Self-flying car

The term self-flying car is an analogy to the self-driving car. The term self-flying car was first publicly used at an MIT conference in 2013. Many companies have been experimenting with self-driving cars over the last decade. The increasing number of sensors in cars, allowing to adapt to changes in the environment, together with mobile internet connectivity and powerful software installed in the car, made this possible. Recently the Google car experiment gained wide public awareness. These cars still have a driver on board when they go on public roads, for regulatory concerns, but they really drive autonomously. Google published information about accidents that occurred, showing a statistical better result than when cars are driven manually by people.
Feasibility and challenges
The idea of flying cars has been around for more than a century. Only recently however, prototypes are developed that have a high enough feasibility to be commercially viable in the next 3-5 years. This thanks to advances in material sciences, aeronautic innovations, GPS and software improvements over the last decade. By analogy to a self-driving car, self-flying cars would be able to take-off, fly and land on their own. Having a self-flying car would make it not mandatory anymore to obtain a pilot license, which is seen as one of the main obstacles for mass production by the manufacturers of these flying cars. Making a self-flying car would be easier than making a self-driving car: while a self-driving car would have to be able to interpret changes in its environment that can be quite difficult to manage, like gestures of a police officer or malfunctioning traffic lights, these kind of events typically do not occur in the sky. The best proof for that is the widespread use of automatic piloting systems by commercial airliners. These systems have been around already for several decades. For the self-driving cars there are still some technological challenges that need to be met before they would be able to drive without a real person sitting behind the wheel and then there are also legislative and regulatory hurdles that would have to be taken. For the self-flying car, there are mainly legislative and regulatory issues to be handled. Because while for a self-driving car, a regulatory category already exists, i.e. a car, a self-flying car has not yet its own regulatory category, it is considered both a car and an airplane at the moment, which makes it harder to pass regulations. On top of that in 2015 regulators started working out regulations for drones. Until now this has been an almost unregulated sector, although companies are already using these drones in experiments for logistics, construction, entertainment etc. Self-flying cars would have to share the sky with these drones as well. If this sector gets regulated soon and millions of drones would be flying in the sky, this could pose additional technological and regulatory problems for the self-flying car.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu