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Business News/ Opinion / Columns/  Today’s electric flying cars are dirty old choppers rebranded
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Today’s electric flying cars are dirty old choppers rebranded

Their promise of quiet emission-free transport is too good to be true

The Kitty Hawk-Boeing Wisk recently caught attention as a ‘flying car’ (Photo: Reuters)Premium
The Kitty Hawk-Boeing Wisk recently caught attention as a ‘flying car’ (Photo: Reuters)

Electric flying taxis were the toast of the Singapore Airshow last week. AirAsia and a unit of Embraer SA announced deals for nearly 200 of these futuristic vehicles, which haven’t made it beyond prototype stage yet. Such eVTOL vehicles—short for electric vertical take-off and landing—have attracted huge interest, with some $12.8 billion invested in the field since 2010, according to McKinsey & Co.

The promise of this boom sector is that they’re selling something fundamentally different than the original VTOL aircraft: helicopters. Unlike their noisy fuel-guzzling predecessors, eVTOLs will quietly buzz a more ethical breed of passenger between office and home, “connecting communities" and linking cities and suburbs “in one swift, smooth, and emission-free flight."

It’s a magnificent triumph of marketing over reality. While eVTOLs promise some genuine advances in aviation technology, the investments being made won’t so much bring about that Utopian future as rebrand the dystopian old helicopter industry for a new generation of the super-rich. If the promise of quiet, affordable, zero-emissions transport sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

Take energy efficiency. It’s always been true that aircraft in cruising flight are remarkably efficient, relative to cars and trains that use friction to drag themselves along the ground. The problem is how to get up there. Climbing and descending (less so) have always taken up an outsize share of fuel consumption. That’s particularly the case with VTOLs, which can use up a big share of their energy just hovering to treetop height. That means the differences between an eVTOL for travel from one city to another and for city-suburb flights are vast.

One 2019 study concluded that eVTOLs could be more efficient than even electric cars for 100km journeys, but noted that 85% of car trips are shorter than 35km—a level at which a regular gas-driven car results in about the same emissions as a flying car. Occupancy also matters. A 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that vehicles like the Larry Page-backed Kitty Hawk Heaviside are already more efficient than electric cars, but a crucial aspect of both analyses is the idea that ground-based modes should be judged by the 1.67 occupants who are carried per trip across the entire American vehicle fleet, whereas eVTOLs should be measured at ideal capacity levels.

That’s not a reasonable comparison. If there’s no full cabin to be picked up each time a flying car touches down, its efficiency per passenger, per kilometre drops drastically. ‘Empty leg’ flights, with a craft flying with no passengers, make up about two-fifths of trips in today’s private jets.

It’s a similar picture with sound pollution. By having several small rotors rather than one big one, most eVTOLs promise to be less noisy than a helicopter, according to Archer Aviation Inc. While decibels are a useful objective measure of sound pressure, they don’t correspond much to the subjective annoyance factor for noise, which relates to harder-to-measure qualities such as frequency, duration, repetition and the way sound reflects from building surfaces in an urban environment. Noise also corresponds a lot to distance, making an eVTOL quieter the higher its cruising altitude. But climb higher and you use up more fuel. It’s almost impossible to be energy-efficient and noise-efficient at the same time.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter. For all the excitement around eVTOLs, they’re likely to account for a small portion of traffic in the future. The trouble is, they’re a distraction from the real problems the aviation industry must deal with—most of all, the question of how the vast majority of us will travel by the middle of this century without our carbon emissions ruining the atmosphere. About three-quarters of investments in future aviation technology since 2010 have gone into urban flying taxis and similar technologies, according to McKinsey, with the urgent question of sustainable aviation attracting only cents on the dollar by comparison.

A grimly plausible vision of the future will see NFT billionaires travel from San Francisco to weekend escapes in Lake Tahoe, blithely ignorant of their true carbon footprints. The city-dwellers over whom they fly will be stuck in endless traffic, which the political system never seems to get round to solving. Once they get home, they’ll be constantly buzzed by the sound of passing eVTOLs they could never afford, thanks to the way spurious arguments about decibels managed to loosen long-standing aircraft noise regulations.

Perhaps eVTOLs are the future of mobility. If they are, it’s not something to be proud of. It’s an admission that transport policy, as something designed to move our masses from place to place, rather than serve the interests of an elite—has comprehensively failed.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies.

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Published: 21 Feb 2022, 11:10 PM IST
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