> Flying cars are even more dangerous than SDV

Are they though? Statistically speaking, planes are safer than cars, and SDVs don't exactly have a pristine record track already.

Commercial planes are inspected regularly by qualified technicians, flown by professional pilots, and they don't fly between buildings in densely populated areas. Imagine if every average joe owned a helicopter, and maintained it the way he maintains his rusty old car... Small planes don't have nearly the safety record of commercial planes, and if everyone owned aerial vehicles that fly inside cities, you can be sure it would be a disaster.

I think there's an argument to be made that if flying cars were owned by a company like Uber, regularly inspected, and flown by a computer, the safety could be there, but then you're still left with issues such as noise and energy efficiency.

I never could swallow the statistics of flight safety. Of course they're safer, there's nothing in the sky. I assure you I can drive a million mile in a flat desert without a single incident while sleeping[0].

Flying cars were probably asking to operate in close proximity to things and people and it would make the probs a lot different IMO.

[0] end of hyperbole.

One of the promises about flying cars was speed: you would theoretically be able to live in LA and commute to SF. So there was definitely some amount of disruption talk.

With that said, this is sort of the point: SDVs would be close to arms reach of pedestrians virtually all the time, so I'd imagine that when all is said and done, the safety/regulatory barrier ought to be an extremely high hurdle to overcome.

There are many things that we can talk about in terms of "if only X was solved, that would change the world" (e.g. X being the cure for cancer, or X being singularity, etc). But the devil is of course in the details: until we know what X is, it _could_ be a single breakthrough but it most likely is a nearly insurmountable wall of a million factors). For SDVs, X is L5 autonomy.

Yeah they're even closer but they're not flying. I'm not even arguing for SDV or against flying cars but I do believe that flying tons in cities is (unless you have Transformers level of tech) non sequitur.

That said I'm far more about co-disrupting the world by .. walking.

General aviation (the closes comparison to driving) is more than 20x more dangerous than driving.

https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety