The venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
What problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
The same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need.
(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
The military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field.
I don't see how these style of drone like aircraft could possibly be better for personnel or gear transport over a collective rotor helicopter. A bigger rotor is more efficient, can lift more, and can autorotate to a safe landing after taking the inevitable battle damage and losing power.
I mean I could be wrong, im certainly not an expert in future military design and strategy, but I just don't see any advantages once you start scaling these to the size needed to move humans. The only potential I can see is multi-rotor designs being easier to learn to pilot over a collective rotor design, but I don't see any modern military considering a few weeks off a pilot's training being worth the trade off in range, capacity, and safety.
> Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first?
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
The tradeoff is you have to build a cargo business. That costs money and leadership attention. Racing for the beachhead, given sufficient access to capital, is the more focused strategy. (This is a good example of how bootstrapped versus financed companies can be radically different in their technical debts, time to market, culture and discipline around validating hypotheses.)
Different configurations are better for different missions. Small suicide drones have very limited range, weak sensors, and can't carry much cargo or a large enough warhead to take out hardened targets. Hopefully we'll never get into a conflict with China, but if we do the platforms will have to be much larger just due to the greater ranges involved.
The 'final' decision was recently made to go ahead with the massive project for this, which is eventually intended to replace the UH60/Blackhawk type platform. Traditional big money defense contractor stuff.
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
the problem with train it stops ... on every train stop. New york specifically, there are several networks(new jersey, mta, there are lines that are 100+ years old.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
> if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings.
> LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?
About 7000 on average, but let's say 10000 since demand varies. And let's consider doing 10% of them with helicopters. If we average 3 people per helicopter, that's 170 groups in and 170 groups out. If each landing needs 5 minutes of pad time, that's 14 pads. Make it 20 to handle variation.
Wow, that makes it sound significantly more feasible than I would have guessed.
Those are all reasonable questions, but if some entity would be able to answer them, of all things, I think JFK, an airport, would be well equipped to handle them.
Well it's 5-10 minutes once you get to the west 30th st heliport, which can easily take 20 minutes within Manhattan. Plus getting loaded in, cleared for takeoff, and potential for backups at the landing pads, I suspect the gains are much less in practice.
JFK and city is a relatively niche and regionally unique market compared to how short/medium range aircraft are used in general. For instance the Joby or Archer product right now wouldn't have the range to fly from a helipad on the Seattle waterfront to somewhere in the San Juan Islands. Or for a flight from Vancouver harbour to Victoria.
I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.
The actual risks of modern day Germany going on a hegemonic rampage across Europe are extremely low. Their interests these days are much more aligned with maintaining proper democratic institutions, the EU, and being a voice for the free non-russia-aligned world.
Yeah, the US, which doesn't even want to put boots on the ground regarding Iran, will totally start invading nuclear powers in Europe any time now. Totally.
The US political system is inherently unstable. It has a strong god-king executive branch of government, and only uses first-past-the-post voting, which results in truly insane election results, and little to no need for cross-party coalition building.
Germany has a partially proportionate-representation multi-party strong-parliament system. While some fringe lunatics can definitely win an election, they are incredibly unlikely to sweep it.
I view World War 2 as Nazis harnessing discontent in Germany to motivate Germans to fight a war. So, the main risk I see is discontent building up again. What about people who can't have a good future because of the industrial decline of Germany?
You still wouldn't have nearly as many dollars if you subtracted the times those people were correct in that assumption. Personally I assumed the site would be global. It doesn't have any info though, so I rely on finding out somewhere else I guess.
The only reason you would assume a site would be global is if your definition of "global" is "works in the US" & you never bother to check for support of other countries. I live in the anglosphere outside of the US & I encounter more than enough US-only web projects for that not be to a default assumption I hold.
Most sites are not global - it's very odd to assume they would be.
OSM launched as a London / UK project. Even today, it's a lot more comprehensive in some parts of the world than others.
If I got the impression that it was like OSM, that would give me the impression that it is only as global as my contributions to it (which is what lead to OSM becoming global).
Expecting support globally is of course unreasonable. Expecting it to be designed to be somewhat location-agnostic for contributors and including some obvious docs (which could just be "coming soon" or "here's what we need to expand") is pretty reasonable to me.
I don't get why there isn't even a stub repo for a mobile app to contribute with. Or am I just not finding it?
After the talk on Grazer Linuxtage (media.ccc.de, youtube.com) we got many responses from people also wanting to buy this receiver. We fixed a few issues of the first revision and ordered 200pcs of Revision 2.
We expect the 200pcs to arrive in the first week of May, 2026. The cost of one complete receiver (excluding case and mechanical parts) is about 20 €.
If you want to purchase a receiver PCB, please contact us at the email liked in the Imprint/Impressum of opentrafficmap.org"
That's for a hardware receiver. It does not appear to have mobile app or API doc accompanyment or a doc on what is needed for expansion. I would imagine that there is a minimum critical mass and municipal buy-in for such devices to work. Theoretically, mobile apps would require far less barriers to start being useful.
It seems pretty weird to use all English words in the domain for a service that offers no English translations and operates in no English speaking countries.
The map is based on international standards and technically it does not restrict locations to German speaking countries.
The authors of this project also shared that they intend on publishing more around this project. This seems to be mostly an early demo that was intended for the live event.
The Germans and Danes and Swedes and Norwegians I see on the Internet developing and publishing software often have a better grasp of the English language than many born in the USA Americans.
OpenStreetMaps works in the US and much of the rest of the world.
It's entirely reasonable to expect that a project with an extremely similar name would also work in most of the world, which just happens to include the USA.
Big social media companies are likely overjoyed to be able to get discrete, government issued info of a person's full legal name, date of birth, residential address (as is printed on US drivers licenses) for advertising and demographic profile targeting purposes. And then be able to correlate it with their existing social media history/clicks/profile, browser fingerprinting, IP address, daily usage patterns, geolocation. It's a massive gift to them.
I doubt they need that to identify you. There are also lots of other problems like algorithmic manipulation. But also just stop using these junky websites. Everyone always complains about Meta doing this, TikTok doing that, and it's like if all they do is make you mad, stop being their user/customers?
It's very hard to stop being their users/customers when they're the only platform where people are gathering for that particular purpose. The nature of walled gardens and network effects often mean that there isn't a viable alternative.
It's bad when the choice one has is between 1) using a platform that's significantly problematic or 2) being disconnected from everyone you'd like to connect with because they're only using that platform.
It’s pretty easy. I haven’t had social media besides LinkedIn since, I think 2013? I participate in all sorts of events, I know about things going on in my neighborhood and city, and I have quite a few friends. You don’t need this stuff and it’s just going to suck up more and more of your time and attention misleading you in to believing you need it.
You’re not connected with anyone. It’s a surrogate activity.
Be careful saying you don’t use social media or soon you’ll have a wholly off-topic sub-thread about whether or not HN is social media too, even though we’ve all read the same tired arguments from both sides about a billion times in other threads.
We're in the same era where lots of peoples' installation guides for the software they want people to use is essentially boiled down to "sudo curl | bash" and/or just "blindly install this thing with 37 npm dependencies", so I'm not surprised in the slightest.
But wait, hold my beer, now we've got people turning openclaw type tools loose in their systems to do things as sudo or install software packages from supply-chain-attack vulnerable repositories with no human intervention whatsoever!
I wonder how long it will be until somebody implements a thing like a camera pointed at a fixed mount Android phone with a rubber finger to open the Google authenticator app
Utah snow at its elevations and climate is more dry and fluffy. Tahoe snow or similar when the temperature is only marginally below freezing is more likely to be wet, slushy. Same thing as snow/ice buildup on the mountain passes over the Cascades in WA when the temperature is hovering just below zero C.
It's hard to measure "cheaper" as an end user consumer, the price you pay for the service, because it's very likely they're operating at a loss to gain market share and growth.
Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.
In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on.
Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".
Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
Turnouts exist. Unfortunately, head-of-line-blockers are very commonly already overwhelmed by the task of keeping tab of their own vehicle; would be a far stretch to expect them to simultaneously stay aware of traffic situations, spot the turnouts ahead, and then take the turnout.
Definitely a big concern, but given the number of times in my lifespan that I've seen pictures or video of human-driven vehicles that have got stuck on railroad crossings (or just straight up drunk people trying to drive linearly down a railroad track)...
I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around crossing barrier arms, vs 100,000 hours of automated driving. I would bet the automated driver does a lot better.
I recently saw a video from (I think not Phoenix) of 3 waymos that were next to each other blocking traffic in an intersection, refusing to move, because they were facing a traffic signal intersection where the signals had reverted to blinking red mode. Humans who paid attention when learning to drive will understand this means the intersection has reverted to a 4-way-stop due to the traffic signal failure.
The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
> The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.
What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?
Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?
This is the right way to look at it. For autonomous fleets, there are typically tiers of intervention, starting with a simple remote check - "can I drive through this?" type confirmation, to much more detailed remote instructions that are slower to give, to getting someone from operations out (or in an emergency first responders) to manually move the car. One reason why you might want to keep traditional controls in the vehicle for the near term.
It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
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