I can't see such a vehicle being any cheaper or requiring fewer licences to operate than a helicopter. And helicopters are already available if travelling 20-30 miles in a straight line is a problem you need to fix.

Helicopters are much harder to fly than any of the flying cars in development. To become licensed for one, you're looking at spending around $20,000 in instruction and flying time. That's why so many helo pilots are ex military. Flying cars also put more emphasis on the noise reduction. Both of these priorities give them greatly reduced performance (speed and range) relative to conventional helicopters.

A helicopter is enormously complex mechanically, hard to operate, and either failure prone (piston engine) or expensive (turbine). Sure an electric VTOL could be cheaper to operate.

You may be right, but I don't foresee the pilot being allowed to control the vehicle. I imagine governments creating laws before long that would require all drone type cars to use GPS, take off and land from designated areas and would not permit manual control unless you meet some criteria.

In which case unfortunately, again, I can only imagine it would be 100x easier to just automate a helicopter rather than make a "flying car"(whatever that means) and then automate it.

One imagines a similar middlebrow dismissal lobbed at those flying camera drones that started selling for personal use about ten or fifteen years ago... We already had UAVs; why would anyone think multiple tiny electric rotors were better?

I don’t know about the legal or other regulatory logistics cost of operating a helicopter, but the physical maintenance requirements for helicopters are likely far far higher than a potential electric vtol vehicle.

Why? Imagine a vehicle that in practicality performs the exact same job as a helicopter, has the same or actually worse failure modes than helicopters(helicopters can at least autorotate, most proposed "flying cars" can neither glide nor autorotate) and now tell me why would such a vehicle have any lower maintenance requirements? Sure it might use an electric motor instead of an engine, but surely safety would require the exact same maintenance regimen as an actual helicopter. This is not going to be a car that you can bring for an inspection once per year, pay £30, change some oil, cabin air filter and be done. It's going to be as costly as any other air-worthy machine to own, in which case any kind of comparisons to a personal car are frankly out of the window, and anyone who thinks they could build a business around one could build a business right now using existing machines. That's not to say that innovation shouldn't happen, quite the contrary - but the whole talk of "flying cars" for your Joe Shmoe is just a pipe dream.

Just getting rid of metal structural components would be a huge boost, that's why the Cabri G2 has zero life limited parts while the R22 has... many. The state of civil rotorcraft is analogous to that of commercial jets 25 years ago. All metal parts, little to no computerization. This isn't inherent to flying cars vs. conventional helicopter configurations, just due to the extremely risk-averse nature of the rotary-wing industry. Helicopters today are very under-optimized but still work pretty well. Think of how shitty old cars were in mileage and maintenance, but still got the job done, while new cars typically last over 100,000 miles.

Just to be clear, the VTOL in this article appears to be a light-sport aircraft (LSA) with a canard wing configuration. I assume it can glide like a normal LSA, though I won't swear to it. It is not an oversized quad-copter.

That said, if it is an LSA, at least in the US, it would have to meet the normal LSA or E-LSA regulations. Including the service schedule, which is less onerous and non-LSA general aviation, but still far more than a car.

> Why?

As people already pointed, redundancy. Those systems have a lot of engines.

The simplest ones have fixed engines, and the most complex ones have then engine move in a single axis. Both are much simpler than an helicopter.

Electrical motors inherently require less maintenance, what isn't as large a change as it seems.

All the e-VTOL designs I have seen can glide, what places them on the same category as airplanes, that require much less maintenance than helicopters.

> Both are much simpler than an helicopter

They are mechanically simpler, but aerodynamically and electrically vastly more complex. These designs are only possibly due to modern engineering, otherwise they would have been invented before the helicopter.

It's mechanical complexity that brings unreliability and high maintenance.

Electrical complexity is more reliable by orders of magnitude, and aerodynamics won't fail mid-flight.

I can think of some reasons: (1) redundancy, (2) economies of scale, and (3) changed regulatory regimes.

The flying car designs I've seen have no true redundancies. They look like they would be dangerously unstable if they tried to run on fewer than all motors.

The Volocopter has 18 rotors (fixed, electric motor, with 1 degree of freedom - doesn’t get much simpler) attached to 9 battery packs, and at least 4 can fail (even more when they are “nicely” distributed) and it's still controllable and landable. And they could still throw in a ballistic rescue parachute.

Unless of course the power supply fails, in which case we're back to the point I brought up earlier - you have neither autorotation nor gliding to fall back on, the vehicle just falls out of the sky like a brick - the parachute would help but I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Which power supply? According to the poster there are 9 separate battery packs which, presumably, are the power supplies.