Human beings always want to go to heaven, and it is not so much human yearning for the sky as it is due to human curiosity.
From human observations of the starry sky to the invention of the hot air balloon. From the emergence of aircraft to the launch of manned rockets, human beings have never stopped pursuing "heaven". But what does this have to do with cars?
Since the beginning of the 20th century, humans have related these two things in various ways. You may not have any idea of this, to be precise, since 1917, the car has been involved in the "heavens" thing.
In 1917, American aviation pioneer, aviator, and famous aircraft designer Ger Curtiss built an aluminum flying car with a wingspan of 12.2 meters, curtiss Autoplane, although it only achieved a short jump flight, but it was already a huge leap in the history of human automobile flight.
Looking back, what a great thing, after all, at that time, cars were not safe to run on the road, let alone the sky? However, in 1921 and 1947, flying cars were born one after another. Up to this point, flying cars are mostly the products of individual inventors and have nothing to do with car companies.
In 1953, car companies appeared. At that time, Buick automotive engineer Liland Brian designed the Bryan Autoplane flying car. The flying car's drive is a propeller mounted on the rear of the vehicle, while the wings can be folded twice to reduce space.
After that, flying cars appeared from time to time, and some people died because of test flights. Until the car entered the era of safety, with the improvement of safety regulations, the crazy announcement of flying cars came to an end. Profit-driven car companies began to refocus on the car itself, gradually evolving into the vehicles we use today.
As the time comes to the 21st century, we have more technical terms, such as traffic efficiency and future technology. As clever as you are, you can easily get an answer by associating these two words with the car. That's right, that "flying car" is coming back. How many car companies are saying they want to build flying cars today? GM, Aston Martin, Audi, Toyota, Geely, and Xiaopeng, who has just spoken, are all ready to go at the starting line. Or maybe some of them have already sneaked away.
In theory, flying cars can alleviate traffic congestion very well, and for short-distance flights, it is indeed preferred. Even the ignition for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was expected to be a flying car, a car invested by Toyota Motors that is said to be the world's smallest flying car with vertical take-off and landing capabilities.
Perhaps the wave of flying cars in the 21st century should be "attributed" to Tesla. Although Tesla did not say that it would build a flying car, Musk himself has more than once announced his "Mars Colonization Plan". Moreover, whether it is Tesla's plan to launch cars into the sky, build rockets or starlink plans, they all convey the cognition that "Tesla wants to go to heaven".
If in the 1.0 era, car companies want to go to heaven because of equipment competitions, while showing their strength, the exploration of unknown areas. Then in this 2.0 era, the idea of cars in the sky is more due to the trend of the times. Or Tesla, the above-mentioned Starlink plan, proposes to launch a total of 4425 satellites into the earth's near-orbit from 2019 to 2024, equipping wiFi for the world.
To date, SpaceX has launched 1,740 Starlink satellites, and although it is only in the testing phase, the Starlink network already covers 14 countries and has more than 100,000 users. Here, we do not discuss the infringement of the country's space rights and threats to political security caused by this plan, but we simply talk about the matter of "heaven". Needless to say, if the Starlink plan is achieved, the world will be further interconnected, what does it mean for cars? The further advancement of autonomous driving, and it is a great advance! At that time, the car is likely to truly transform into a technology model, even if the development of vehicle technology cannot keep up in the short term, but relying on extremely high interconnection, it is only a matter of time. If this day does come, it is not necessarily a good thing for consumers. From the practical point of view, automotive autonomous driving is beneficial to everyone, but since the platform is built, as a party that builds the platform, car companies will inevitably charge service fees. The cost of such cloud services is very expensive, enough to make these cloud service providers make a lot of money.
Moreover, Morgan Stanley Research Reported pointed out that the market size of the "flying car" industry is expected to reach $300 billion by 2030; in 2040, its market size can reach $1.5 trillion. China will be the largest single market, climbing to $430 billion. Speaking of this, everyone should understand why to develop flying cars, and why to promote interconnection and promote automatic driving, the essence of which lies in the pursuit of capital, but it is also the inevitable development of automobiles to the stage of technological interconnection.
Flying cars are cars, but they operate on the same principle as airplanes, which means that if they are human-driven, we need to have a flight license. Such a high threshold makes it impossible for flying cars to be associated with solving traffic jams. Therefore, autonomous self-driving unmanned vehicles are the real preferred solution. At this point, we can find that promoting the development of flying cars is not in conflict with the promotion of automatic driving, and there is mutual gain. And can develop, but also can make money, why not enjoy it?
In the face of the big cake of automotive intelligent networking, no car company can resist this sweetness. Any car company that has the strength and hopes to gradually transform into a service provider will want to earn this high profit. However, although there is an element of capital, in fact, under the intertwining of scientific and technological interconnection, the product of the automobile has already undergone many changes unconsciously. Therefore, in the near future, it may not be surprising whether it is really equipped with a pair of wings to make it soar, or through an invisible network, it may not be surprising to connect it with the sky.
(Image source network, invasion and deletion)