Think of it this way. If an SUV drives into your building you can sue and make some money. But if some really rich person crashes their flying gizmo into your building you can sue and make a lot of money!

I can't sue if I've been incinerated by an uncontrolled lithium battery fire.

With more and more SUVs and truck beimg EVs that doesn't change much. Well, eVTOLs will burn longer, not that it matters because a large SUV will burn long enough to not matter to you.

And I'd bet a lot more on the crash safety of aerospace cerrified batteries than those of the automotive sector.

> And I'd bet a lot more on the crash safety of aerospace cerrified batteries than those of the automotive sector.

Why? Aircraft are optimized for weight far more than automobiles. Making airplane batteries safer than car batteries would make them even less energy dense than they already are. Add to that fact that cars have a crumple zone built into them, while an airplane AFAIK does not -- at least not one that matters when it crashes into my house at 100mph.

Furthermore, some Tesla crashing on the freeway on the way to Tahoe is unlikely to start a forest fire. But what about some rich yahoo making the same trip while flying their personal electric plane who crashes in the Oakland hills?

These problems are non trivial particularly because every personal electric plane company wants to scale into the millions.

Neither could you sue if you had been struck and killed by an SUV. The end state of your reasoning is that nobody can ever do anything that involves risk because someone might die and be unable to sue. Sounds like an awful world

Emphasis on "killed." I don't want to be struck by an SUV, but one hitting my apartment at ordinary NYC residential street speeds (at least, pre-COVID) is less likely to kill me than a plane crash.

Risk is a community exercise. You don't (or rather, shouldn't) get to externalize disproportionate risks upon the commons because it makes your life easier.

(An example of such a consideration: what happens when the fire department shows up? They know how to deal with a car accident; are they going to have the presence of mind not to douse a vehicle that looks like a normal personal aircraft in water?)

>but one hitting my apartment at ordinary NYC residential street speeds

Why ordinary speeds? Someone driving into a building is likely to be going significantly faster, perhaps because they confused the brake pedal and accelerator.

Things like this happen all the time https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/1529914550266368000

You have only that much of momentum from ground in comparison to something already in the air and just falling down.

We currently have a billion cars on the road. Of course we have plenty of accidents.

But that's not a valid comparison.

And perhaps we should also get rid of carsnow your argument is totally invalid

So, are you saying that you think that the worst that happens in car crashes is "someone could sue"?

please don't waste our time.

Why? You’d expect there to be far more people at the street level than on top floors.

And in any case, even if such accidents would be worse, they’d also be vast less common. It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air, and the level of training required to operate an aircraft is far higher than the level of training required to operate a SUV.

Drivers famously can’t even keep track of which pedal is the brake and which is the throttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration

So, terminal velocity of a relatively aerodynamic shape (like a bullet falling, or a skydiver who is head down and pulled their arms in) is about 200mph, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity

How many SUVs do you know of that are crashing into houses at 200mph?

Also, what is the relative mass of the electric airplane with a bunch of lithium batteries, versus the SUV?

What parts of the house might be hit by a falling airplane, versus an SUV crashing into the house from the road?

What is the fire risk of a bunch of lithium batteries having fallen out of the sky, versus the SUV crashing into the house?

There's lots of factors to be considered here, but overall I'd say there's a lot more risk of damage, injury, and death with the falling electric airplane than with the SUV.

Why focus on houses? SUVs drive into ground level shops and restaurants every single day. Places which tend to exists at ground level for accessibility reasons, and contain much more people than your average house.

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/driver-crashes-through-gas-...

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/car-into-kohls

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/vehicle-careens-into...

https://turnto10.com/amp/news/local/massachusetts-wrentham-v...

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/video-shows-suv-crashing...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-hospitalized-car-plows-dc-res...

https://www.gainsberglaw.com/blog/cars-crash-into-buildings-...

I could find thousands of these.

An airplane falling from the sky is far less likely to hit anyone than a car suddenly accelerating into a store because the driver is flooring the accelerator instead of the brake. These incidents are so common that they have an extensive wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration

You can find some numbers at https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics.html They claim this happens around 60 times a day.

And you think that having the same amount of air taxies in the air that. SUVs on the street would still make the SUVs look bad?

Again at least with streets I know that an SUV will only crash close to streets with an air taxi it could crash everywhere.

Kindergarden? Yes.

Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.

> And you think that having the same amount of air taxies in the air that. SUVs on the street would still make the SUVs look bad?

Yes of course, per passenger mile SUVs are far more likely to drive into a building than an air taxi is to fall out of the sky.

> Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.

But we don’t.

It could be any structure, but the probability is that it will be a house or other type of housing. There are a lot more residential buildings than commercial.

> Why?

All of the things that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719861 wrote, and:

> You’d expect there to be far more people at the street level than on top floors.

There are far more people who live near the sky than live near a large road.

> It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air,

No, it really isn't? Aircraft driver licencing and training is notoriously much harder, longer than the equivalent motor-car licencing and training. Car drivers don't have to learn about stalls for starters. The training is there because a) it's much harder to do right, there are more ways to go wrong and b) potentially greater impact.

The common failure mode for a car is that it stops moving at the side of the road. The equivalent for an aircraft is that it falls out of the sky onto whatever is below. We are not ready for a lot more of that.

remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Glasgow_helicopter_crash