Sebastian Thrun Defends Flying Cars to Me

The CEO of Kitty Hawk, the Larry Page-funded individual airborne vehicle company, explains why this isn’t the stupidest idea ever.

Some years ago, venture capitalist Peter Thiel made a famous complaint about what, in his view, was insufficient swashbuckling in Silicon Valley. “We were promised flying cars,” he wrote, “and instead what we got was one hundred forty characters.” Well, better late than never: We just learned that Kitty Hawk, a company backed by Google c0founder Larry Page, is working on the Flyer, a very first draft of the flying car for which Thiel and other tech magnates have been so ardently pining. The prototype Kitty Hawk Flyer is a 220-pound ultralight aircraft (no pilot license required) meant to soar only over water. Still, Kitty Hawk explicitly frames the company’s overall aim as building the future of individual aerial transportation.

But could it be that in this case, never is better than late? You can boil down the problems of flying cars to seven factors: safety, cost, noise, sky congestion, parking, regulation, and the overall question of why we even need them. I could think of no one better to address these concerns than Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Kitty Hawk. Thrun is an AI scientist, a pioneer of self-driving cars, and an entrepreneur who also cofounded the online education stiff Udacity. He cheerfully agreed to my proposal for an interview where I would act as the voice of brutal skepticism about the entire Jetson-esque enterprise, pitching him a series of cranky questions. Despite my best efforts, he remained upbeat and unflappable across. Whether he makes his case is up to you.

Steven Levy: Why do we need flying cars?Sebastian Thrun: It is a childhood desire. Flying is just such a magical thing to do. Making personalized flight available to everybody truly opens up a set of fresh practices. But in the long term there’s a practicality to the idea of a flying vehicle that takes off vertically like a helicopter, is very quiet, and can serve brief range transportation. The ground is getting more and more congested. In the US, road usage increases by about three percent every year. But we don’t build any roads. And countries like China that very recently witnessed an explosion of automotive ownership are suffering tremendously from unbelievable traffic jams. While the ground infrastructure of roads is one-dimensional, the sky is three-dimensional, and it is much, much larger.

But it you build flying cars, won’t the air be just as congested?

The nice thing about the air is there is more of it. You could have virtual highways in the sky and stack them vertically. So you never have a traffic intersection or similar.

But highways have lanes. You can’t have dotted lines in the sky.

Yes, you can, it turns out. Thanks to the US government we have the Global Positioning System that gives us precision location information. We can paint virtual highways into the sky. We are actually doing this today. When you look at the way planes fly, they use equipment that effectively constructs highways in the sky.

Still, the number of planes is little compared to cars, which you want to put in the air. Plus, everybody is buying drones. If you folks get your way, the sky is going to be fully utter.

Every idea put to the extreme sounds odd. But, right now you look at the sky and you might see at most six things up there. Usually you see nothing. And you have to live in a congested area like San Francisco to see six things in the air. So we are a far distance from any visual obstruction of the air. To me, what’s much more significant is noise. When a petite aircraft flies over our house, it is very audible.

I’m glad you brought that up. These are noisy!

The prototype that we demonstrated is noisy, but we have a design under the wraps that will likely have a noise level similar to a passing car. The promise of electrified technology is conceivably very quiet. Electrical flight has the potential to be as quiet as a hummingbird.

Where do you park a flying car?

The footprint of our prototype that we demonstrated is about the same as a puny car.

Yeah, and attempt to find a parking space in San Francisco. Where are you going to park these things?

We don’t know yet. Honestly, the vehicle we are building right now is meant as a motorsports vehicle. It’s operated only a few feet above the water line. Primarily for safety concerns. And it would be on your trailer or in your garage.

Right, at very first you are building your flying cars to rail over water. I’m sure people who own quiet lake homes will be blessed about that.

It will be as quiet or quieter than a jet ski. And it will be up to people to judge whether the noise levels are okay or not. This is not meant to bother other people; it is meant to empower people.

Petite planes have a much higher accident rate than commercial airlines. It’s dangerous to fall from a height. Are you worried people are going to die from these things?

I worry greatly about the safety. That is certainly a main concern. The reason why I think ultimately flight will actually be safer than ground is that on the ground there is a lot of stuff to hit. In the sky there is almost nothing to hit.

But you are planning to have slew of stuff up there to hit. All those flying cars!

They can be coordinated to be out of the way. This happens today when you look at air traffic, which routes planes in different directions and at different altitudes. What is absolutely correct is that the equivalent of a fender-bender in the air is likely death. We know this. But if we look at the reasons why general aviation — puny aircraft — aren’t safe, it is almost entirely because of pilot error. It is actually hard to land the plane at the decent air speed and in cross wind on a narrow runway. The nice thing we can harvest in Flyer is a computer system that eases the pilot of these difficulties. Flyer will be as effortless to pilot as any modern drone.

Drones crash a lot of the time because people make pilot errors. But when you sit in one, I don’t think you are going to fly yourself cheerfully into a wall.

The nice thing about this fresh type of flight is you can make the controls. We can design the computer to take away all the powers of flying that make flying hard and leave you the parts that makes flying effortless. So on Flyer we have a joystick-based interface that lets you directive flying. Very much like a 3D movie game. If at any point in time you feel unsafe, you just take your palms off and you stay exactly where you are. There is no such aircraft today that can accomplish this.

Basically, isn’t this just a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires inventing an indulgent form of transportation because they liked The Jetsons , and don’t want to be on public transit and highways like the rest of us?

Honestly, my objective is not to build a better way for me or my friends to get around. My objective is to truly understand how safe and quiet and energy-economic air travel can switch the way we stir about. Transportation is so significant to us. At this point most of us are restricted to a very coarse set of arteries on the ground that are powerfully congested. I believe if we invent safe, affordable, quiet technology that can, at some point in the distant future, be widely used via the nation, we could truly alter the way transportation works. It would have a tremendous influence.

Still, won’t we peons be stuck on the ground while you and Larry Page and everyone who can afford it are zipping around over our goes?

I am very wooed that at scale the prices for these vehicles will end up lower than the price of a car. And the reason is there isn’t much on these vehicles. In addition, there is the vision of having an air taxi service — it picks you up and then brings you to where you want to go. For people who live in a congested area, it could be a fundamental game changer. Having said this, this is a distant vision. Flyer is not intended to do this. Flyer is intended to be a very, very very first vehicle that will let normal people without a pilot license practice securely the beauty of flight.

Is there any other cranky question I left behind ask?

You could ask about regulators.

Good point. Won’t any level-headed regulator just nix this entire idea?

We are working very actively with the FAA and other regulators, because at the core we share the same concern, which is safety. Especially as you innovate in something that has the potential to put bodily harm or even death to people. It is indeed significant that this is done ethically and securely. As a result we see our friends from the FAA very, very frequently. And we’ve experienced truly excellent collaboration. I am a technologist, so I can invent the technology, but it is the society that has to accept the technology. The more everyone can work together, the better for everyone involved.

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