Flying cars definitely sound cool, but whether they’re actually a good idea is up for debate. Fortunately they do seem to have some surefire benefits, among which you can now count improved efficiency — in theory, and on long trips. But it’s something!
Air travel takes an enormous amount of energy, since you have to lift something heavy into the air and keep it there for a good while. This is often faster but rarely more efficient than ground transportation, which lets gravity do the hard work.
Of course, once an aircraft gets up to altitude, it cruises at high speed with little friction to contend with, and whether you’re going 100 feet or 50 miles you only have to take off once. So University of Michigan researchers thought there might be a sweet spot where taking a flying car might actually save energy. Turns out there is… kind of. The team published their results today in Nature Communications.
The U-M engineers made an efficiency model for both ground transport and for electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, based on specs from aerospace companies working on them.
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