What The Future Cars, Planes And Trains In The U.S. Could Look Like

[Music] a hybrid electric aircraft would be an aircraft that would leverage electric motor and electric propulsion in addition to the traditional fuel sources that we have today just like you would have a hybrid electric car you could have a hybrid electric aircraft we've become a car culture and it's hard to break out of that cycle we have very powerful oil lobbies car manufacturing lobbies aviation lobbies all the entities that the high-speed rail would have to compete with there's a lot of people who think that you can buy autonomous vehicles today especially when you can go out and buy a car and buy an option that's called full self driving and pay for that the fact is it does not exist today [Music] china has the fastest and largest high-speed rail network in the world the country has more than 19 000 miles of high-speed rail the vast majority of which was built in the last decade japan's bullet trains can reach speeds of almost 200 miles per hour and date back to the 1960s they've become a staple for domestic travel and have moved more than 9 billion people without a single passenger casualty france began service of the high-speed tgv train in 1981 and the rest of europe quickly followed and high-speed rail is quickly expanding all over the world in places like india saudi arabia russia iran and morocco and then there's the us [Music] the us used to be one of the world's global leaders in rail but after world war ii there was a massive shift if you look at the united states prior to 1945 we had a very extensive rail system everywhere it all was working great except the number of companies in the auto and oil industries decided that for them to have a prosperous future they really needed to basically help phase out all the rail and get us all into cars the inflexible rails permanently embedded in cobblestones were paved over to provide smooth comfortable transportation via diesel motor coach general motors firestone tire standard oil and a few other companies that got together and they were able to buy up all the nation's streetcar systems and then quickly start phasing out service and literally dismantling all the systems over about a 10-year span in the 1950s president dwight eisenhower signed a bill to create the national interstate system it allocated about 25 billion dollars to build 41 000 miles of highways the federal government paid for 90 of that the states covered the final 10 and rail fell by the wayside can't you see that this highway means a whole new way of life for the children and a way of life that we have a chance to help plan and and to build we dedicated a huge amount of dollars to building automobile infrastructure in the middle of the 20th century and we're still kind of attached to that model of development we went from a rail served country to a auto-dependent nation by the 1960s we've become a car culture and it's hard to break out of that cycle not to mention the fact that in our political system we have very powerful oil lobbies car manufacturing lobbies aviation lobbies all the entities that the high-speed rail would have to compete with this is the american dream of freedom on wheels we averaged some 850 cars per thousand inhabitants in the us in china it's only 250. and we've never gone back but according to some this country's transportation ecosystem is reaching a tipping point when you look at what's happening with the corridor development again states across the u.s who are recognizing they are running out of space to expand their highways or interstates there are limits at airports there's aviation congestion so what are the options a better rail system is one and could come with significant benefits it's largely an environmental good to switch from air traffic and car traffic to electrified high-speed rail that's that's a much lower emission way of traveling when the high speed rail between madrid and barcelona and spain came into operation i mean air travel just plummeted between those cities and everyone switched over to high speed rail which was very convenient people were happier dude they weren't forced to switch they did it because it was a nicer option to take high-speed rail there's a sort of a rule of thumb for trips that are under three or four hours in trip length from city to city those usually end up with about 80 or 90 percent of the the travel market from aviation where rail exists and it's convenient in high speed it's very popular america i think is waking up to this idea that rail is a good investment for transportation infrastructure one survey showed 63 percent of americans would use high-speed rail if it was available to them younger people want it even more right now the main passenger rail option in the us is amtrak it's operated as a for-profit company but the federal government is its majority stakeholder train systems reaching top speeds of over 110 to 150 miles per hour are generally considered high speed and only one of amtrak's lines could be considered as such that's its acela line in the northeast corridor running between dc new york and boston one of the challenges we face is that the northeast corridor has a lot of curvature a lot of geometry we really operate a cella express on an alignment that in some places was designed back in the 1900s and so it really was never designed for high-speed rail and while the acela line can reach up to 150 miles per hour it only does so for 34 miles of its 457 mile span its average speed between new york and boston is about 65 miles per hour which is in stark contrast to china's dedicated high-speed rail system which regularly travels at over 200 miles per hour but some people are trying to fix that [Music] in 2008 california voted yes on high-speed rail now a decade later construction is underway in the central valley of the state and right now it is the only truly high-speed rail system under construction in the u.s ultimately high-speed rail is a 520-mile project that links san francisco to los angeles and anaheim that's phase one and it's a project that's being built in building blocks so the one behind me is the largest building block that we're starting with this 119 mile segment this segment will run from bakersfield to merced eventually the plan is to build a line from san francisco to anaheim just south of la but as it stands the state is almost 50 billion dollars short of what it needs to actually do that the current project as planned would cost too much and respectfully take too long there's been too little oversight and not enough transparency we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between merced and bakersfield after gavin newsom made that speech president trump threatened to pull federal funding for the project we'll continue to seek other funding we hope the federal government will resume funding the contributing new funds to the project i think in the future as the federal government has funded major construction of infrastructure over time they'll again direct money to high-speed rail because in fact it's not just california but other states are also interested in high-speed rail systems to complete the entire line as planned the official estimate is now over 77 billion dollars and it's unclear where the money will come from so why is it so expensive part of the problem in california the big price tag is getting through the tehachapi very expensive tunneling or over the pacheco past again into san jose from the central valley you know eastern china the flatlands of japan where they've built the shinkansen all of those are settings where they have didn't incur the very high expense of boring and tunneling that we face so the costs are different and a lot of the money is spent before construction can even begin just in this little segment here alone we're dealing with the private property owner we're dealing with a rail company we're dealing with the state agency and so just the whole coordination then we're dealing with a utility company just in this very small section we had to relocate two miles of freeway and that was roughly 150 million dollars per mile so there's a lot of moving pieces to you know anywhere we start constructing china is is the place that many folks compare they have like 29 000 kilometers of high-speed rail and 20 years ago they had none so how have they been able to do it so quickly and part of it is that the state owns the land they don't have private property rights like we have in the u.s you don't have the regulations we have in terms of labor laws and environmental regulations that add to cost it also delays the projects for some reason and i've never really quite seen an adequate explanation as to why cost to build transit or many big infrastructure projects are just dramatically higher than in other parts of the world including another advanced countries but the bottom line is we're really bad at just building things cheaply and quickly in uh in the us in general so it's not just rail infrastructure that is expensive all transportation infrastructure is just the physical investment in a freeway usually will be five to eight to ten million per mile but if you add seismic issues and land acquisition and utilities and environmental mitigation and remediation of soils and and factors like that it can become as high as 100 or 200 million a mile the numbers for a high speed rail can vary you know anywhere from 20 to 80 million per mile the big reason why america is behind on high-speed rail is primarily money we don't commit the dollars needed to build these systems it's really as simple as that and it's largely a political issue they don't have political leaders who really want to dedicate the dollars needed there's a lot of forces in america that really don't want to see rail become our major mode of transportation especially because it will affect passenger numbers on airplanes it'll affect the use of autos so you have the politics the message shaping and then the straight advertising and all three of those coordinate and work together to keep america kind of focused on cars and not focused on rail some of the earliest support for rail came from the nixton administration some of the original capital subsidies and operating subsidies for urban transit came from the republican parties i think it's only more recently that maybe this has shifted that more liberal-leaning folks who care about climate and a whole host of urban issues have really argued for investing very heavily in rail if you had democratic leadership on the senate and a different president or potentially some leverage for a president to sign a new budget bill with some dollars for high-speed rail that could override those objections from republicans in congress but i think it's mostly ideological they're big on highways they're big on things like toll roads they just they don't want the government spending dollars on this kind of project and they see it as you know something those socialist european countries do but not something that should be done in you know car loving america in my judgment it would take a very strong federal commitment almost sort of a post-second world war interstate highway kind of large-scale national commitment this is why some high-speed rail projects are trying to avoid public funding altogether one company texas central plans to build a bullet train from houston to dallas without using a dime of taxpayer money we're taking what is a laborious unreliable four hour drive if you're lucky and turning that into a reliable safe 90 minutes and when you look at that as a business plan being driven by data this is the right place to build the first high-speed train in the united states the texas project is backed by investors motivated to make a profit and will use proven japanese rail technology texas central's goal is to complete the project by 2025 another private company is even further along with its rail system in florida it's expanding its higher speed train from miami to orlando orlando's the most heavily visited city the united states miami the most heavily visited international city of the united states is too far to drive is too short to fly we have the rail link and that was really the genesis of of the project west edens has invested heavily in florida's rail project which used to be called brightline brightline recently rebranded to virgin trains as the company partnered with richard branson's virgin group the team at brightline which is now called virgin trains has proven that that it can work that people actually want to get out of their cars and they'd love to be on trains in order to reach profitability the company sacrificed speed to save money if you want to really go high speed you have to grade separate so you basically have to build a bridge for 250 miles that you then put a train on that sounds hard and it sounds expensive and it's both of those things so a huge difference in cost a huge difference in time to build and not that much of a reduction in service and now tech companies are getting involved with infrastructure projects in the pacific northwest a high-speed rail plan is underway to connect portland seattle and vancouver microsoft contributed 300 thousand dollars towards research for the project our number one priority for microsoft as well is to really see and pursue this high-speed rail effort happen if you look at around the united states where all the fortune 500 companies are located they all are in a similar situation to microsoft the housing is unaffordable traffic congestion is epic it's too hard to get anywhere and to get employees so high-speed rail can solve this same exact problem in numerous regions around the united states so is the private sector the answer to bringing high-speed rail to the u.s if the private sector wants to invest in transportation and as long as it's not you know impinging on the public taxpayers i don't see a problem with the private sector moving forward and i think there is some truth that the private sector is going to have much more of an incentive to hurry up on the construction and get things done more quickly more cheaply that said the private sector still has to operate with the oversight and the regulatory responsibilities of the public sector so for example environmental review doesn't go away just because it's a private sector project labor standards don't go away the difference is that they don't have to keep trying to sell a project to the public for a vote to raise taxes or sell bonds some people remain optimistic that the u.s can catch up to the rest of the world and have a robust high-speed rail system we're building that right now behind us this 119 mile segment that we want to expand with the money we already have to 170 miles it's going to serve a population of 3 million people in the central valley so it's not only do i believe but it's under construction a lot of activity is now taking shape state rail authorities have been shaped in four or five states so they're actually taking these on now as a legitimate project and moving forward i think the future is very bright for train travel in the united states there's broad consensus with our policy leaders in industry that it's time to move an infrastructure bill and that will certainly help kick-start u.s rail others are much less confident i wish i were a little more optimistic it's just very difficult to make the economics work here no one has embraced it as a strong part of their political platform there's just too many other tough pressing problems we're facing i don't see us catching up to where the rest of the world is it would take such a massive infusion of dollars for that to happen in california and probably waiving a number of environmental requirements and some other government regulations that hinder the quick deployment of these projects in favor of other values my own instincts are that it's going to be decades and decades and decades before you'll be able to go a one-seat trip from san diego to sacramento or san francisco it'd be nice if there was just one simple answer it's this litany of factors that collectively add up that make this so hard to pull off in the united states instead of retrofitting cars with sensors and computers and saying hey here's a self-driving car we think there's an opportunity to create a new type of vehicle that from the very beginning was designed to move people around autonomously more companies are trying to bring self-driving cars to the masses than ever before yet a truly autonomous vehicle still doesn't exist and it's not clear if or when our driverless future will arrive proponents like elon musk have touted an aggressive timeline but missed their goals and others in the industry have also missed projections well our goal is to deploy these vehicles in 2019 so you'll have the option to not drive it's not happening in 2020 it's happening today we wanted to check in where exactly are we with self-driving cars and when can we expect them to be part of our daily lives the current state of driverless cars is very interesting because we've passed what people refer to as peak hype and we've entered what's called the trough of disillusionment which is even people within the industry are saying gee it turns out this is a lot harder than we thought we're definitely not anywhere near as far along as a lot of people thought we would be three years ago but i think over the last 18 to 24 months there's been you know a real injection of reality there was a sense maybe a year or two ago that ah our algorithms are so good we're ready to launch we're going to launch driver's skills in any minute and then obviously there's been these setbacks of people getting killed or accidents happening and now we're a lot more cautious several big players have begun to walk back their predictions on how soon we could see this technology even waymo's chief external officer admitted that the hype around itself driving cars has become unmanageable the technology has come a long way but there's still a lot of work to be done there's the perception which is you know using the sensors to figure out what's around the vehicle and the environment around the vehicle prediction figuring out what those what those road users are going to be doing next in the next few seconds turns out the perception and especially prediction are really really hard problems to solve companies tackling self-driving today are taking two general approaches some are building a self-driving car from the ground up others are developing the brains that drive the car an early leader was google who started its self-driving car project in 2009 known as waymo today the company is developing hardware and software that can function as the brains in a self-driving car aurora is taking a similar approach founded in 2017 by early players from uber tesla and google's self-driving initiatives it's already raised 620 million in funding from amazon and other big name investors aurora is testing vehicles on the road in pittsburgh pennsylvania and out here in the bay area we don't yet let the public in our cars our cars are on the road we have two of our test operators in there the technology we're building can operate from a compact electric car to a minivan to even a big long haul truck argo ai and aptiv are examples of other companies taking a similar approach lyft is developing its own self-driving systems now too and offering self-driving rides on its app through partnerships in select areas self-driving is is too big for just one company and one effort and if you look at our strategy that is why we're working with partners on the open platform active and waymo and why we're building uh the tech here companies like tesla zoox and gm with its cruise division are making their own vehicles aiming for self-driving cars that can operate in all environments this is the engineering challenge of our generation we've raised seven and a quarter billion dollars of capital we have deep integration with both general motors and honda which we think is essential to when you're building mission critical safety systems and building those in a way that you can deploy them at very large scale crews which was acquired by general motors in 2016 has been testing its fleet of vehicles in san francisco with safety drivers on board to give you a sense for the magnitude of the difference between suburban driving and what we're doing every day on the streets of san francisco our cars on average see more activity in one minute of san francisco driving than they see in one hour of driving in arizona zuke's led by the former chief strategy officer at intel is working on creating an all-in-one self-driving taxi system with plans to launch in 2020. instead of retrofitting cars with sensors and computers and saying hey here's a self-driving car we think there's an opportunity to create a new type of vehicle that from the very beginning was designed to move people around autonomously nissan and tesla both have semi-autonomous systems on the roads today tesla's has been available in beta on its vehicles since 2015 and drivers have been known to use the current system hands-free tesla's promising full self-driving software is just around the corner it's going to be tight it still does appear that will be at least in limited in early access release of a future complete full self driving feature this year i think tesla is actually a lot further back than they would like the world to to believe they are because they they are in fact so much more limited in terms of their hardware others are making self-driving shuttles that operate along designated routes only or focusing on trucks with long-haul highway routes and then there are companies like ghost and comma ai working on aftermarket kits essentially hardware that could be installed in older cars to bring them new self-driving capabilities one day for all players in this space the path ahead is filled with challenges chief among them proving the technology is safe driverless systems have to meet a very high safety bar that has to be better than a human before they're deployed at scale there are no federally established standards or testing protocols for automated driving systems in the u.s today but there have been fatal crashes a woman named elaine hertzberg was killed by an autonomous uber with a safety driver who was paying no attention this woman was crossing the street walking her bicycle should easily have been seen by the autonomous vehicle was not was run over nobody stepped on the brakes in 2016 a tesla fan named joshua brown died in a crash while using autopilot hands-free in florida other autopilot-involved accidents are now under investigation still the industry is hopeful that autonomous vehicles will make the roads far safer than they are today really the kind of zero to one moment for the industry will be when we can remove those safety drivers safely and the vehicle can operate without the presence of any human others like elon musk have said you know it's almost irresponsible not to have these vehicles out there because they are safer and will be safer than human drivers even if we could say that an autonomous vehicle was better than a human driver it doesn't mean that an autonomous vehicle is better than a human driver plus all the advanced driver assist systems we have when looking at when the tech could actually be ready one of the principal metrics touted by companies is the number of miles driven but not all miles are created equal when testing automated systems you could take an autonomous vehicle and go you know put it on an oval track you know or just a straight road and you could drive 100 million miles but that's not really going to tell you much about how well the system actually functions because it's not encountering the kinds of things that are actually challenging in a driving environment testing self-driving vehicles out on public roads isn't enough they need to be exposed to every imaginable scenario so companies rely on simulation we can create situations that we're basically never going to see or very rarely see so for example we might want to simulate what happens is a bicycle comes through an intersection runs a red light and crashes into the side of our car turns out that doesn't happen very often in the real world but we want to know that if that happens our vehicles are going to do something safe basically allow the car to practice uh up in the cloud instead of on the road when you're testing autonomous vehicles out on public roads not only are the people riding in that car part of the experiment but so is everybody else around you and they didn't consent to being part of an experiment i remain concerned that humans will be used as test dummies instead of self-certification and deregulation i want to see strong independent safety regulations from the agencies in front of us today the self-certification approach did not work out well for the boeing 737 max 8 and now boeing is paying the price we should heed that lesson when it comes to finding out the best way to deploy autonomous vehicles lawmakers held hearings this month to figure out how to keep the public safe without holding back self-driving innovation in september the national highway traffic safety administration released new federal guidelines for automated driving systems but they're only voluntary suggestions at this point state legislation is farther along as of october 41 states have either enacted laws or signed executive orders regulating autonomous vehicles with regulatory questions looming it's no surprise that self-driving companies are proceeding cautiously at first what we're going to be seeing in the next several years is more limited deployments in very specific areas where there's confidence that the technology can work i think we'll see limited deployments of self-driving vehicles in the next five years or so you'll see these moving goods and you'll see them moving people but you'll see them specifically in fleet aurora says its systems could be integrated into any vehicle from fleets of taxis to long-haul trucks the cost of self-driving technology is another deciding factor for how it will be deployed most consumers are never going to own a vehicle that's really autonomous because the technology is expensive and there's a whole raft of issues around product liability and you know making sure that it's properly maintained and sensors are calibrated that's one reason ride hailing companies lyft and uber are getting in the game we have two autonomous initiatives one is the open platform where we're connecting lift passengers with our partner self-driving vehicles so this is aptiv in las vegas and waymo in chandler arizona and then also kind of the product experience for the tech that you see here which is level five as av companies inch toward the mainstream public perception simple understanding of the tech has become another issue that could impact progress some in particular in the industry have done a disservice to the public in over hyping the technology before it's really ready it's still not very clear to most people what we mean when we say driverless cars waymo and general motors cruise automation are very close to having what they refer to as level five cars most of the time in other words again they can in theory function uh all by themselves but so far it seems that they function like a you know 15 year old driver hoping to get a driver's license there's a lot of people who think that you can buy autonomous vehicles today you know especially when you can go out and buy a car and buy an option that's that's called full self driving and pay for that you expect that it actually exists and the the fact is it does not exist today with an uncertain timeline and a history of missed targets public confusion is no surprise despite big developments most companies have recognized we are still years away from having truly self-driving cars as part of our daily lives one big question is when is the car ready you have to have a good sense of all of the scenarios and all of the situations that the vehicle will need to encounter and that just takes time we expect level four vehicles to be feasible in small quantities within the next five years and what that means is you'll probably see hundreds or maybe thousands of vehicles out either delivering packages or moving people's through neighborhood or maybe hauling goods on our freeways and now even the experts hesitate to make promises on when true self-driving will get here you always have to assume that the the user is going to find a way to misuse the technology assume the worst and then design for that i think it's a mistake to be over promoting the technology and over hyping it when it's still a very much a work in progress this is something we need to do with society with the community and not at society and we take that very seriously we're building mission critical safety systems that are going to have a huge positive impact on people's lives and the tech adage of move fast and break things most assuredly does not apply to what we're doing here ever since there's been flight people have this vision and i think you and i have this vision you're on the highway you're going like two miles an hour and you just desperately want to push the button to go vertical and take off over this it's just an irresistible fantasy that all drivers have had hey doc we better back up we don't have enough roads to get up to 88 roads well we're going we don't need roads these visionary scenes depicted in backs of the future and blade runner did not exactly pan out instead we continued to waste hours stuck in traffic fantasizing about flying cars yet we don't have them even though the potential market is huge the market for urban air mobility is expected to reach 1.5 trillion by 2040. companies like boeing airbus toyota and uber are recognizing the need for more efficient travel and injecting millions into developing vetoes or vertical takeoff and landing vehicles though these operate more like massive drones or helicopters than they do cars vitols have the potential to fundamentally change the way we commute in cities so what's taking so long and will we ever be able to push a button and zoom over traffic with our car plane hybrid [Music] the biggest challenge according to engineers in creating a flying car is to create a machine that is robust rugged and probably heavy enough to withstand the rigors of the road the bumps and the occasional fender benders and at the same time a machine that is light enough and aerodynamic enough to be safe in the air most engineers claim that although it was an interesting problem it was not a solvable one the balance would always be wrong or the weight would be wrong and you could never do better than creating an inferior car that would also be an inferior airplane and that you were much better off making an airplane and making a car and keeping them separate andrew glass is an author and illustrator who spent years researching flying cars for his book he says that initially the notion of roads seemed far more far-fetched than flying cars even though there were sort of rudimentary cars and rudimentary planes there were no roads to speak of and so there was this fascinating kind of archaeology of a period where people couldn't even imagine a complex comfortable highway system but what they could imagine was bolting the wings of a rudimentary airplane to the top of a rudimentary car and flying over the countryside until they got to a landing strip where they would land disengage the wings and drive to where they were actually going people have been trying to build car plane hybrids since the early 1900s in 1917 the curtis auto plane debuted at the pan-american aeronautics exposition in new york the autoplane had a removable fuselage wings and tail and actually looked like a car when it traveled down the road but with world war one in full swing priorities quickly shifted from building a flying car to building military planes and the auto plane was eventually dismantled for parts in the mid-40s public interest in flying cars was resparked after robert fulton flew his airphibian prototype the arphibian used the same controls for flying and driving and required the drivers leave their airplane parts behind when you drove it like a car three years after its first flight the amphibian became the first flying car to receive certification from the civic aeronautics authority predecessor to the faa but in the end the arphibian's high production cost meant it was never made on a wide scale still the amphibian became the inspiration for molt taylor's aerocar a few years later the aerocart 2 earned the green light from aviation authorities and complied with all road vehicle codes that existed at the time it was everything that people hoped it would be it was safe it was versatile it was an actual good-looking car that was comfortable and easy to drive it was also a plane that was functional would take you three to five hundred miles but he just could not find backers for it ford was curious about the aerocar and in 1970 even commissioned a study to gauge the market interest in such a vehicle ford predicted they could sell about 25 000 aero cars but the company eventually decided to pass on the project after engineers and lawmakers raised concerns when the department of transportation heard about it they went a little crazy with the idea that ford was getting ready to put a lot of drivers flying over suburban areas and the engineers at ford came back with the usual criticism that to make this car safe enough to meet all the safety standards it would become too heavy to be an effective airplane and so the technology there just took a dip it's revived i think with the notion of self-driving cars [Music] flying cars have kind of become this this byword where people say they promised me flying cars and all i got was you know fill in the blank yeah why don't we have flying cars so what we're close actually that's close we're captioning not batteries available motors to make these things affordable and reliable electric propulsion is kind of a key enabler and so that's that's really the differentiator that's uh that's making it possible there have been a number of innovations through hardware software telecommunications and infrastructure that have led to this acceleration of of both capital and um early commerciality and proto-commerciality of urban air mobility a few of these things are weight reduction carbon fiber composites more dense and higher energy density batteries which improve the power to weight smaller lighter electric motors more powerful micro motors for what they call dep or distributed electronic propulsion an electric motor also has the ability to you can control torque right sort of the power that the motor throws off and you can control rotation speed very effectively and so for something like a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle where you need a lot of power to get the vehicle in the air you don't need a lot of power in what you call cruise right as the vehicle transports through the air and then you need a fair amount of power to get the vehicles back safely on the ground an electric propulsion system and really high technology motors and motor controllers are perfect for that mission these were technologies that really only existed in a military application until recently and we're now seeing it come out of the dod and darpa in the military field into the commercial market adding to that then lower price and a higher capability for sense and compute so all the things that you would see in an autonomous car prototype can be applied in an urban air mobility vehicle an autonomous operation experts don't see this as too much of a challenge for vitols since these vehicles will be doing a lot of repetitive tasks autonomous control technology has matured to a stage where we can put into good use the mission is very simple you just take off carry some people safely and then land and so for a simple mission uh flying their craft should be simple and so we think that it is right for application of autonomy this this level of autonomy is not any it's not too far or far-fetched anymore these advancements in key technologies have led to a number of flying car prototypes massachusetts-based terrafugia has managed to get road and faa approval for its transition model though it's not yet commercially available slovakia-based aeromobil 2 has not sold any vehicles and is awaiting approval from the european aviation safety agency for its aeromobil 4.0 car however both of these companies seem to be turning their focus to vetoes terrafugia's newest model the tf2 will have removable pods that can be docked to either an air vehicle or car wheels meanwhile a rendering of aeromobile's latest model the aeromobil 5.0 shows a car that drives to a helipad before it takes off vertically experts say engineering a hybrid car plane is really difficult because the two vehicles are designed for opposing goals when you design cars your objective is to fight friction with stark when you design airplanes your objective is to fight gravity with lift so this leads to two different kinds of solution sticking wings into a car doesn't make them good airplanes any more than sticking wheels onto airplanes in addition a hybrid air and road vehicle in the u.s would require certification from both the faa and the national highway traffic safety administration which can be hard to achieve that's why many companies have turns to vetoes the vertical flight society a trade association for the advancement of vertical flight has been tracking electric veto design since 2016. its website lists over 250 different designs for ev tolls one well-known company working with ev tools is uber the idea is that with the new technology that's been applied to cars that have made electric cars possible electric powertrains batteries electric motors we can make a new class of aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter but uses multiple different rotors instead of one large one that allows it to have kind of built-in inherent redundancies that actually make it both safer to operate and cheaper to operate at the same time uber is not building any of the vehicles itself instead the company is collaborating with established manufacturers including boeing and hyundai to bring uber's ride sharing platform to electric flying vehicles uber says it hopes to have its ev tolls up and running by 2023 another big name in the space is airbus the company is testing city airbus an all-electric four-seat remotely piloted flying taxi which has so far performed more than a hundred test flights toyota also recently invested 394 million dollars in electric air taxi startup joby aviation and porsche has announced that they are exploring creating a luxury electric flying vehicle with u.s plane maker boeing startups opener and kitty hawk have come up with their own versions of vtols both startups are backed by google co-founder larry page and promise a personal flying vehicle that doesn't require a pilot's license companies see an enormous opportunity here people are conscious about the environmental impact they are tired of congestion they want to travel faster quicker and they're more receptive to ride sharing even with all the buzz experts agree that there are many challenges that manufacturers must face before they can bring an urban air mobility vehicle to market in order to have longer distances and faster charging times to keep that utilization up we're going to need pretty significant improvements in power to weight of the battery another one that doesn't get a lot of attention but should is noise you don't want to fill the air with these whizzing buzzing high frequency vehicles the third one is privacy while many in the public might be comfortable with autonomous vehicles covered with sensors that could facially recognize pedestrians the thought of something being in the air at night flying around your home or in your neighborhood or you know between businesses may introduce a new genre of privacy and safety related nuances that that are yet to be explored and will ultimately go into the courts and the regulatory bodies then there's the question of safety and regulation airplane safety is two or three orders of magnitude more than car safety a car engine may not be reliable like my first car let me break down but it's safe because you can just you know pull over and wait for emergency medical services but not in airplanes if something goes wrong that's the end it's a life-threatening event not only for people inside but those on the ground even futurist elon musk seems to be hesitant about the idea of flying vehicles there is a challenge with flying cars in that they they'll be quite noisy uh the the wind force generator will be very high let's just say that if something's flying over your head through a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place um that is not an exciting and anxiety-reducing uh situation you're thinking like did they service their hubcap or is it gonna come off and guillotine me it's a flying pass our dream is that this will help solve the worldwide transportation crisis where you know it's impossible to get from here to san francisco in rush hour traffic right now and the regulatory system is basically set up so this aircraft can't meet that need right now but it's not because of capabilities this aircraft is capable right now of actually flying you know to san francisco landing and recharging it coming back or even landing coming back based on the distances but the problem right now is the regulatory environment has not caught up with the capabilities of this type of aircraft because honestly this type of aircraft was just invented but regulation seems to be catching up i want to close with some thoughts on the next very very innovative piece of technology that we see emerging and that's urban air mobility as i mentioned these are aircraft that fill that that void from 30 miles to 300 miles between the small drones and the commercial aircraft we know today and probably the biggest question i get on this is is this real are they really happening yes this is more than just hype this is more than just promotional videos we have at least six aircraft well along in their type certification which is the first step in introducing the new aircraft into operation in 2019 the european union aviation safety agency released a special condition certification for veto aircraft the condition applies to vehicles with nine passengers or less and a max certified takeoff mass of 7000 pounds or less as for if flying cars will ever fill our skies right now that seems unlikely i don't imagine that this is ever going to happen where people actually accomplish this dream of of a flying car in every garage it was a kind of self-contained fantasy that wasn't going to be a reality for very many people it seems as if trying to design a dual purpose road car and flying car is just not economical and not the optimal technological solution so if you look out 10 20 20 30 years the future of transportation is a mesh of high-speed automated efficient electronic sustainable terrestrial transport and then working as a mesh with electronic automated urban air mobility for various applications [Music] the invention of flight has been one of the most profound technologies in history and for the past century it has functioned pretty much the same way but that could all change the advent of lithium-ion batteries and electric propulsion technologies is igniting a revolution in transportation everything from cars to trucks and buses are going electric but what about planes we call this the third revolution in aviation the first was the piston engine that enabled the wright brothers to fly their first flight the second was the jet engine which only really was applied to larger planes and we think the third revolution is electric propulsion [Music] co2 emissions and the environmental impact they pose has moved to the forefront of public attention and has been one of the driving forces in leading electric vehicle adoption the aviation industry is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and unlike cars aviation is often excluded from national climate plans because it operates across borders between flight and commercial shipping constitutes about five percent of our total co2 emission per year and these are some of the hardest co2 to decarbonize aircraft emissions are a real serious problem it's projected to be up to 25 of the entire global carbon budget to stay below 1.5 degrees c according to a 2018 report on co2 emissions from commercial aviation there was a 32 increase in emissions over the five years leading up to the study and with the faa estimating the number of airline passengers in the u.s will surpass 1.28 billion by 2038 planes will be a big source of pollution for years to come jet fuel is also one of the biggest operating costs for airlines and electric motors have fewer parts to repair and maintain making them a more economical option as well when you look at a jet engine there's thousands of moving parts a turboprop has seven thousand to ten thousand moving parts and you have to every three thousand hours spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of time to overhaul them there's one moving part in an electric motor in a plane an electric propulsion system can reduce cost of ownership or cost of operation dramatically orders of magnitude 40 50 60 70 percent but not only do you have lower maintenance costs but you also have lower costs in terms of actually providing the energy required to go from one location to another with so many benefits why is it we have yet to see the electric vehicle movement come to aerospace so the fundamental problem with electric aircraft has always been that a good lithium-ion battery cell has 1 40th of the energy content of the equivalent weight of jet fuel and so if you were to take an existing airplane and you take out all the fuel and you take out the engines and the fuel systems and replace those with only batteries then you would only fly one twentieth as far while the electrification of aviation has been slow to start the technology is starting to look more feasible so there's been a significant enough revolution and improvement in the performance of batteries which the automotive industry is really driving it is extremely promising that one of these battery technology can be scaled up for electric flight so the real question is is not when will we have electric airplanes it's it's when will the time come where we can have electric airplanes that fly far enough to then start replacing conventionally fueled air transport the first area to be serviced with electric aircraft will be short regional flights but battery electric flight is still in early development some of the planes that have flown have been demonstrated they're basically all battery they're just carrying their pilot and they don't they actually don't even have the weight to carry passengers right now but the batteries are going to improve pipistrel is one of the few all-electric plane manufacturers actually building and flying today because of limited range and capacity they're primarily used as trainer aircraft recently harbor air in vancouver canada partnered with magne-x to take its fleet of seaplanes all electric it just completed its first successful flight and is beginning the certification and approval process israeli startup aviation aircraft showed off its all-electric nine-seat aircraft in summer 2019 at the paris air show the company claims the plane will be capable of flying up to 650 miles and that customers have placed more than 150 orders the startup hopes to begin testing in 2020. there's companies out there like buy aerospace and pippistrol that are doing i think amazing things in the light sport and the trainer aircraft market where they could go straight to electric with those vehicles and the cost of ownership and the operational cost benefits are really really compelling until battery tech improves hybrid electric aircraft is what will be utilized for larger capacity flights going longer distances a hybrid electric aircraft would be an aircraft that would leverage electric motor and electric propulsion in addition to the traditional fuel sources that we have today so one can imagine just like you would have a hybrid electric car you could have a hybrid electric aircraft so what we've done is we've taken a very very successful honeywell helicopter engine and we've mounted it with a special gearbox to two of our ultra efficient generators so in total this machine generates 400 kilowatts of power which is enough to power 40 homes at one time ampere is one startup working on and testing hybrid electric aircraft the first plane that ampere flew is our electric eel and that's a six-seat aircraft the largest hybrid electric aircraft that's ever flown we're already building our second copy of that aircraft and it's going to be the first ever to fly on an actual commercial route demoing daily operations in hawaii the test flights will begin next year in partnership with mokulele airlines flying on a route base out of maui this project is a stepping stone for worldwide adoption of electric aircraft so we've been working in programs from everywhere like norway where norway is actually aiming to have all flights under 90 minutes go electric or hybrid electric by 2040 and looking at the uk is scotland initiatives going on right now to have electric and hybrid electric aircraft airlines historically have struggled to make money on shorter regional flights but hybrid planes could change that in a hybrid we're reducing fuel burn by up to 75 percent that is transformational for the economics of airlines there's this whole segment of the market about 40 billion dollars of revenue that has now been eliminated from airlines balance sheets because they just couldn't fly those routes profitably we're going to enable them to fly those routes again utilizing hybrid engines in regional aircraft could also make flight more common in daily life i think everybody knows how expensive it is to fly regionally and part of the reason that this is the case is that small turbine engines are very inefficient electricity from renewable sources can be very cheap and in parts of the country it's ridiculously cheap like the pacific northwest compared to jet fuel flying will be uh will be a bargain it's also going to enable is things like regional commuting that you have these super commuters in places like los angeles and the bay area that are going to be able to do things like fly daily air pooling so when could we see larger commercial airliners go electric it could be some time i think there's a lot of years if not decades before hybrid electric and fully electric propulsion is going to be viable in that space and it's unknown when battery technology will be sufficient for those longer missions in the takeoff the amount of power that is required is specifically related to its weight even to have a small passenger plane maybe three or four people go for several hundred miles you need a battery that is two to three times more powerful than it is today it's more likely that these larger aircraft will convert to hybrid technology until batteries are capable of supporting longer flights when you talk to a boeing or you talk to it to an airbus about a really big airplane the conversations in the present tend to be around how do you make the airplane more electric versus fully electric and that does take loads off of the engines and help reduce the fuel burn of those aircraft and make those aircraft more efficient electric technology also opens up a host of new efficient designs for future aircraft there's kind of a cascade of benefits you produce less heat so it's easier to cool your system and your cooling drag goes down you can design the plane differently the electric motors are tiny compared to an engine you can put them in different places so it just opens up an entire new design space if you compare the amount of energy per weight that you could put in a battery versus amount of energy per weight that's in a gallon of gasoline it's like it's enormously different and what that forces you to do is to design very very efficient airplanes these efficiencies in combination with the advantages of electric propulsion enable an entirely new type of flight air taxis or urban air mobility urban air mobility is really a new mode of transportation i would actually call it a new era in aviation and that revolution is really to overcome the traffic problem we're seeing around big cities perhaps you're 30 miles away from your closest airport so you could potentially get into one of these urban air mobility vehicles and fly that short distance that might take you an hour in traffic but maybe 15 minutes in one of these urban air mobility vehicles this new segment of transportation has attracted the attention of uber which is hoping to bring its experience as a ride share company to flight we know that congestion is getting worse and there's limits to what you can do on the ground let's move transportation out of the 2d grid into the third dimension uber is creating the technology that will help run the logistical operations of such a service and partnering with manufacturers to provide the aircraft when you select uber air we'll get you a car you'll take that to the skyport will walk you through the seamless minimal time transition into the aircraft which will then take off fly to the closest remote sky port to your destination where a car will meet you just in time for you to get to your final destination urban air mobility could surpass ground-based services in investor interest and funding morgan stanley estimates the market could reach 1.5 trillion by 2040. the evolution has been like nothing i've ever seen i've been in aerospace for decades and there's been an influx of capital at each end of the value chain from the vehicle manufacturers to the technology to the infrastructure to the regulatory environment hundreds of startups have recently entered the space all working to develop their own aircraft fahana is developing a short-range vertical take-off and landing vehicle funded by airbus joby aviation is backed by jetblue airways and google's larry page is an investor in two startups as well traditionally only a few hundred planes are manufactured a year the advent of urban air mobility could change that and have a big impact on the automotive industry the volumes are going to be like nothing we've ever seen in a traditional aerospace market 500 airplanes a year 600 airplanes a year those are record-setting right numbers of airplanes and for urban air mobility could be tens of thousands of vehicles per year and quite frankly the traditional airspace industry isn't equipped to support those volumes anticipating this convergence of aerospace and automotive led honeywell to partner with denzo one of the world's largest automotive suppliers we talk about urban air mobility not as a replacement for an airplane but as a replacement for a car and so you have a lot of automotive companies that are very very interested in participating in the market we build millions of motors and inverters and when we bring that kind of technology and manufacturing know-how to our aerospace customers it's seen as really really monumental because they are used to building in such low quantities air taxis are only just starting to enter testing but how soon could we potentially see them out in the world we do see some urban air mobility operations using conventional helicopters today but when are we going to actually see these electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles my best guess would be as the technology develops it'll be most likely in the 20 35 20 20 30 plus time frame we've said publicly that we think that 2023 is an achievable date for launch of a real commercial service it'll be a handful of vehicles starting out on key routes it's going to start you know at a price point that's a little bit more premium but before air taxis or fully electric planes can be a reality batteries still need to improve if we want a small air taxi to fly for say 500 miles that will require a battery that has more than double the energy density of today's electric vehicle batteries another roadblock is ensuring it will be safe and reliable under heavy use there are 200 000 planes taking off and landing every day so the reliability of a battery power plane has to be very high as the technology improves they'll be entering an industry built around heavy regulation aircraft manufacturing and systems are required to undergo intense certification to ensure reliability and safety this is no longer you know dad's little cessna 172 this is a vehicle that needs that reliability and that safety to move people who are expecting that same experience that they would get in a 737 in a small vehicle not to mention the logistical obstacles of navigating the crowded airspace as more flight technologies come to market there will be more aircraft in the skies than ever before think about hundreds or even thousands of these vehicles flying around they have to stay away from all the other traffic that's flying in the space so not only will we have to ensure safe operations for the passengers on board but also for off nominal cases ensuring for the safety of the folks that are on the ground and with urban air mobility emerging as a new field in aviation a whole new set of research questions and processes need to be developed between the faa and vehicle partners to address these challenges nasa has created the grand challenge the grand challenge is focused on providing an ecosystem or a proving ground to enable not only nasa but also the faa vehicle industry partners and airspace industry partners to come together to really understand the key questions of what will be required to enable urban air mobility operations the hope is that together they can outline safety certifications regulation and integration into the national airspace and urban environments seeing an electric plane as a prototype is quite far from a mass-produced one unless there is a significant policy shift to put for example a cost on carbon emission battery based planes will have to compete also with jet fuel based planes and currently the economics do not work as planes progress toward electric technology we should expect it to follow a very similar path to what we saw in the automobile industry were you at one point were talking about small vehicles like a nissan leaf now you're talking about electrifying entire buses and i think in aerospace or in flying vehicles we're going to see sort of a similar evolution you know they stay in service for 30 years the aircraft that need to be flying 30 years from now you need to be in development today i think that we will start seeing regional electric aircraft happen and i think that will certainly be in the next 15 years every type of transport is going electric has already gone electric and i planes are next and it's not just some far out future it's happening right now [Music] you

Channel: CNBC

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Keywords: CNBC, business news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, high speed rail, high speed rail usa, high speed rail in america, bullet train, speed train, self driving car, tesla, waymo, business, news, elon musk tesla, flying cars, electric planes

Id: CWhJ4QIJlfo

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ZoologyDarwin]

Focusing on flying cars and autonomous vehicles is stupid because we have a thing called rapid transit that is much better.