technology

God that's a terrible idea in basically every way

You could not pay me to get inside one of these.

i see china is catching on to the billionaire mouse trap trend, they should do automatic submarines next

They're only really going to be used by the rich but it's a cool toy and makes them look good.

It can reach speeds of 81 mph (130 km/h), with a cruising speed of 62 mph (100 km/h).

mmmkay. That's a significant time save when you can go as the crow flies, but you'll be limited in destinations by the availability of helicopter landing pads.

the aircraft can carry up to 485 pounds (220 kg)

There are only 2 seats, so 2 people and a bag each.

these air taxis can cover 22 miles (35 km) or 21 minutes of flight on a single charge

That's really not very much. Blade, a company that runs helicopter taxis in places like New York, has typical "short flight" distances of 10-100 miles, so one of these can take the shortest viable route once (bringing passengers with it on the trip back if it's lucky) before needing to recharge.

China is a fair bit denser than North America so there may be more of these short distance routes available, but dotting the cityscape with helicopter landing pads in order to take advantage of them would be a big ask and might not be possible.

The vehicle’s battery takes approximately two hours to fully charge.

21 minutes of flight per two hours of charging. Loading and unloading passengers will probably take time as well, so maybe we can call this 45 minutes of "operational time" per aircraft per two hours spent charging. That's a lot of idle time that your passengers will have to foot the bill for in order for your operation to be viable.

This wont end well, tho it might end funny

Jetsons future is here. I wish those Zionazi collaborators success.

In Xiaohongshu I saw a couple posts about self-driving busses, and very few people seemed concerned about the safety of these. No idea what the record says on their safety though.

In theory, flight should be less complicated to automate simply because there are fewer things in the sky and fewer still that are as unpredictable as things on the ground. The issue with flying is that mistakes are much deadlier and more spectacular.

Best wishes to China on this, but I'll suffer the extra travel time on the safety of terra firma

American company of a hundred engineers proposes wild venture capital bait

"Meet the one rich guy who will revolutionise XYZ all by himself"

Single Chinese company prepares to test tech concept and fills in a government form

"The entirety of China has unanimously approved this concept, people will be falling out of the skies imminently, China says"

american when flyin g taxi?

china when taxi fly?

"in the future we will have flying cars"

the future:

I don't hate it but hope it has failsafes

What do would they do in a 7600 scenario?

China is even out-bazingaing the US now.

this is nonsense