Servo - December 2015

film was set in the year 2035 — only

20 years from now. The Robot Taxi shown in Figure 3 will go into test service in Japan in 2016 and have a stand-by human driver onboard, but only if needed. By 2020 for the Tokyo Olympics, it is planned to be in full service.

Will we have totally autonomous cars by 2035? If Google, Uber, Apple, Robot Taxi, and others have their say in the matter — then yes! We might not have truly functional bipedal humanoid personal servants any time soon, but self-driving cars are available now.

Yesteryears’ Cars of Tomorrow

That title sounds a bit like ‘Back to the Future,’ but I wanted to highlight futuristic ideas from the past and see how some dreams just don’t make it into reality. Inventive people from all times have always looked to the future for a better life. In 1920, a coughing, sputtering Model T Ford sure looked better than a horse and wagon clomping along dusty country roads. In 1933, the visionary, Buckminster Fuller designed the Dymaxion shown in Figure 4. Over half of it was filled with an engine and structural components. Of three actually built, only the second one survived to this day, and a copy was made by Norman Foster that is shown in Figure 5. It was to be the car for everyone, but the single rear wheel steering and extreme manufacturing costs sank the company.

In 1950, the driverless car of the future shown in Figure 6 seemed too much like a dream than a possibility.

Here we are — 65 years later — and we see a family sitting without any seatbelts under what amounts to a greenhouse, zipping down a highway with a dashed line that the car must somehow follow.

All of the cars have great big (but non-functional) tail fins to look somewhat like a 1950’s jet plane. Other than a sketch to show a designer’s dream, we don’t know what powered the car or controlled it on roads and highways.

The Flying Car for Everyone

We’ve all seen the articles for the past six decades about a ‘flying car’ in everyone’s garage. The flying car shown in Figure 7 made about as much sense 60 years ago as it does today. If one of our car’s four wheels develops a flat, we just pull over and fix it. If one of the four lifting fans shown in Figure 7 fails, well, you just ‘bought the farm.’ If you ignore the technical hurdles required, the logistical and operational problems become quite evident. When we see headlines in the news about the 32,000+ deaths that occur each year on our highways and realize that these cars travel on two-dimensional roads at speeds below 100 MPH for the most part, we can only wonder just what the ‘average Joe’ might encounter in a three-dimensional airspace. Let’s look at a typical flying car scenario of the near future: It’s halftime for the football game and “Bubba” and friends have finished a 12-pack and his buddies watching the game with him want more beer. Bubba hops into his flying car and zips over to his neighborhood 7-11 to buy two more 12-packs. All around him are other ‘flying cars,’ buzzing around like flies at a picnic. He’s in a hurry and nearly hits another vehicle as he takes off from the store. He barely passed his FAA flight exam after several attempts. He had sold his new pickup for a down payment on his new flying car and is already one monthly payment behind.

The Moller Skycar

I have followed many different ‘personal aircraft’ projects over the years. Most were about small aircraft that could fit in your garage and take off from and land at your residence.