Are flying cars about to become a real thing? Starburst Accelerator thinks they are

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This is Lillium Aviation’s proposed VTOL vehicle.

Lillium


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Could the time finally be right for the flying car to leave the drawing boards of futurists and take to our skies as a new form of transportation? According to Francois Chopard, Founder and CEO of investment firm Starburst Accelerator, the answer is yes. For decades, the idea of flying cars have been used as shorthand for “the future”; something perpetually a few years off in the distance, waiting for technology to catch up and make them possible. Chopard thinks that’s finally happening.

He is not alone. In addition to AeroMobil—which plans to sell winged vehicles to well-heeled enthusiasts—there are quite a few other companies working on developing new vehicles to solve our commutes by taking them into the third dimension (see for example Uber, which is planning a new service called Uber Elevate). There’s also Google co-founder Larry Page, who owns two different flying car startups: Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk. Even Airbus is getting in on the action.

An Electric VTOL Orchestra?

Chopard and others think that taking to the skies will be a solution for increasing traffic density and ever-longer commutes in major cities. We spoke with him recently to see if he could counter our heavy skepticism. “When you look at prototypes that have been flying you can see the tech and performance is ready,” he explained, pointing to companies like Joby, Lilium, and Aurora. Unlike the AeroMobil Flying Car, which uses wings to generate lift and an internal combustion engine to provide propulsion, Chopard told us the real action is in electric vertical take-off and landing machines, which don’t require a runway or landing strip to operate.

The Joby S2.

Joby

“Los Angeles has maybe six or seven air fields, but more than 300 heliports. You need a good grid of places to take off and land to make the service efficient,” he told Ars. And electric power will beat burning av-gas, because it’s cheaper and doesn’t require the presence of fire-fighting equipment, unlike refueling a helicopter or general aviation airplane, he explained.

Despite reports that Zee.Aero’s vehicles sound like air raid sirens thanks to their electric motors, Chopard thinks the noise issue won’t be much of a factor either. “The target is to be as noisy as the environment. Right now, we’re just a couple of decibels away from that target,” he told us. “There are a couple of studies looking at whether just decibel levels are the right indicator to measure noise; low frequency or high frequency noise isn’t taken into account. These vehicles are less noisy than helicopters.”

It’s the policies, not the tech

As is the case with so many other emerging technologies—think genomics or self-driving cars—Chopard thinks the biggest unsolved issue is how to regulate flying cars. Certifying vehicles for flight shouldn’t be too troubling for regulators like the FAA. But most of these new startups are envisioning fully autonomous vehicles, in much the same way self-driving cars are the hot thing in the automotive sector.

That’s at least a decade away from being possible, he thinks. “Short term, regulators aren’t ready for that, a pilot will still be on board. In the next five or six years—and to build experience—there should still be a pilot, but after that automation should be much easier in the air because it’s a much less complicated environment,” Chopard said.

Still, even if the technology does prove mature—including those batteries, which we still think need to shed a little more weight to make all this truly feasible—we may well need to beef up air traffic control systems. The prospect of hundreds of extra flying vehicles flitting around our cities will require some careful management to maintain adequate separation, after all. But we have to admit, the prospect of a commute like Deckard’s in Blade Runner does sound pretty cool.

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There are more than 2 million electric vehicles on the road around the world

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BEIJING, CHINA – 2017/04/23: GoFun shared e-car parks at roadside. The car-sharing service is an emerging field to draw eyeballs and investment in China. (Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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According to a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), 2016 was a record year for electric vehicle (EV) sales. Over 750,000 EVs were sold worldwide last year, compared to 547,220 sold in 2015.

But the gains are overshadowed by the distance that electric cars still have to go—although more than 2 million EVs now travel the world’s roads, they only make up 0.2 percent of the total light-duty passenger vehicle share around the world. And the growth of the number of electric cars on the roads actually slowed in 2016 compared to 2015 (60 percent in 2016 versus 77 percent in 2015), leaving policy makers and sustainable growth advocates wondering how to continue to grow the global fleet to meet climate change mitigation goals.

Transportation makes up a significant portion of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—14 percent globally according to a 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In the US, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.

The transportation sector is a stubborn one to clean up, too. An example can be found in California, where even as carbon-reducing policies have brought GHG emissions from the energy sector down to 20 percent, transportation still currently makes up 40 percent of the state’s emissions, according to recent statement from the state’s Public Utilities commissioner.

Alternative-fuel vehicles are important to hitting emissions goals, but the IEA report says that currently, there is not enough momentum behind plug-in cars without strong policies incentivizing adoption, like tax credits and zero-emissions vehicles lanes. Electric vehicles (including both battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) “still have a long way to go before reaching deployment scales capable of making a significant dent in the development of global oil demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” the IEA report states.

China is leading

The report (PDF) showed that China leapfrogged the US in 2016 to become the country with the most electric passenger vehicles. Although EVs only made up 1.5 percent of the country’s national fleet, more than 40 percent of the EVs sold in the world in 2016 were sold in China (twice as many as were sold in the US). The country also has 200 million electric two-wheelers, 3 million to 4 million low-speed electric vehicles, and more than 300,000 electric buses, none of which were counted in the IEA’s official EV numbers.

Scandinavian and northern European countries have the most EVs on the road when it comes to market share, however. “With a 29 percent market share, Norway has incontestably achieved the most successful deployment of electric cars in terms of market share, globally,” the IEA wrote. The Netherlands follows with 6.4 percent EV market share, and 3.4 of Sweden’s cars are electric.

EV adoption isn’t a given

All of those countries have policies to foster EV sales, and 2016 showed that if certain incentives are taken away, sales falter. Such a scenario played out in the Netherlands where tax incentives were gradually phased out for Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV), which dropped PHEV sales by 50 percent. Battery electric vehicles (BEVs), however, weren’t affected by the tax and sales grew by 47 percent.

In Denmark, too, the country started reinstating registration taxes after years of exemptions for EVs and ended some government procurement programs. As a result, the country saw a 68 percent drop in electric car sales in 2016. New Danish incentives will be added this year, however—the country will begin offering a purchase tax rebate on EVs based on battery capacity—which ought to produce an interesting data point to next year’s report.

So if EVs can’t compete with internal combustion engines on price, then what’s the good of offering government incentives to buy them? The IEA argues that, with enough support, the technology to build EVs will become economical for auto manufacturers to build and car buyers to buy without support. “A supportive policy environment enables market growth by making vehicles appealing for consumers, reducing risks for investors and encouraging manufacturers willing to develop EV business streams on a large scale to start implementing them,” the agency wrote. The most effective incentives, according to recent research, minimize the premium associated with purchasing an EV, and show the buyer a total cost of ownership lower than that of an internal combustion engine.

The IEA recommends that as electric vehicles reach cost parity with ICE vehicles, “governments will need to gradually revise their approach to electric car support, phasing out incentives in cases where BEVs and PHEVs actually rival ICE costs,” although health-related taxes could remain in place for ICEs. The agency wrote that it expects this to happen around 2030 “where fuel taxes are estimated to be high and vehicle attributes (namely power) more favorable to electrification than in other regions.”

Scale is key

Governments that want to meet a 2° scenario (as described by the Paris Agreement, where global temperature doesn’t rise more than 2°) want to induce a virtuous cycle where manufacturers can drop the price of EVs because enough EVs are being purchased. The primary contributor to the higher cost of EVs over internal combustion engines is the car’s battery.

The report cites Department of Energy (DOE) estimates on how scale affects battery price. A 100 kWh battery pack will experience a drop in production costs by 13 percent when production volumes increase from 25,000 units to 100,000 units. Manufacturers making more than 200,000 battery backs per year are expected to be able to produce them for $200/kWh or less. Increasing a battery pack size from 60kWh to 100kWh would also similarly reduce costs by 17 percent per kWh. (For context, a recent McKinsey & Company survey found that 100kWh battery packs are now being produced by most manufacturers for $227/kWh and need to fall to $100/kWh to compete with internal combustion engines.)

This is part of the economics that made Tesla so eager to build its Gigafactory in Nevada and start producing car batteries as well as stationary storage batteries. The company has claimed that it produces batteries for $190/kWh. Other companies like Daimler are following suit, too.

The IEA looked at the various targets recently announced by EV manufacturers (Telsa aims for 1 million cars on the road by 2020, Ford has promised 13 new EV models by 2020, etc) and found that the total stock of EVs could fall anywhere between 9 million and 20 million by 2020. But it’s unclear that this will be enough to get us where we need to be in terms of reducing global emissions. In order to meet a 2° scenario, the IEA says, battery production will have to significantly increase out to 2025, and “would require the construction of roughly ten battery manufacturing facilities with the production capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory.”

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Emergency drones rush life-saving help to simulated cardiac arrest cases

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An emergency medical drone coming to the rescue.


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Thanks to drones, condoms have rained down on villages in rural Africa. Remote islands have quickly received medical supplies, while researchers have winged biological specimens to distant pathology labs.

Now, a research group in Sweden is buzzing about yet another type of life-saving flight for the unmanned aerial vehicles—emergency medical flights.

Reenacting 18 real-life emergency calls of cardiac arrest to emergency medical services in Norrtälje, Sweden, researchers dispatched a drone carrying an automated external defibrillator (AED) from the local fire station. The drone reached the site of the emergency in around five minutes—about 16 minutes faster than emergency medical responders—researchers report Tuesday in JAMA.

In the event of cardiac arrest, a quick response is critical; saving 16 minutes could make the difference between life and death. Still, the researchers, led by Andreas Claesson of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, are careful not to overstate the results.

“Saving 16 minutes is likely to be clinically important,” the authors write. “Nonetheless, further test flights, technological development, and evaluation of integration with dispatch centers and aviation administrators are needed.”

For the study, the researchers used an eight-rotor, 5.7kg drone with a maximum cruising speed of 75km per hour. It was developed and certified by the Swedish Transportation Agency. The drone was equipped with a 763g AED that bystanders at the scene could easily use to try to revive a person in cardiac arrest.

In a 72-hour period, the researchers dispatched the drone to the out-of-sight locations of 18 emergency cardiac arrest reports, which were called in to the local authorities between 2006 and 2014. They were all within a 10km radius of the fire station, with a median flight distance of 3.2km.

The median time from reenacted emergency call to drone launch was three seconds, while the median EMS dispatch time was three minutes. On average, the drone arrived in a little over five minutes (fastest time was 1:15 and longest was 11:51). The EMS, on the other hand, arrived in about 22 minutes (fastest time was five minutes and longest was 38).

The authors note some limitations of the study, such as having only good weather for the small number of flights. And while AEDs are designed to be easy to use, it’s unclear if bystanders would use them correctly and consistently, thus creating actual medical benefits to drone-dispatching. And of course, there’s also the issue of getting approval from agencies such as the Federal Aviation Authority.

JAMA, 2017. DOI: doi:10.1001/jama.2017.3957  (About DOIs).

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