Shooting Down Flying Cars (Worldbuild With Me - Part 2)

I said that eVTOLs have the potential to open up the North. But their current business model is urban transport. That's a mistake.

Science Fiction exposes contradictions in our assumptions about the future; arguably, that’s its social purpose. A good example of this is the “flying car,” or, as people involved in the multi-billion dollar development project call them, “eVTOLs.”

At least $3.3 billion will be invested in Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing technology this year, and it could be $170 billion by 2034, according to some sources. Leaders in the field, such as Joby, Beta, and Archer, are attracting hundreds of millions from private sources and the military. They’re supposed to provide the point-to-point convenience of the helicopter without the noise and cost of that older technology. The ultimate vision is that there could be landing pads scattered through urban neighbourhoods and on the tops of many buildings, creating a kind of 15 minute city where you’re always less than 15 minutes from a station. The vision is of a transport system as inexpensive as a ground Taxi that connects you to anywhere in the city.

The current, first generation of vehicles mostly needs a human pilot. This requirement alone erases the economic argument for them; pilots are expensive. The average consumer is not going to shell out $200 to get to the airport. The Chinese have autonomous craft, and that’s where the industry is going to have to go to make these things practical.

A couple of years ago, I might have bought into the urban transit model and built it into the world of 2050 I’m imagining for the new novel. Whoosh has demolished that possibility. The New Zealand company is developing a completely different form of inexpensive, convenient urban transit. Frankly, I don’t see how the eVTOL urban transit business model can survive it. For the novel, this pushes eVTOLs into a different, but fascinating niche, which I alluded to in the last post in this series. When you worldbuild on the assumption that both of these systems succeed, then a wholly different 21st-century trend emerges—one of systematic deroading and rewilding.

Before we get to that, who exactly are Whoosh? They’re a group of ex-Google employees who have taken a niche transport idea and reimagined it.

Cable-car networks are the latest thing in urban transit. You might not know this if you don’t live in South America, which is where they’ve really taken off (pardon the pun). At least 13 cities have adopted cable cars as a convenient transit solution that is vastly cheaper and more flexible than trams, trains, or tunnels. In Bogota, Colombia, the TransMiCable system has been nothing less than transformational, because it links the previously isolated Ciudad Bolívar neighbourhood with the more upscale downtown.

A traditional cable car system. Image is public domain

Cable cars have many advantages over traditional public transit. Since they fly over driving obstacles such as freeways, rivers, and industrial lands, and can climb the steepest hills with ease, they allow cities to quickly stand up a point-to-point connection between two neighbourhoods that were previously disconnected. The impact this has is huge: crime goes down, public engagement and employment go up. Local businesses thrive. Best of all, these systems are ridiculously cheap and fast to set up compared with alternatives like light rail. Provided you’ve got the vertical clearance, you can fly over pretty much anything, so just put up three cable towers per kilometer, for $20 to $30 million per klick, and you can connect neighbourhoods up to five kilometers apart after less than two years. If you build networks, you can pretty much get anywhere using such a system.

Cable car transit has been wildly successful in Bogota and elsewhere, and cities in Europe are starting to adopt it. But it does have its limitations. The chief one is inflexibility: there is a given number of cars on the cable; they can’t be swapped in or out to meet demand. If a particular cable car line has an hourly capacity of 3600 people, that number cannot be increased no matter how much demand there is. You will only ever squeeze 3600 people through at rush hour or during sporting events, no matter how many people are crowding the station.

They also go where they go. Unlike an Uber, you can’t choose your destination. There may only be a handful of stops on a given line. You may fly over the street you want to visit and have to backtrack to it on foot from the next available station. Because the cables are moving, they have a maximum length because of the mass that has to be driven. So the lines are typically fairly short.

These are the problems Whoosh wants to solve. With Whoosh, the cables don’t move; in fact at intersections, they’re replaced by rails. The cars have ev-style battery packs and drive along the cable/rails. When they reach an intersection or station, they have the option of changing cables to go in a new direction. Whoosh claims that they use half the energy of an equivalent EV. Because the cables don’t move, the distance between towers is dictated more by the carrying capacity of each cable length. Fewer towers may be needed; or, there may be more along popular routes. The main point is that because the cable cars drive themselves, you can add as many as you need for rush hour surge capacity, or cut back to nothing at night. Commuters use a phone app to call a car, and it’s theirs alone for the duration of the trip—like Uber, but without needing a driver and with no need for an AI as in the robotaxi. Simpler, safer, reliable (the cars travel at a fixed 40 kilometers per hour), and Whoosh can build stations anywhere along a route, as long as they have an area the size of a standard parking spot to put it.

It’s the ability for cars to change cables that makes Whoosh’s system into transit’s killer app. It’s relatively simple for a municipality to add a new line that connects to an existing intersection, slowly building up a literal net of cables that can cover an entire city.

How can eVTOLs compete against such an inexpensive and flexible solution?

They can’t.

Since urban transport is the most widely touted business model for eVTOLs, this is a big problem. But because we’re worldbuilding here, we’re free to imagine alternative use cases and combine them with other trends and economic, and ecological needs. So let’s work through the implications of a 2050 where both eVTOLs and Whoosh’s technology are successful. It’s not just our cities that are transformed; so is the countryside.