jerryd
You have to wonder what these people have been smoking!!
Sadly little shown will be built, or maybe luckily in too many of them.
What is most cost effective will be lightweight composite vehicles with EV drive. Not sure how much else can compete with it as in yrs it'll be less expensive to buy and 20 percent the cost to run. Less as FF's get more pricey.
As for Trains you can get most of the hyperloop for much less cost and done right can take your RV, truck, car on it too if designed for it. Basically the gov builds the High Speed tracks just like they do interstates and everyone gets to use them with certified vehicles going 180-300mph. And that tech is here using air cushion lift and composite trains, trucks, etc.
Anyone who builds the self driving controls is libel for any crashes meaning they won't be made because of lawsuit costs..
donwine
When you read the manufacturers tag - will it say "assembled in the US by robots with parts made in China?"
ei3io
I have to wonder why only minimal vision informs too many of us too much of the time.
Luddism will always exist as technology marches on...
Transportation's evolution will find advances no one yet even envisions even though they are only a short time into the future having their roots 100s of years into the past.
Richard Auchus
I really like the Aeromobil, simply because they put style into the equation. The Transition looks terrible and awkward, but the Aeromobil? Thats sexy for the kind of car/road plane it is!
alien678
Puhlease... can you say hyperbole ?
For 30 years now an affordable system that would have been self sustaining in +/- 3 years has sat on the shelf , www.taxi2000.com was offered to Madison,WI in 1984 by Ed Anderson. Ed proposed an 8 mile system from Middleton, WI to the Madison Capital for 1 million $$$'s half his actual cost and the City of Madison was more interested in their parking ticket revenue and what about the 200 domiciled insurance co.'s and the 3000 doing business here... so puhlease... it's Christmas ... give me a break... it makes me ill to think of what coulda, shoulda, all ready been done here... can anyone tell where I can get a refund on an like new Mayan Calendar.
Slowburn
Roadable airplanes aren't flying cars and until they can have a fender bender without plummeting to the earth I don't want anybody having flying cars. Well designed blimps might work. but you would probably need parking lots that deflate and reinflate the balloon for compact parking.
@ alien678 It does not solve the biggest problem with mass transit systems, it does not provide door to door service. Plus I like leaving stuff in my car for later use.
Scott in California
I see all these cars are riding on roads that take up more and more real estate, and use a lot of $$$ to build. After the Loma Prieta earthquake in California (1989) a section of freeway was redesigned and rebuilt, at a cost of $17,000 per INCH!! of roadway.
The basic problem is that roads as we have in California, in advanced parts of the world, are simply not economically sustainable. Cars, and all these funny vehicles in this article, will sit unused for 95% of their "owned" existence. This is simply too much squandered wealth to have any sort of world that features 90% of the population enjoying a fulfilling humane life.
The Skud
Most of these little 'folding' vehicles will only be of use in the ever-crowded cities. Tiny cars like the Smart Car are useless on a highway or long trip. Those 'windscreen doors' have already proven a failure - drive too close to a garage wall and you're stuck! Remember at least one early bubble car? Flying cars would need so many safety built-ins they potentially could be a disaster. Already Mercedes and others have hundreds of thousands of cars with electrical faults and things from small fires to wrong-time speed crashes. I like high-speed rail but real estate space will never be any cheaper, and converting present-day rail carriageways would be chaotic during transition.
Edgar Walkowsky
No mention of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) and Evacuated Tube Transit (ETT). Automating cars on the road is way more difficult than building a PRT system such as Ultra from the UK and Mister PRT from Poland or SkyTran from the U.S. All these systems are automated but separated from the road on slender guideways. There is a keen interest in PRT in India, they will end up with more advanced infrastructure than the "developed" world.
Slowburn
@ Edgar Walkowsky
Developing autonomously operating cars is cheaper than building the infrastructure for rail based PRC and and the evacuated tube simply costs to much to build for the efficiency to service the debt.