 Live on a given Thursday morning, I'm Jay Fiedel. The handsome young man is Ethan Allen. He's a scientist with APCSS, joins us from time to time. He's in the Think Tech family for many years and we talk about likable science. That's what we're here for. Good morning, Ethan. Good morning, Jay, how are you doing? We're good. So the question, maybe this is a really short show. Are there flying cars in our future question mark? No. Go ahead. It's a technology that's been developed already. It's not going to be undeveloped. It's just going to go on. The question really is how fast are they going to be and become common? That may be decades down the road. Well, from the technology point of view, I think what I hear you saying is we could do this today, but it has to be socialized in the marketplace. And it has to be socialized in the regulatory community. And if we could get past those two things, we could have flying cars today. Is that right? That's pretty much right. I mean, the technology, the basic technology is there, but we're really sort of, I think, not even a model T level. Yes, they built some nice prototypes. They can do two things. They can fly 25 miles on a single charge. They can carry a person. That's nice. They're previously expensive at this point. Yes. Building a social acceptance, having people understand that these are very neat to have. It's very cool to be able to do this. And then, as you say, the regulatory business, is this going to be a real headache to deal with? Yeah, well, you know, it's a struck me that this is sort of like Kitty Hawk. As a matter of fact, Kitty Hawk is one of the companies involved. You know, it's nice to do this on a remote beach in South Carolina, which is where Kitty Hawk is. And, you know, or on a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. But, you know, the dream come true would be that you'd have. This kind of automated technology that would allow. The flying car to fly right over your city street. And I think that, you know, even assuming that we can get more than 25 miles of range, even assuming that we can, you know, get the best technology and improve the best technology to make, make it fly. I think there's a long way to go on the software where you could have multiple flying cars in the city, not crashing into each other. Where are they on that? Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a huge issue. I mean, right now they are classified as ultra-light flying machines, basically. And they don't really need to be regulated, but they cannot fly over urban areas. They cannot fly over airports. And yes, at some point they'll have to be dealt with. Because even if you have good self-driving or self-flying automation in them, still once you put them over in adjusted areas, they're bad things are bound to happen sooner or later, right? And you don't really want one of these things falling out of the sky onto a busy city street. Yeah, so how are they going to regulate these? What kind of safety precautions are going to have to be put in place? What kind of insurance are they going to have to have on them? Yeah, huge numbers of different questions. And yes, I mean, as long as they were constrained with relatively small range, relatively tiny payloads, they're not terribly practical for a wide-spread use. So they'll never be much more than that. You and I, we have a half an hour to design a pathway for that. But first, believe it or not, we have a viewer who's way ahead of us here. And the viewer has asked a question I want to put to you. Thank you to the viewer for doing that. Unless we require everyone to get pilot's licenses, it seems that flying cars will need to be smarter than on-road cars, probably having true general, true general artificial intelligence. Level five autonomy is much farther away than we had hoped and may be unreachable even for road cars. How can we safely have skies full of flying cars? Well, you touched on that a minute ago, but is it possible? Yeah, I mean, again, I think that's unreasonable to suggest that everyone who's flying is going to have to have a pilot space and then they're going to become common. It's not that many people have either capability or the time or the energy or the money to get pilot's license, right? It's a fairly complex process. And so it's going to depend, I think, on the automation getting better to where they become essentially self-lying. Besides, for any utility, if you demand there's a pilot and then you've immediately increased your payload, a great deal, right? A pilot is in there and that just cuts down on what more you can carry. So a simple logistics point of view, you really want these to be flying themselves so that the pilot isn't part of the payload, right? Well, don't you think there'll come a time? I mean, let's assuming this catches and becomes a reality. What do you think there'll come a time when you won't need a pilot's license? Will you get in the machine? Like GPS, you punch in your destination and it takes you there. What expertise do you need for that? No, absolutely. I think that's the only way. That's a prerequisite, basically, for them to become popular. And so the question is, yes, can we get that level of reliable auto-piloting technology? And yeah, it's tricky. You're probably going to get in a car because you've got third dimension to deal with. But that technology is developing very rapidly all the time. I mean, right now, the technology for self-driving cars, which is still admittedly, really, in its infancy, has a far lower per passenger mile fatality fatal accident rate. That rate is about a quarter of human-driven vehicles. And yet we're still sort of prototyping that. So this automation technology can and will develop better and, yes, until that happens, I don't think that the flying cars can really take off as it were. I heard that. Well, yeah, I totally agree. It's a sequential thing. The first thing we do is we reach a certain level of perfection of the flying of the terrestrial cars. And when we see that that works, and we have a very, very, very low rate of accident and, God forbid, fatality, where people, say, can clearly come to the conclusion that it's safer to be in an automated car than a human-driven car, once we get to that point, then I think the automated technology will be worthy of flying cars. But until then, it's really not going to be a reality, not in the practical sense. Yes. And you're quite right. There's a real socialization aspect. Yeah. Because already it is, you know, arguable, yes, that you're much safer off in an automated driven car. So just saying that the fatal accident rate is clearly not a human-driven vehicle. So, you know, anyone with any sense would do that, but you don't see a lot of them yet. There's a whole social acceptance. Now, part of it with flying cars may not be, there may not be a hurdle because we are all, everyone's used to driving their own car, right? They've seen their grandparents did it, their parents did it, they do it. You know, everyone does that. None of us have really flown, not many of us have flown our own planes, right? So we're not, we don't have that sort of social hurdle to get passed about giving up control of your piloting, because you get in a commercial jet and you're giving up that control, right? Somebody's up there piloting it. So, yeah, so we may, that hurdle may not be as big as one, but there's still going to be a, some significant barrier there. Well, you know, and the other thing is, you know, is this federal or is this state? It's the old story. The states retain a lot of jurisdiction, if you will, over cars and automated cars and the federal government has been tentative about getting involved, I think. The federal government, in my view, should just control the whole thing. So you have uniformity among the states. That would have to happen with the flying cars. You can't have different rules for different areas. You have to be able to cross the state line without worrying about whether you, you know, comply in the new state. It has to be a federal system, don't you think? Yes, it's going to be very awkward. You know, a road, you can say it, road crosses the state line here at this point and you can change the rules if you want and change your speed limit, whatever you want. But yes, if you're flying across open woods, how do you really know where that state line is when you've gone from one state to another? I mean, yes, the GPS, it can tell you, yes, you're now approaching the border and yes, now you're on the border and you've crossed it. And so in theory, the states can do it, but I agree, I think it makes much more sense to try to do it federally. Think about the rules that you have around airports and around cities, which are going to have to really be very tightly regulated for these things, right? You cannot have these in flying over airports, right? You know, that's just crazy because, you know, the potential for accidents with incoming or outgoing commercial flights is horrendous. And so yeah, if every state is controlling it, there's just going to be a mishmash of different kinds of rules, how far, how high, you know, it makes much more sense, but I agree with you to have feds write the regs on it. Yeah, but you know, it's easy to program the thing. This will all be a question of software, right? So we don't want it to go near an airport. Well, put the airport in its GPS system and say this thing cannot go, cannot go anywhere near that airport. You know, you can huff and puff and stamp your feet. It cannot go anywhere near that airport. So you don't have to worry about steering it away. It will not go there. So I mean, it's a robotic kind of thing, I think, that would be built into its GPS navigational system. You know, the thing that troubles me about the flying cars, I mean, of course, they got the rotors sort of like a drone. Then they go up and down, straight up and down. They're in a runway. I don't think most of them, there are a number of them. Just looking at the New York Times article, there were, you know, three, four, five of them out there now and they're raising capital and they're developing technology. They're even developing technology that can build the technology. I thought that's interesting. They're not buying the components. They're making the components. Anyway, so if you have rotors, okay, you talked about this a minute ago. If it falls out of the sky, you run out of gas, electrical charge, your rotors break, your navigational system breaks, could happen. Something breaks. And now it's not a question of finding a soft landing. It's coming down right now on whoever is down there. I don't know how you fix that. Any ideas? Yeah, no, they have, at least these early designs have no glideslope at all. They drop like rocks, if things go wrong up in the air. And one presumes you would try to build in, again, in your software, all kinds of alerts. So if it sees the least kind of thing potentially going along, just immediately says find the nearest good spot land and get down. As quickly as you can, basically. Because, yeah, you can't afford to have stuff go wrong. I mean, a small paper cover, a Cessna can fly, cut out its engine, can glide for some, quite some distance, but it's got some altitude, restart the engine and go from there. But these really, you can't do that. Yeah. Well, okay, no, but you can set, as you suggest, you can set up a malfunction system that gets a handle on it, using AI, you know, anything, you know, sensors about everything that's happening in the aircraft, the car craft. And when anything sounds like it might go wrong, the thing looks for a place, maybe it starts to siren or something, let people know it's coming down. And then it tries to come down as gracefully as possible as soon as possible. So that, you know, it's no crash. Right. And it seems to me this is a whole new technology we have to work on to achieve that. Yeah, because it's one thing, like if you're driving your electric car and your, your charge runs out and you pull aside the road, it's one thing. But yeah, you're flying cars. You've got to know that it's getting low on charge and it's going to land before it runs out of charge. Yeah, right. Let's assume for a moment, Ethan, let's make some wild assumptions here. Let's assume that they solved that problem. Let's assume they can get a range of way more than 25 miles. Let's assume they have a navigational and a software system that will, you know, be able to handle it without a license pilot, without a pilot. Really, it's automated. The whole thing is automated. It's really bulletproof that it's not going to fail. It's all kinds of failsafe systems built into it. I mean, I think this is something that engineers and software engineers could really figure out and maybe one or more of those various competing entrepreneurs that are building or trying to build these things will come up with various systems and they'll be, you know, they'll collaborate and there's some big company we'll put some big money into before you know it. All the problems we've identified here would be resolved. Okay. So let's assume it really works. Let's assume it will fly over a city. What's the benefit? Well, there are several benefits. One, if you start becoming popular, you're going to take a certain amount of traffic off the road as people would rather fly in a straight line from point A to point B than drive in some weird convoluted way through heavy traffic. They should be faster, you know. You know, there's a lot of, for obvious appeal to it, to anyone too. I mean, the idea of just being able to go walk out your door, pop in this little thing, punch a button and you know, fly through the air to someplace 50 miles away presumably in 20 minutes or something is very appealing, right? It's going to be a real selling point. Yeah. How do we get from here to there? Is it a question of how fast can that happen? How fast will it happen? Well, it's the old B-line thing, you know. If I fly a B-line, instead of taking twists and turns on the road and stopping for traffic lights and traffic and what have you, I would get there in a small fraction of the time that it takes me to drive even if I drive well, even if the roads in that area are good. The bottom line is if it works perfectly for this discussion, let's assume that I can get where I need to go really quickly. And so if I have say a range of 100 or 200 or 500 miles on the thing I'm not going to use nearly as much range as I would where I driving an electric car or a gas car. It would be relatively speaking immediate. Right. In that sense, there's sort of more efficient, although, you know, you're using a lot of energy to lift something like that up off the ground. That's going to be, again, one of the big technical challenges is how do they, how do you get batteries that are powerful enough, old enough charge, long-lasting enough, and light enough, you know. You can't use your lead-based batteries in an aircraft, right? What an air-based battery or a hydrogen-based battery or something, you know. Well, are we anywhere close to that? Talking about that digression, seems to me, as you say, electric car batteries are heavy, although, A, they're not as heavy as they were a few years ago, and B, they're not nearly as expensive as they were a few years ago. So we made progress in that regard. Right. And suffice to say, if you make a little, you know, it's that certain law that what every computer, you know, doubles in its capacity every year. There's a mathematical progression here where you can anticipate if a lot of people are doing research on this kind of technology, maybe even developing a sort of trickle charge from solar, who knows what you can do with electric, a rather fine car. Do you think it's doable within our lifetime? Do you think it's doable at all? Yes. I mean, I, you know, if you look at technologies and technologies that were introduced a century ago, you know, book 30 or 40 years sometimes to get widespread and more and more recently at the time from the technology's inception with wide adoption has shrunk cell phones or, you know, were adopted pretty, pretty quickly. Electric cars, I mean, electric cars, they're being adopted pretty quickly. Self-driving cars, that seems like that's a little more of a, you know, a little slower. So yeah, it's a balance there. You say, I mean, there's a lot of factors. If the first few go up, work very well, work flawlessly, that will really encourage more people to invest and push the whole thing. If you have a bad crash or two early on, that'll be very, you know, set the field back. Calls for regulation and all that, you know, slow the tension between regulatory, regulating government and the industry and people. So yeah, it could fall out of the sky. May I say that way? But let me, let me go to another, another point on this. It's the implications. Let's assume the car works. Let's assume it has range. It has the lightness. It has good navigational software that's not going to crash into anything. All of that. And let's assume that the public loves it. There are implications to our society. Because if the public loves it, there'll be a lot of them up there. And the question is when you get to your destination, what do you do with the thing? It's not like you pack it up in a suitcase and, you know, walk it up to your office. No, no, no. Things are changing about offices and things are changing about whether you should go into your office. COVID has taught us that maybe we don't have to go in. Maybe transportation is not as critical for the work of day world as it used to be. But do you do have, nevertheless, a problem about what to do with it when you get there? And then finally, what implication does it have for the existing roadway and transportation system? You give that up? Or do you modify that to allow for this additional option? Yeah. And everyone might look at the current, the who we group here in Hawaii, right? Who they've got lots of little spots around where they park a few vehicles. You get on your phone and you say, I want this kind of vehicle who walked in there, punching a code, get in and drive it wherever you want. You basically leave it the who we spot at the, you know, where you get out. It's used again by somebody else. That's, I think economically, the only way these things will work is you won't own them individually. Some company will own them and make sure that thing's being used virtually 24-7, except when it's information. It's the Uber model, isn't it? It's like, I don't know if you remember that old video about guys fishing and doing ice fishing. And it's really funny. He's doing ice fishing in the middle of a lake and he wants to have a beer. And so he telephones the, you know, the store on the side of the lake and they send him a beer with a drone. The FAA got down on that. They thought that was really a bad ad. You know, the idea is you call for the service. You recall for the Uber. You, as you said, you don't own it. It's silly to have private ownership of the sort of thing. You have a fleet like an Uber fleet and they, they come to your door and pick you up and drop you off. That's the way it's got to work. They do, they're doing big data search. They know essentially what times where they should have more of their vehicles stationed basically because of likely demand. Yeah. They know when you drop somebody off, that's not a likely pickup spot. You fly the vehicle somewhere else to a better spot where it's more likely to be needed soon. Yeah, that's all, again, I think it's all got to be part of it. Make that, make this thing work. So yeah, it's the roadway. I mean, I don't envision our roadways are going to go away anytime soon. They hopefully would become less congested. And since hopefully most, if not all the cars on them by then will be self driving, automated driving, zoom, a near a flawless system are rates of traffic accidents and penalties will plumb. So the two could be very nicely complimentary in that sense. Yeah, but even, even if, you know, these, these flying cars are really very efficient. They're not going to be able to, you know, long hauls. It's short, short hauls. And I, and I think that the, you know, the, the air, air industry, air, air, airline industry will remain vital. Although there's pressure to make them electric too. I don't think there's much progress, but there is pressure. It's a fuel thing. Greenhouse gas thing. You know, ideally we have these new aircraft that fly without using fossil fuels, but then I think they have to stay in business for the long hauls. These are really short term. They're like taxis. Just like taxis. So that, that raises the question of, you know, where, where do you deploy them? Where is the Uber located? And what happens in a case of bad weather? What happens if it's raining or snowing or, you know, windy? I mean, all those things would have a, a significant effect on, on the system. What do you do to compensate for that? Yeah. There's two interesting points you've raised now. One, note that all these prototype, I mean, aerial vehicles that are being developed use electric engines, none of them as far as I understood, use of fuel based standard internal combustion engine. They're just too, it's too heavy to inefficient. They're all used on electric motors. So, um, but yes, so if you envision that, that the automated system, safety and navigation systems are so good. When presumes that same kind of level of, of sophistication will be applied to terrestrial vehicles too. And therefore you should be able to sort of cram a lot more cars on the road without slowing things down. Anything should speed up even more cars on the road. If they're all, all the cars would know where one another is or one another are, they're all paying attention to each other. They're all driving. They're not going to get big blocks where they slow down. They'll space themselves out. They'll keep traffic flowing much better. So in some sense, those industries are going to compete against each other too. Right. Um, I was going to say that first of all, you have to have system control. You know, it's like that thing with the, with you can get in a certain lane, a fast lane, um, but you have to pay and the cost of being in that lane depends on how many other people want to be in that lane. So, you know, it's automated on an AI basis. And it's calculated to make the, the whole system most efficient. Um, and, and, you know, you pay is a way that that can be, you know, controlled. Okay. Good. Now you have flying cars. Well, likewise, you have to have a system for the flying cars. You, you, you know, even the best AI navigational technology requires some control of all the cars. And if the airspace, for example, is too crowded. Um, you know, you want to control all the cars. Um, and if the airspace, for example, is too crowded, um, you know, you want to control the system in one way. If it's, it's, uh, or the price, uh, if it's not so crowded, you want to control it in another way and including the price. Now here's the big one. Okay. If I have an interchangeable system where some people, um, might take the flying Uber. Uh, and other people might take the terrestrial Uber. Because I, you know, I think the same thing is going to happen to automated cars. You won't own it yourself. It'll be somebody that drives up to your door at a certain time. An automated and automated Uber. Um, so if I have it, uh, say a system. That's controlled electronically with AI on the ground. And I have another system. That's controlled in the same way in the air with flying cars. Two systems are really part of one system. Because if the weather is bad or who knows what, then you know that people are going to take the other option. So, so you have to create a, uh, comprehensive system, including the terrestrial automated cars, plus the flying cars all together now. Am I right? And how do you do that? And who's going to do that? Right. I mean, yes, some Uber of the future, right? Basically, uh, I think you're right. Systems would have to be linked together in any, certainly in any sensible arrangement that they'd be linked. Um, because as you say that it's just a question, you know, you're in point A, you want to get point B. Yeah, it may take a little longer on the ground, but, you know, it may be the cost half as much, maybe it's worth it. You know, um, there's going to be all that calculation to be made. Um, now they project, you know, as the guys look at this project, they can make these things. Compendably priced basically on a per mile basis. Again, I'm not going to hold my breath for that. Um, I do think it will happen. I think we'll begin to see them coming out. I wouldn't be surprised in the next decade. If we began to see a trickle of them, you know, but, um, yeah. You think we, you know, I think about the world with hundreds of countries and I think about all the developing countries where people don't have. A lot of money. And I think about whether this would ever work there. And I think about them, you know, the disparity, even in our country, but people who could afford to fund this and who could not afford to fund it. And so it's likely to cost a bit of money going forward, especially in the development phase, um, until it all settles down against, you know, economies of scale. And so the question is, you know, I have on top of all we discussed, what about the disparity? What about servicing, you know, the population, the consuming public, if you will, some of whom can afford it and some of whom can't. Sounds like there's a lot of challenges between where we are now and this utopian world of automated transportation. Do you see how that would work? I mean, can we look into the future now and see how the evolution would take place? That's a very, very, very sort of deep question. Yeah. Would these exacerbate the inequity in our society? And is there a way to make them not do so? Is there a way to make them part of making more equitable society? That's a very tricky one. Because as you say, they're going to have to, particularly in the early stages, they're going to be very expensive to invest in. The investors are going to want to get their return. Fundamentally, they're going to be developed by capitalist system, right? It will be, you know, if you can pay, you can enjoy it. You don't. Do you think they would be developed by a capitalist system? Right now, looking at the article in The Times, it seems to me that's just a lot of, what do you want to call it, private capital, entrepreneurial talent, you know, involved in this field and the government isn't doing anything. But when you have to regulate it, as we discussed on a national basis, and you have to, you know, set the rules, set the guardrails on a national basis, you're also saying, aren't you, that the federal government puts some money in. It can't let this remain as a, what I'm going to call it, a wild west kind of, everybody on his own industry. It has to be big capital. It has to be, probably it has to be government incentives and government encouragement. Otherwise it won't happen. Don't you think? I would agree. I think you're going to have to have some serious role for government and regulation of it. How, how they can be used, where they can fly, how they interact with, you know, commercial planes. And yeah, there's sort of a thousand different questions where essentially some federal input is going to be needed. And yeah, that's going to cost governmental money too. Very exciting stuff. And here's my takeaway. You can think about your takeaway. My takeaway is this. Right now we have a Congress that can't tie its shoelaces. Right now we have government that can't, can't address these problems. At the same time, I mean any problems, much less problems as grand as these problems. At the same time, we can envision this and reading the articles, you know, it does get you excited. It makes you think that maybe in the future, humanity can use the technology in a positive way and create a utopian society where it's, it's like science fiction. It's beautiful. It services all of us without inequity. It services all of us at a price we can afford without disparity. Oh my goodness, this is utopian. It's beautiful. It's heavenly. And it is within our grasp. I suggest to you, Ethan, it can be done. If we focus on it, it can be done. The problem is we don't know how to do it. I mean, we don't know how to, you know, find political will use the technology to better this, the life of everyone on the planet, the species in general. And that's the trouble I see. I mean, we have really got to get back to, you know, national management, national government. And until we can solve the problem of, you know, of all the problems that we're looking in the eye right now, we can't, we can't find a way to get over the horizon into making a better world using this kind of promising, exciting technology. Completely agree. You said that very eloquently, Jay. That's, you know, there's huge potential there. Do we have the sort of the disciple and political will to move it forward in the way it should be developed for good purposes that will serve everyone? I like to think we would, as you say, I'm optimistic though. But we shall see, I guess. We shall see, we shall see on flying cars and many, many other similar things. It's a promising world. We should all live so long. Thank you, Ethan Allen. It's great to talk with you as always. Great talk with you, Jay. Thanks. Love me on. Aloha.