t was the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. Cameras made the technology possible, helping the vehicle detect objects on the road. The car was engineered with “dynamic vision,” a component which allowed its imaging system to focus on only the relevant objects in its surroundings. And in perhaps its most triumphant achievement, Mercedes-Benz’s VaMoRs self-driving car navigated the notorious German Autobahn at 60 mph speeds.
The VaMoRs was the world’s first self-driving car. While fully autonomous vehicles might still be the dreams of today’s tech giants, the VaMoRs first hit the road a whopping 33 years ago. Though the world has come a long way in terms of autonomous transportation, the future will reveal even more impressive technology. Outside of self-driving cars, flying cars could take to the skies. On railway lines, trains could reach speeds of 650 kph; using hyperloop technology, people could be transported over land at speeds of a whopping 1200 kph. Transportation might even be able to take the everyday tourist out of this world in a space plane. Whatever the future of transportation may hold, cars, trains, and planes are about to get a major upgrade.
Self-Driving and Flying Cars
Autonomous cars are one area of transportation technology which has improved substantially in the last thirty years. The VaMoRs was a 5 ton van outfitted with bulky, conspicuous interior cameras; the Tesla Model S’s semi-autonomous “Autopilot” feature was delivered as a single software update. The VaMoRs’s computer systems could process camera data every couple seconds; today’s computers can process images every few milliseconds or even nanoseconds. Ernst Dickmanns, the engineer who designed the VaMoRs, continued to design other autonomous vehicles throughout the 1990s. However, the cars had some issues identifying potholes and other street obstacles. Today’s Teslas come with sophisticated obstacle-aware acceleration to prevent accidental acceleration in the presence of an obstacle.
The future of self-driving cars, however, was supposed to arrive much quicker. A variety of 2016 headlines predicted that millions of autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. That same year, then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx predicted that self-driving cars would become commonplace in the U.S. by November 2021.
What actually goes into making self-driving vehicles is an engineering nightmare – and is stalling the development of autonomous cars that can handle the open road. For example, even though autonomous cars’ computer imaging systems have drastically improved over the past 30 years, these vehicles still have to be prepared to operate in all kinds of weather, and detect obstacles that occur at varying levels of frequency. Self-driving cars will need to learn that it’s okay to run over leaves in the middle of the road but not okay to run over large branches. Additionally, autonomous vehicles are a long way from being able to make the kinds of judgement calls humans make behind the wheel every day, such as deciding to go first at a four-way stop.
The advances in AI technology over the last ten years drove the optimistic predictions regarding the speedy development of self-driving cars. However, though AI training can help train autonomous vehicles using machine learning, it is possibly that such a technique can give the cars’ computers poor exposure to certain types of rare driving scenarios. Developers have tried to get around this problem by training cars in simulations and engineering rare driving scenarios that cars needed to be equipped to handle (such as an accident up ahead on the road). In the field of autonomous transportation, the cost of skimping on these training hours can be deadly. In 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars hit a pedestrian (it has been rumored that Uber’s cars have not logged nearly as many training hours as competitors such as Waymo). Additionally, the car’s system hadn’t been trained to recognize pedestrian’s crossing a street; the result of the computer error was the death of a 49-year-old woman. Such programming issues will need to be fully resolved before autonomous vehicles can safely join city streets in large numbers.
While some engineers are currently working to make self-driving cars a reality on the road, others have their eyes set on the skies. Some companies are hoping to roll out commercial passenger drones by 2025; Uber and Boeing are hoping to release revolutionary air taxis by 2025. However, the electric battery technology required to power such vehicles doesn’t exist yet, and the current technology only allows drones to fly for 20 minutes max. In August 2020, the Japanese company SkyDrive successfully conducted a test flight of its battery-powered electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL), the SD-03; however, in the test flight, the vehicle only flew for approximately four minutes.
However, for SkyDrive, four minutes might be enough. They’re planning their air taxi rides to last between 3-5 minutes to cover a distance that would take 20 minutes to travel in a car, and the company is hoping to launch the service in Osaka or Tokyo by 2023. While the company is optimistic about the necessity of flying cars to combat dense traffic in Japan and Southeast Asia, others are not so sure that such technology would ever be needed outside of large urban centers. Even executives at companies developing flying cars argue that their products are not being created to revolutionize urban traffic. “We aren't going to change the world in terms of traffic with flying cars," Mark Jennings-Bates, vice president at PAL-V, a flying car start-up, told USA Today. “At best, it may displace traffic in the area, which is arguably less pleasant.”
Despite the uncertainty regarding flying cars’ necessity, some experts are certain that they will eventually “take off,” so to speak. Making sure the cars are safe is likely to be a big hurdle. Laurie Garrow, associate director for the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Tech, argues that flying cars will have to undergo a lengthy certification process before getting approved for regular use. In 2019, expert panelists participating in a discussion reported in MIT Technology Review agreed the regulations would be the largest obstacle in getting flying taxies to the sky. However, once the cars are approved? Panelist predictions for when flying taxies would become a regular sighting in large cities ranged from 2-10 years.
A New Kind of Solo Travel
In 2013, in an article entitled “Why Don’t We Have Jetpacks?,” Popular Mechanics explained why the comic-book technology had never quite made it past the printed page. Humans aren’t meant to fly on their own, the article explained, and thus required an excessive amount of force to get off the ground. Since creating this amount of force takes a lot of energy, even the best jetpacks in 2013 could only keep a person in the air for about 30 seconds.
Within just three years, one company had proven Popular Mechanics wrong. JetPack Aviation, a Los Angeles company which calls itself the leading innovator in micro personal vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) industry, developed the world’s first portable jetpack between 2010 and 2015. Its JB10 jetpack became available to a select group of consumers in 2016. Currently, two models are available for sale on the company’s website, with prices available upon request (though when journalist Rohit Jaggi test flew one for luxury lifestyle magazine Robb Report in 2019, he noted that the device cost a whopping $340,000).
JetPack Aviation’s founder, engineer David Mayman, reported earlier this year that though jetpack technology won’t be available to everyday commuters within “two to three years or five years,” it will be something that will eventually be available to the “average member of the public.” Currently, jetpacks are powered by propulsion technology. Engineers would like to use electric batteries, but they face the same challenges that the makers of other VTOLs (such as flying cars) have run into. Batteries currently can’t hold enough energy to power a person into the air using a jetpack. Once battery technology improves, however, Mayman predicts that engineers will be able to overcome the power source problem, maybe even within the next few years.
Faster Alternatives to Trains
In a world where the future of the environment looks increasingly grim, high speed rail has often been touted as a mass transit solution to the emissions woes of airline travel. Trains produce less carbon dioxide than private cars carrying the same number of people and result in less traffic congestion. Additionally, proponents of high-speed trains argue that high speed rail could produce travel times similar to air travel with a more lenient boarding process and more space for passengers. Even the process of preparing states for high-speed trains could have benefits, producing jobs and creating incentives for tourism in areas with train travel.
However, those that envision a world where high speed trains are the future of transport are likely to find their dreams derailed within the next several years. Power poses one potential obstacle. As trains move at faster and faster speeds, they require more and more power, making it more difficult to connect trains with their power source. Additionally, as trains go faster, they face more problems with air resistance. A long-nosed design can help alleviate this issue and prevent sonic booms, the loud noise created by the shockwaves that race ahead of a high-speed train faster than the speed of sound. However, high speed trains can create other noise issues, especially in Europe, where many tunnels built in the 19th century might not be wide enough to add much-needed noise insulation. In other areas, even the land beneath the rail for a high-speed train might pose difficulties; if the ground is too soft, engineers will have to stiffen it before building railway tracks to prevent liquefaction.
Additionally, high speed trains are not without their economic challenges. Making faster trains requires more power which results in higher costs. Engineers must keep these costs in mind when increasing train speeds. Though high speed trains could theoretically travel at a maximum speed of 600kph, Laurent Jarsalé, vice president of High Speed Product Line at the French rail company Alstom, notes that trains must operate at a “technical-economic optimum,” which most often results in trains that travel at around 320 kph.
And as for the future of high-speed rail? There might not be much of one. In China, China Railway Corps is already struggling with ridership on its current lines. The high-speed rail network connecting the EU has been criticized as “incoherent, overpriced, and under-delivered.” And in the United States, high rail has struggled to take off in any capacity for years. Though over $10 billion was allocated to U.S. railroads in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most projects were cancelled or severely delayed. Additionally, almost none of the projects promised investment in high speed rail and connecting the whole country to high speed rail systems under some plans was slated to cost as much as $1 trillion over several decades. Ultimately, the future of transport may very likely move along without the addition of high-speed rail.
Of course, even if the future doesn’t move by rail, it might move by a futuristic form of rail known as hyperloop. First proposed by Elon Musk, hyperloop is a technology which removes some of the obstacles that currently limit the speed which can be achieved by train. A hyperloop system would consist of pods that move through steel tubes where magnetic levitation and vacuum pumps have removed air, reducing the drag produced by air pressure and friction. Some say that this technology would allow the pods, carrying cargo and people, to travel at up to 750 mph (over 1200 kph).
Hyperloop technology has many potential benefits. Elon Musk argues that installing a hyperloop system between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be cheaper and faster than having a high speed rail line in the same location. He also argued that hyperloop could be self-power and less disruptive than rail travel. Other proponents of the technology argue that the vacuum technology will give hyperloop an environmental edge over other modes of transportation. The prospect of the technology has even driven the interest of several companies hoping to build hyperloops everywhere from Slovenia to Abu Dhabi.
However, much like highspeed rail, hyperloop also has its caveats. Though rough estimates insist that the technology would be cheaper than rail, the costs of maintaining a hyperloop tube and keeping it free of air are largely unknown. Additionally, engineers will face hurdles in proving that that hyperloop is safe. And though the technology is supposed to be environmentally friendly, no one is exactly sure how much energy it will require to move hyperloop pods at speeds up to 750 mph. As experimentation continues over the next several years, the world will begin to see whether the technology is a viable substitute for rail.
Out of This World
While flying cars and hyperloop are ambitious takes on transportation, space plans offer to take transportation out of this world. Space planes are vehicles that can fly both as an airplane in the atmosphere using its wings and as a spacecraft in the vacuum using rocket propulsion (reword). Some see space places as the vehicles which could make vacation space travel a reality. Space planes have the potential to lower space travel costs from $10,000/pound for every object on a payload leaving the Earth’s atmosphere to $1000/pound.
NASA’s X-fleet spaceships were early innovators in this space and might play a key role in making space travel accessible to all. The X-fleet ships have given engineers an opportunity to study everything from how to keep spacecraft from burning up during atmospheric re-entry to how to build spacecraft that will yield lower mission costs. Beginning in the 1990s, NASA began developing the X-33 space plane with Lockheed Martin, their ultimate goal focused on sending a commercial craft into space. The X-33 was to be a small prototype for the VentureStar, which was supposed to be the first commercial craft flown in space. The project was abandoned in 2001 before the commercial craft component could ever be funded.
As space travel has gradually shifted towards the private sphere, private companies have taken up the challenge of building the world’s first space planes. The startup Exodus Space Corp. is hoping to send the AstroClipper into space. The AstroClipper will take off and land on a runway like a plane but will be propelled into space with the help of a heft booster. The company is hoping to launch a technology demonstration by 2022, with the eventual goal of taking passengers into space by 2030.
No matter whether states decide to invest in high speed rail or flying cars, the future of transportation will look nothing like the past. Workers might be transported through a vacuum tube at 700 mph to get to a meeting a few cities away. Air taxis might transport people from dinner to drinks halfway across town within three minutes instead of thirty. The next several years will ultimately reveal how close the world gets to achieving its current transportation goals.
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The Future of Transportation: Cars, Trains, and Planes
December 30, 2020
Flying cars, the hyperloop, intergalactic travel? These are not Sci-Fi visions of the future but the world now. Here we cover the innovations that are transforming this landscape and accelerating us in ways that previous generations only dreamed about.
I
t was the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. Cameras made the technology possible, helping the vehicle detect objects on the road. The car was engineered with “dynamic vision,” a component which allowed its imaging system to focus on only the relevant objects in its surroundings. And in perhaps its most triumphant achievement, Mercedes-Benz’s VaMoRs self-driving car navigated the notorious German Autobahn at 60 mph speeds.
The VaMoRs was the world’s first self-driving car. While fully autonomous vehicles might still be the dreams of today’s tech giants, the VaMoRs first hit the road a whopping 33 years ago. Though the world has come a long way in terms of autonomous transportation, the future will reveal even more impressive technology. Outside of self-driving cars, flying cars could take to the skies. On railway lines, trains could reach speeds of 650 kph; using hyperloop technology, people could be transported over land at speeds of a whopping 1200 kph. Transportation might even be able to take the everyday tourist out of this world in a space plane. Whatever the future of transportation may hold, cars, trains, and planes are about to get a major upgrade.
Self-Driving and Flying Cars
Autonomous cars are one area of transportation technology which has improved substantially in the last thirty years. The VaMoRs was a 5 ton van outfitted with bulky, conspicuous interior cameras; the Tesla Model S’s semi-autonomous “Autopilot” feature was delivered as a single software update. The VaMoRs’s computer systems could process camera data every couple seconds; today’s computers can process images every few milliseconds or even nanoseconds. Ernst Dickmanns, the engineer who designed the VaMoRs, continued to design other autonomous vehicles throughout the 1990s. However, the cars had some issues identifying potholes and other street obstacles. Today’s Teslas come with sophisticated obstacle-aware acceleration to prevent accidental acceleration in the presence of an obstacle.
The future of self-driving cars, however, was supposed to arrive much quicker. A variety of 2016 headlines predicted that millions of autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. That same year, then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx predicted that self-driving cars would become commonplace in the U.S. by November 2021.
What actually goes into making self-driving vehicles is an engineering nightmare – and is stalling the development of autonomous cars that can handle the open road. For example, even though autonomous cars’ computer imaging systems have drastically improved over the past 30 years, these vehicles still have to be prepared to operate in all kinds of weather, and detect obstacles that occur at varying levels of frequency. Self-driving cars will need to learn that it’s okay to run over leaves in the middle of the road but not okay to run over large branches. Additionally, autonomous vehicles are a long way from being able to make the kinds of judgement calls humans make behind the wheel every day, such as deciding to go first at a four-way stop.
The advances in AI technology over the last ten years drove the optimistic predictions regarding the speedy development of self-driving cars. However, though AI training can help train autonomous vehicles using machine learning, it is possibly that such a technique can give the cars’ computers poor exposure to certain types of rare driving scenarios. Developers have tried to get around this problem by training cars in simulations and engineering rare driving scenarios that cars needed to be equipped to handle (such as an accident up ahead on the road). In the field of autonomous transportation, the cost of skimping on these training hours can be deadly. In 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars hit a pedestrian (it has been rumored that Uber’s cars have not logged nearly as many training hours as competitors such as Waymo). Additionally, the car’s system hadn’t been trained to recognize pedestrian’s crossing a street; the result of the computer error was the death of a 49-year-old woman. Such programming issues will need to be fully resolved before autonomous vehicles can safely join city streets in large numbers.
While some engineers are currently working to make self-driving cars a reality on the road, others have their eyes set on the skies. Some companies are hoping to roll out commercial passenger drones by 2025; Uber and Boeing are hoping to release revolutionary air taxis by 2025. However, the electric battery technology required to power such vehicles doesn’t exist yet, and the current technology only allows drones to fly for 20 minutes max. In August 2020, the Japanese company SkyDrive successfully conducted a test flight of its battery-powered electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL), the SD-03; however, in the test flight, the vehicle only flew for approximately four minutes.
However, for SkyDrive, four minutes might be enough. They’re planning their air taxi rides to last between 3-5 minutes to cover a distance that would take 20 minutes to travel in a car, and the company is hoping to launch the service in Osaka or Tokyo by 2023. While the company is optimistic about the necessity of flying cars to combat dense traffic in Japan and Southeast Asia, others are not so sure that such technology would ever be needed outside of large urban centers. Even executives at companies developing flying cars argue that their products are not being created to revolutionize urban traffic. “We aren't going to change the world in terms of traffic with flying cars," Mark Jennings-Bates, vice president at PAL-V, a flying car start-up, told USA Today. “At best, it may displace traffic in the area, which is arguably less pleasant.”
Despite the uncertainty regarding flying cars’ necessity, some experts are certain that they will eventually “take off,” so to speak. Making sure the cars are safe is likely to be a big hurdle. Laurie Garrow, associate director for the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Tech, argues that flying cars will have to undergo a lengthy certification process before getting approved for regular use. In 2019, expert panelists participating in a discussion reported in MIT Technology Review agreed the regulations would be the largest obstacle in getting flying taxies to the sky. However, once the cars are approved? Panelist predictions for when flying taxies would become a regular sighting in large cities ranged from 2-10 years.
A New Kind of Solo Travel
In 2013, in an article entitled “Why Don’t We Have Jetpacks?,” Popular Mechanics explained why the comic-book technology had never quite made it past the printed page. Humans aren’t meant to fly on their own, the article explained, and thus required an excessive amount of force to get off the ground. Since creating this amount of force takes a lot of energy, even the best jetpacks in 2013 could only keep a person in the air for about 30 seconds.
Within just three years, one company had proven Popular Mechanics wrong. JetPack Aviation, a Los Angeles company which calls itself the leading innovator in micro personal vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) industry, developed the world’s first portable jetpack between 2010 and 2015. Its JB10 jetpack became available to a select group of consumers in 2016. Currently, two models are available for sale on the company’s website, with prices available upon request (though when journalist Rohit Jaggi test flew one for luxury lifestyle magazine Robb Report in 2019, he noted that the device cost a whopping $340,000).
JetPack Aviation’s founder, engineer David Mayman, reported earlier this year that though jetpack technology won’t be available to everyday commuters within “two to three years or five years,” it will be something that will eventually be available to the “average member of the public.” Currently, jetpacks are powered by propulsion technology. Engineers would like to use electric batteries, but they face the same challenges that the makers of other VTOLs (such as flying cars) have run into. Batteries currently can’t hold enough energy to power a person into the air using a jetpack. Once battery technology improves, however, Mayman predicts that engineers will be able to overcome the power source problem, maybe even within the next few years.
Faster Alternatives to Trains
In a world where the future of the environment looks increasingly grim, high speed rail has often been touted as a mass transit solution to the emissions woes of airline travel. Trains produce less carbon dioxide than private cars carrying the same number of people and result in less traffic congestion. Additionally, proponents of high-speed trains argue that high speed rail could produce travel times similar to air travel with a more lenient boarding process and more space for passengers. Even the process of preparing states for high-speed trains could have benefits, producing jobs and creating incentives for tourism in areas with train travel.
However, those that envision a world where high speed trains are the future of transport are likely to find their dreams derailed within the next several years. Power poses one potential obstacle. As trains move at faster and faster speeds, they require more and more power, making it more difficult to connect trains with their power source. Additionally, as trains go faster, they face more problems with air resistance. A long-nosed design can help alleviate this issue and prevent sonic booms, the loud noise created by the shockwaves that race ahead of a high-speed train faster than the speed of sound. However, high speed trains can create other noise issues, especially in Europe, where many tunnels built in the 19th century might not be wide enough to add much-needed noise insulation. In other areas, even the land beneath the rail for a high-speed train might pose difficulties; if the ground is too soft, engineers will have to stiffen it before building railway tracks to prevent liquefaction.
Additionally, high speed trains are not without their economic challenges. Making faster trains requires more power which results in higher costs. Engineers must keep these costs in mind when increasing train speeds. Though high speed trains could theoretically travel at a maximum speed of 600kph, Laurent Jarsalé, vice president of High Speed Product Line at the French rail company Alstom, notes that trains must operate at a “technical-economic optimum,” which most often results in trains that travel at around 320 kph.
And as for the future of high-speed rail? There might not be much of one. In China, China Railway Corps is already struggling with ridership on its current lines. The high-speed rail network connecting the EU has been criticized as “incoherent, overpriced, and under-delivered.” And in the United States, high rail has struggled to take off in any capacity for years. Though over $10 billion was allocated to U.S. railroads in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most projects were cancelled or severely delayed. Additionally, almost none of the projects promised investment in high speed rail and connecting the whole country to high speed rail systems under some plans was slated to cost as much as $1 trillion over several decades. Ultimately, the future of transport may very likely move along without the addition of high-speed rail.
Of course, even if the future doesn’t move by rail, it might move by a futuristic form of rail known as hyperloop. First proposed by Elon Musk, hyperloop is a technology which removes some of the obstacles that currently limit the speed which can be achieved by train. A hyperloop system would consist of pods that move through steel tubes where magnetic levitation and vacuum pumps have removed air, reducing the drag produced by air pressure and friction. Some say that this technology would allow the pods, carrying cargo and people, to travel at up to 750 mph (over 1200 kph).
Hyperloop technology has many potential benefits. Elon Musk argues that installing a hyperloop system between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be cheaper and faster than having a high speed rail line in the same location. He also argued that hyperloop could be self-power and less disruptive than rail travel. Other proponents of the technology argue that the vacuum technology will give hyperloop an environmental edge over other modes of transportation. The prospect of the technology has even driven the interest of several companies hoping to build hyperloops everywhere from Slovenia to Abu Dhabi.
However, much like highspeed rail, hyperloop also has its caveats. Though rough estimates insist that the technology would be cheaper than rail, the costs of maintaining a hyperloop tube and keeping it free of air are largely unknown. Additionally, engineers will face hurdles in proving that that hyperloop is safe. And though the technology is supposed to be environmentally friendly, no one is exactly sure how much energy it will require to move hyperloop pods at speeds up to 750 mph. As experimentation continues over the next several years, the world will begin to see whether the technology is a viable substitute for rail.
Out of This World
While flying cars and hyperloop are ambitious takes on transportation, space plans offer to take transportation out of this world. Space planes are vehicles that can fly both as an airplane in the atmosphere using its wings and as a spacecraft in the vacuum using rocket propulsion (reword). Some see space places as the vehicles which could make vacation space travel a reality. Space planes have the potential to lower space travel costs from $10,000/pound for every object on a payload leaving the Earth’s atmosphere to $1000/pound.
NASA’s X-fleet spaceships were early innovators in this space and might play a key role in making space travel accessible to all. The X-fleet ships have given engineers an opportunity to study everything from how to keep spacecraft from burning up during atmospheric re-entry to how to build spacecraft that will yield lower mission costs. Beginning in the 1990s, NASA began developing the X-33 space plane with Lockheed Martin, their ultimate goal focused on sending a commercial craft into space. The X-33 was to be a small prototype for the VentureStar, which was supposed to be the first commercial craft flown in space. The project was abandoned in 2001 before the commercial craft component could ever be funded.
As space travel has gradually shifted towards the private sphere, private companies have taken up the challenge of building the world’s first space planes. The startup Exodus Space Corp. is hoping to send the AstroClipper into space. The AstroClipper will take off and land on a runway like a plane but will be propelled into space with the help of a heft booster. The company is hoping to launch a technology demonstration by 2022, with the eventual goal of taking passengers into space by 2030.
No matter whether states decide to invest in high speed rail or flying cars, the future of transportation will look nothing like the past. Workers might be transported through a vacuum tube at 700 mph to get to a meeting a few cities away. Air taxis might transport people from dinner to drinks halfway across town within three minutes instead of thirty. The next several years will ultimately reveal how close the world gets to achieving its current transportation goals.
