan Islands to everywhere everyday.

www.point2pointair.com

Point to Point Air

Hate traffic? Do you want to reach your destination faster and safely? We get that. Avoid the gridlock of ground transportation. Fly to San Juan Island, Friday Harbor, Roche Harbor, Orcas Island, Lopez Island, most anywhere in the San Juans and around the Pacific Northwest. Point to Point air...
www.point2pointair.com www.point2pointair.com
 
MIFlyer said:
But, would it need to be "hundreds of dollars" if it's electric and hops back and forth between two spots? For example, North Seattle to the Microsoft campus in Redmond? 1 hour drive or 10 minute flight and the thing could just go back and forth for 2 hours in the AM and two hours in the evening. Lots of scenarios like that.
Click to expand...
Everybody knows about those scenarios, but NOBODY has accomplished anything with an electric VTOL so far, and even if they do, the certification process will be long and arduous.

"Cheap" is wishful thinking. It won't be cheap. Even getting just a new ICE aircraft engine to market eats up many hundreds of millions of dollars, so the relatively low numbers produced make them expensive. Once one adds in all the necessary liability insurance for this sort of thing, it gets way, way too expensive.
 
How many people are going to get in a pilotless full-scale drone anyhow? Even if it was feasible to build?
 
Steamflyer said:
How many people are going to get in a pilotless full-scale drone anyhow? Even if it was feasible to build?
Click to expand...
Plenty would, right up until a couple of them fall out of the sky with fatalities, which is inevitable. Plenty of people simply don’t know enough to recognize when the reassurance that “everything is great, no way this thing can kill you (don’t pay any attention to that disclaimer and release of liability in your ticket purchase agreement, that’s just legal stuff) is nonsense.
 
Racerx said:
I just don't get the infatuation.
Click to expand...
My theory is that the people in charge of providing a lot of this funding are wishcasting. They live is an urban area like the bay area or NYC and are dismayed by the amount of time they spend on highways between San Francisco, Mountain View, San Jose, and whatever extremely expensive neighborhood their main residence is in. A 'quiet' VTOL aircraft would solve all their problems! Make it electric and have lots of AI software in it because Software Is What They Do And They Understand It. What can they do with a helicopter that's new? The problems with helicopters are known, whereas the problems with the VTOLS are unknown, and feel like software so they kid themselves that they can solve them all.

So they try and bend the numbers to try and convince themselves that there's actually loads of people who would pay $300 a trip to make that 1.5hr commute 20 minutes long, because they certainly would.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top