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Re:The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi by fiter on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @03:01PM (#21456052)
I can think of some reasons: (1) redundancy, (2) economies of scale, and (3) changed regulatory regimes.
Re:The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi by edmundhuber on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @03:25PM (#21456282)
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.
Re:The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi by FabHK on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:26PM (#21457995)
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.
Re:The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi by gambiting on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @06:00AM (#21461378)
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.
Re:The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi by fiter on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:02PM (#21465096)
Which power supply? According to the poster there are 9 separate battery packs which, presumably, are the power supplies.