The 2-seat Sun Flyer will be the first FAA-certified all-electric trainer aircraft. The new 4-seat will closely follow. Features of the Sun Flyer 4 include a 116 cm cabin width, 12 m wing span, ballistic parachute recovery system and a gross weight of 1200 kg with 540 kg of payload for pilot and passengers. “Like Sun Flyer 2, Sun Flyer 4 will run completely on batteries. As a result, the 4-seat airplane will have operating costs 5x lower than costs associated with similar combustion-engine aircraft. With 4 hours of flying time, the versatile Sun Flyer 4 will appeal to both flight schools and pilot-owners.”
Tag: transportation
Dockless bikes in NYC
finally! that’s ~100x fewer than required, but it’s a start.
300 dockless bikeshares are coming to NYC
Robot delivery
Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.
2019-08-20: Starship Technologies
The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.
2021-01-27: 1m now:
Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.
This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.
China international high speed rail
China signed a deal for a high speed rail line between Belgrade and Budapest that could cut travel time from 8h to 2.5h.
Transportation-as-a-Service
any discussion of the threat self-driving cars poses to Uber tends to imagine a world where there are magically 10Ks if not millions of self-driving cars everywhere immediately. That simply isn’t practical from a pure logistics standpoint; the time it will take to build all of those cars — and, crucially, get government approval — is time Uber has to catch up.
Moreover, it’s not at all clear that Google will be willing to make the sort of investment necessary to build a self-driving fleet that could take on Uber. The company’s recent scale-back of Google Fiber is instructive in this regard: it is very difficult for a company built on search advertising margins to stomach the capital costs entailed in building out a fleet capable of challenging Uber in more than 1 or 2 markets.
Finally, as the incumbent in the transportation-as-a-service space Uber has the advantage of only needing to be good-enough. To the degree the company can build out UberPool and UberCommute, they can ensure that their own self-driving cars get first consideration from consumers trained to open their app whenever they are out and about.
Lilium
A start-up company—hosted in a ESA business incubator center released an idea for an egg-shaped 2-seater plane called Lilium that’s currently in the works. With a top speed of 400 kmh and a range of 500 km, the plane can travel between Munich and Berlin in 90 minutes. If the testing succeeds, this will be the world’s first vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for personal use.
and the first flight:
With the first flight now a memory, Lilium will run its aircraft through increasingly complex maneuvers, including the transition between vertical and horizontal flight, runs between cities, in inclement weather, and with a variety of degrees of automation. If all goes well, passengers will experience the flights in trials well ahead of the 2025 target for a fully operational service.
Uber lowers accidents
Of course, all the drama about uber is nothing but crony capitalism and needs to be ignored. this won’t end before the last taxi commission is destroyed.
We find that Uber’s entry lowers the rate of DUIs and fatal accidents. For most specifications, we also find declines in arrests for assault and disorderly conduct.
Uber increases productivity
capacity utilization rate is 30% higher for UberX drivers than taxi drivers when measured by time, and 50% higher when measured by km
uber isn’t just much much nicer for consumers, it’s also superior for congestion / the environment. no wonder they’re being fought so hard.
Networked robotic transportation
All of these robotic vehicles are largely disconnected or they are using their own proprietary means of networking their activity. In order for robotic transportation to explode, it will need a simple protocol for coordinating this network in a decentralized way. Once this scalable decentralized standard is developed, it will do for air, sea, land, and undersea transportation what the Internet did for the movement of data and in about the same amount of time.
Passenger Drones
EHang has shown a drone which can transport humans. The drone will be totally automated, meaning passengers will input a destination and have no control during the flight. This will make the machine safer by eliminating “the most dangerous part of standard modes of transportation, human error.”
2016-10-12:
Flyt Aerospace has flown a person using a personal vertical takeoff and landing inside a hangar. They are taking commercial drone flight systems and combining them for personal flight.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 