Yes, Detroit used to actually have a rail network back in the day, it actually had TWO commuter rail lines going north and west from downtown respectively. Their discontinuation was blamed on the decline of business moving out of downtown from the suburbs, but, if you're a local, you know full and well transit planning in this region has been dominated by auto industry interests since day #1. I mean, the only mayor in Detroit's history who proposed that the city build a subway was literally a good personal friend of John Dodge and appointed a shareholder& former vice president of the early Ford company to the position of police chief, who would, after Marx stepped down, mysteriously become mayor of Detroit

Look at how they massacred my boys...

PS: Also, on a related note- if you've ever seen any B-roll of images from Detroit, you've probably seen this massive train station at some point. Well, the Ford motor company bought the building not too long ago from a notorious slumlord and is going to rip the majority of the platforms out in order to build their new " autonomous mobility platform " instead of... i don't know... utilizing all of the empty blocks and streets we have in the city?.. Funny how this all turns out isn't it?

  • skeletorsass [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Funny render but will never be real. It is far too dangerous. It is not possible to manage traffic. Wind would be deadly. Every building is a hazard and no person is ever safe anywhere in the city. Rotor flying is sensitive to a lot of air patterns which can sink a helicopter very quickly and chaotic. The energy required is much higher and this is a physics problem which can not be solved. This is an advertisement, not practical.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    They're pretending that it'll be really quiet lmao.

    You can not displace the amount of air needed to make a car fly without creating the noise that comes with that quantity of air displacement. The more air you displace the more noise you create.

    This demonstration is a physical impossibility. These will be loud as fuck.

    • KurdKobein [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Is it just physics? I know a dude who owns a pricy 0,5kg drone. The thing is noisy as hell. On the other hand a big bird, like a duck, is almost silent compared to that. I won't be surprised it would be possible to create some sort of powered flight vehicle capable of lifting a human that isn't as noisy as a helicopter.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        The more air you move the more noise you make, this is not avoidable. Those "big" birds displacing surprisingly little air and only do so on flaps, they're quite light-weight.

        We can't make a quiet propeller that displaces enough air to fly a human. It's an engineering impossibility.

  • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]
    cake
    ·
    4 years ago

    lol, even the capitalists known for creating things that fly (Boeing) can't keep their flying vehicles in the air...with trained human pilots involved, in spite of the human pilots' efforts even

    Can't wait for inadvertent 9/11s every time GM's shitty software fails... small price to pay for not sharing high speed transit with the proles

  • Melon [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I fail to see any way that this thing is better than a simple autogyro, other than in vertical takeoff/landing.