China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed

I definitely don't want to belittle the achievement, but I would imagine that creating safe self-driving helicopters is much easier than creating safe self-driving cars. (At least as long as the skies are just as empty as they are today. Once it's full of things like the roads, that will be a different topic)

Can you expand on how you reason it would be easier?

More degrees of freedom, easier collision avoidance. The mechanical part is a lot harder, of course, but the "self driving" part is a lot easier. We had autopilot and auto-land in planes well before we had anything of the sort in cars.

I wish to see the safety test of what happens when a blade breaks off and hits the passenger bay.

Yeah, without a reinforced nacelle you could easily end up with a fatal birdstrike here. One shudders to imagine how thin that polyethylene window is...

Open space. Fewer obstacles up there in the sky, separated by large distances. Simple trajectories. We've already had autopilot systems for decades.

1 word: birds.

Anyway, detecting and avoiding obstacles should be in the menu. Maybe not as complex as at street level with people and cars doing unexpected things, but maybe with some added complexity that need to have into account like weather, inertia and things near landing sites.

Self-driving car senses objects and must make difficult decisions: Is this radar reflection from stationary light pole or from a moving object? Is this a parked car or a moving car? Will this pedestrain/biker jump on the roadway? What if the car next to me going to turn left sharply?

No such thing exists in the air. The air is mostly empty, there are no stationary objects next to the route. If there is a building, aircraft can fly as far as 500 meters away from it - try finding a driveable road with no obstacles at that distance. There is no people or large animals. There is not even curb to hit.

Importantly, I bet there are no legacy vehicles in the approved routes - and I am sure they will have some sort of V2V tech to ensure that all objects in the air will transmit their position and intention.

A self driving car needs to be able to reliably drive within ~1 foot of arbitrary obstacles, recognize junk in the road, recognize people in the road, obey vague hand signals from random cops, obey every weird traffic sign in the world, obey every traffic law, and disobey signs and laws when convention requires it.

Helicopters don’t have to deal with any of that. There won’t be any random obstacles. No human drivers to contend with. No conflict between legality and practice to navigate.

It is both amazing and sad to see China is literally in the future compared to the US in terms of infrastructure and social development.

A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now. The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. In comparasion, the streets of SF, one of the crown jewels of the US technosphere, are just so "normal" I find it hard to believe.

It is the same feeling I had decades ago walking into a then-modern metropolis in the US for the first time. All the cool tech, the convenience, the upscale atmosphere, the extravagance of it all were striking. I have not felt that again for a while and I just think it can't happen again with what I am already used to now. Incredible that China managed to evoke that sense of awe in me again.

Is there hard evidence of this beyond random anecdotes? Genuinely curious as I haven't visited there.

Here's an alternate source,

https://www.flyingmag.com/china-approves-passenger-operation... ("China Approves Passenger Operations With Self-Flying Electric Aircraft")

With some clearer wording on what's been approved so far,

- "Early EH216-S operations will come with heavy limitations, which EHang said it aims to lift in phases. For example, flights are restricted to Guangzhou and Hefei and must land where they lifted off[...] In other words, the EH216-S is approved for applications like out-and-back aerial tourism but not air taxi services in cities."

(I don't want to derail this thread too strongly, but the current source looks very much like AI slop. The text is egregiously LLM, and, if you zoom in [0] on the people in the backgrounds of the photos, there's some Lovecraftian horror going on with those faces!)

[0] https://engineerine.com/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/...

> social development.

How are they ahead in this regard? Tech is one thing, but social credit scores and the level of censorship seem regressive rather than progressive to me.

It doesn't mention how much noise does it make. Even though it's electric, drones are usually damn noisy and annoying, and something of this size can't possibly be any better.

Have you been to SF? It’s like a zombie movie with shocking public transport. There are many nicer cities which seem futuristic compared to SF. I’ve not been to a Chinese metropolis but if you just look at some photos it wouldn’t be hard to imagine somewhere like Shenzhen being much further ahead.

Strange comment, there’s plenty of videos of both locations on YouTube to make the comparison and I think it’s quite apt. Chinese (and other SEA) major cities definitely feel much more modern than most American cities these days. Most American metropolitan areas are quite bland/bleak outside the “beautified” green areas.

Chinese cities like Shanghai have been world class for a long time. The last time I was there, I had a dinner with a client on the outskirts of Shanghai. I took multiple subways to reach there and found that neighborhood quite ordinary and starkly different from Shanghai itself. Of course this is also an anecdote but gives you a different perspective. I also know a few people who visit China often and they tell me the cities are definitely futuristic.

Personally I think Singapore is the most futuristic city-state in the world.

> A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now

Sorry, I should have been more clear, this is what I was referencing. I have been to SF recently and would agree it's not hard to make a lot of cities look better in comparison.

Given that permanent residents in the U.S. seem to have lost all of their free speech rights, and citizens aren’t far behind, I think we can call that precise issue a truce for now. Definitely other human rights/freedoms we still have over them at the moment.

Can you tell me more? I visited Shenzhen few months ago and wasn't that astonished. Pretty normal city. Well, I was surprised about few things, like overall lack of traffic jams in the 17-million city, roads seems to be well planned, but I could just be lucky. And that's me coming from Kazakhstan, which is not exactly first-world country. Life seems kind of the same, taxi apps, map with reviews, delivery guys, etc.

Actually I'd argue that Chinese IT is slightly behind Kazakhstan, because their localization is so bad. Baidu maps does not provide English translation at all, and that seems the only proper maps for China. Most WeChat apps I tried also were Chinese-only. I'm pretty sure that every major website and application is well translated to English in my country, Chinese people seems to care very little about English, which makes it particularly hard for international visitors. I literally had to screenshot some app over and over, pasting it to Google Translate to be able to register in the some metro app, so I could actually buy tickets with app and not cash.

Also motorcycle people were absolutely crazy about road rules, like they don't care at all about anything. Auto road, pedestrian road, red light, opposite direction, anything works for them. I was seriously concerned about someone hitting me, which didn't happen, but few times it was close. Car people, on the opposite, were pretty disciplined. May be cameras don't work for motorcycles?

> These vehicles are expected to redefine how cities tackle traffic congestion and pollution

Counterpoint: no they're not.

These sorts of very large drones may well become more popular, but they're not gonna become widespread enough to impact traffic congestion. The realistic target is becoming a moderately more popular version of helicopters for the sufficiently affluent.

This seems to be a matter of preference. I feel awe when I visit charming old European cities with great walkability. "Modern" is great for aeroplanes but overrated for cities.

It doesn't even need to hit the passenger compartment. The partially missing, unbalanced rotor could be enough to take it out.

> Tech is one thing, but social credit scores and the level of censorship seem regressive rather than progressive to me.

I can't stress enough how you need to do your own research on this stuff. American propaganda has depicted China as a ruthless peasant state for decades, and it's only in recent years that news like this has opened peoples' eyes to the fact that that all was a cover for the fact that they've passed us in recent decades.

https://merics.org/en/comment/chinas-social-credit-score-unt...

tl;dr: The "social credit score" is mostly myth. From the article:

>By 2019, China’s central authorities were stating explicitly that they were not happy with the idea. They issued formal clarifications that scores could not be used to penalize citizens and that only formal legal documents could serve as grounds for penalties.

Compare this to the US, in which things like DUIs on your background can be used to deny you Constitutional rights. There's no nothing exceptional about how they're doing things over there when it comes to this.

This is my main concern as well. The article [1] that perihelions linked to says that the approved vehicle is produced by EHang and the model is called EH216-S. A quick search yielded this Reddit thread [2] which suggests the noise level is 80dB.

[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/china-approves-passenger-operation...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ehangstock/comments/mmz42r/for_anyo...

I’m currently in a part of the world where helicopter delivery is so cheap and common that locals are complaining. “It should be more expensive…” someone told me last autumn.

The helicopters (and drones!) are loud and annoying. Until these problems are solved, locals will resist converting all airspace into the equivalent of a loud, high-speed roadway.

For me, I guess it was the experience with the public transport, the cleanliness of the city, the way everything was built to interact with your phone seamlessly and automatically once you have the local apps(at the cost of privacy, I am fully aware), and the dazzling look of it all. Everything is new and shiny and feel safe. And not just the sterile kind of clean, but one that has a vibrant life under it.

Yes, the english localization is trash. But I mean, I am in China, I am happy enough they even have some english available. I speak some other Asian languages and not sure if it was obvious, but the US also have trash translation to those languages here too.

Maybe that was the biggest difference. I can read a bit of chinese so my experience was more "the way it was meant to be" I guess? I assume it can disappoint if you expect just an upscaled Western experience there. China is big enough they don't need to cater to rich foreigners. I knew the feeling well enough when I first came to the US so I am not surprised. But maybe it is a novel experience to Westerners.

It is also amazing and sad to see positive comments on such technological developments in China where similar developments in e.g. the USA would be lambasted on this very same site: Flying taxi drones? They'll fall out of the sky on the heads of the elderly and Musk should stay away from this. Tech and integration? Big brother getting even bigger and no I don't want Musk to be part of this. Is it just that the neighbour's grass is always greener or is there some deeper reason for the oikophobia that has become so popular, especially in 'progressive' circles?

I also notice you're mentioning SF without mentioning that this city - like so many others - has been driven into the ground by decades of mismanagement by so-called "democrats". California is on a road to nowhere while building high-speed trains to nowhere, the streets in SF only get cleaned up when the leader of the Chinese Communist party comes to visit, the place is a dump and people are leaving it in droves. It wasn't when I was there for the first time in 1979 - people on roller skates, some left-over hippies, disco really made it - but the last time I visited - 2003, for the IETF conference - the signs were already clearly visible and I was warned that the hostel I stayed in in the Tenderloin district was 'not in a safe area' and that I should not walk around the city (which I did anyway, I'm stubborn).

California should kick the "democrats" to the curb for a while, try to repair the damage they did to the place and its reputation and maybe, just maybe the "Golden State" can once again become the place of dreams it once used to be. This is not so much an endorsement of Republicans but simply a statement of fact, a single-party system nearly always leads to decline. To slightly paraphrase MC5: Kick Out The Dems! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvJGQ_piwI0&t=13

Imagine the perfect city, with lots of green parks, great restaurants with outdoor seating, shops, do you think it should have noisy drones in it? Or a thousand drones?

When I made that comparison, I did not mean to bring politics into the conversation, but I assume it is a natural direction people can take it too.

I will just say this: the issues with the US are beyond *partisan* politics. In my opinion, it is a social problem much deeper than what is shown on TVs and discussed in election campaigns. Changing the party in power will not change the situation. Until the US acknowledged these matters, it will continue on the same path it has been.

> Compare this to the US, in which things like DUIs on your background can be used to deny you Constitutional rights.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

The problem is the many cities in the West are objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world, so many people who don't have that global perspective come to China and think "it's so futuristic" or so, when in reality it's something that has been achieved elsewhere decades ago and China is just one in the line of a common trend. Even when others in this thread say cities like Singapore or Hong Kong are "futuristic", Singapore has been like that since the late 90s, that's not futuristic, it's rather the norm since the 2000s. Certainly those from Asia, even Southeast Asia aren't finding those cities paticularly revolutionary, if not a bit shinier.

Some Chinese Cities may try to "integrate" tech more like in Shenzhen with drone delivery, flying taxis here, or qr-code scanning or whatnot, but that's just more of gimmicks for a select few rather than fundamental lifestyle changes. Far as I would say, Tokyo is still likely the most "developed" of cities in terms of quality of life.

>The problem is the many cities in the West are objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world.

If anything that's more of an American problem rather than a Western one. There's plenty nice cities in Europe.

i can certainly say i would not want to hear that daily or (or with any regularity) - yt wCm68PmmSQ8 to listen to it. still not even used to the small airport with newer air traffic routes rumbling residential neighborhoods nightly afterhours. but oh well i guess; more people seems to follow more noise and light pollution (and i dont want to abandon the quietness)

everything with a mass over 1kg+- in the air, is carrying a "gps" and something that is transmitting its location, and all air traffic world wide is(theoreticaly) assigned a flight path for each trip,witha specific flight level, ie: the planning is 3d, so the density per layer, never gets very high, and there are specific paths taken to change layers, there are never any dogs, or horses, or people trying to deek, there are no signs or maps, and in case of fully automated vtol taxis, navigation will be to mm accuracy, with likely a routine to land fully autonomously on loosing the network, and a backup ballistic recovery parachute, if power is completly lost or another emergency situation occurs. and also likely is that forward speeds will be low enough, that collisions with birds will be a low probability, and rotors will likely be schrouded, keeping the idiots heads attached when determinidly trying for that gota have selfie.

Singapore will always be Disneyland with the Death Penalty (early 90s) in my book. But seriously, china built outs its cities much later than the west, and they have a cyberpunk feel. But it feels like a lot of gimmicks, even Japan feels like that (they build things like Tokyo's Skytree, but it isn't very practical, and they just repeat this all over the country). If you live in a city, the basics matter, like...nice public transit, which china has built out very nicely in the last two decades.

"The West"?

Do you mean North America? Because cities in Europe and Oceania are wildly different from the cities in North America and definitely not 'objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world' (which includes cities in Africa, which honestly aren't amazing).

There are many reports of international students having their statuses, i.e. permission to stay in the US, revoked for being involved in legal matters. The wording of the revocation is vague so nothing is certain but these students reported they have never done any crime except DUIs/DWIs/traffic incidents.

The status revocations are sudden and opaque. The students do not have an opportunity to appeal nor explain. They immediately become illegals once the decision is made and thus become subjects to detainment without due process. In practice they must immediately make arrangements to leave the US or they will risk future visa bans as them being in the country without status can also be considered violating immigration laws.

So, hypothetically, someone who came to the US for a bachelor and decided to go for a PhD, spending about 10 years here, can be forced to abandon everything in matters of days. A tricky situation, yet completely overshadowed by the tariff news and ignored by the masses.

Seems as noisy as a standard helicopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=22&v=9-Vr_Kd1W0E

Hope this doesn't take off (kek), EVs have made PRC cities increasingly tranquil, dealing with rotors would be huge step down in QoL. Fine for quick transit across water.

That said, maybe they can optimize for size:volume. it would actually be pretty good to displace delivery network from ground level. Maybe even straight to 40th storey balcony / living room delivery sometime.

We got 140 characters and China got flying cars.

Thanks, I hadn't heard about DUIs being used as a justification for revoking status.

(I'm all for treating DUIs seriously, but using a one time offense as justification for such serious consequences seems over the top to me; obviously the lack of transparency and due process make the whole thing much more troubling as well.)

I think you used the wrong map app. Everyone in China use gaode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoNavi. This is the best map app I ever seen.

Airplanes already broadcast their position! It's called ADS-B.

Additional reading:

https://hindenburgresearch.com/ehang/

An IRL Youtuber streamer recently tried one of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQGAuf0rFLA

Might be a bit of a stretch to call these "taxi"s but anyway here's your futuristic flying car from China...

You will be denied the rights to carry arms in many states if you have a DUI.

++1

Okay, so the ccp backdoored the things(cause of course ) and so all ot takes is some domestic terrorist load one with fuel and smash it into some party hq? Will be interesting wether thex can burry that sort of 9/11

Yeah, that’s particularly funny coming from the guy who petitioned to forbid discussing politics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43122960

Actually I would enjoy a low tech, less integrated and connected experience.

I like interacting with nature, people more than swiping in an app.

I like old tramways in Lisbon more than flying taxis. I like small Greek buildings and even baroque and neoclassical architecture more than glass and metal buildings and skyscrapers.

I heard that the entire country is in a state of panic after two Xiaomi SU7 autopilot crashes. Motorways have put up signs warning drivers not to use autopilot or assisted driving. Authorities and manufacturers are now trying to explain the previous false advertising.

I have not been to either for 20+ years, but Singapore or Hong Kong did not feel futuristic to me. Singapore is certainly efficiently run and clean, but at the time I definitely would have preferred living in London (or multiple smaller British cities), or Paris, or Sydney (culturally, if not geographically, western)

> A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now

Is that a fair sample. Foreigners tend to visit the best bits of anywhere and China is a very big and varied country.

> The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable.

Also dystopian as it enables government control and monitoring. In many ways China is ahead in things I do not want to happen.

Tesla: "First time?"

I'm not sure you can avoid birds like a skateboad running onto the street. If anything I expect dynamic avoid areas or timed "no fly" zones depending on bird mass. Maneuvering to avoid birds seems like a recipe for disaster.

Not every airplane does that. Commercial planes mostly do, but its not mandated under all circumstances as far as I know. (Speaking for my region only)

> the way everything was built to interact with your phone seamlessly and automatically once you have the local apps

This sounds so horrifying to me.

The fact that it actually exists and can be demoed is pretty impressive.

Ideal use case seems like medical. Air taxi someone directly to the hospital as fast as possible.

From the demo video, they claim it has more rotors than needed. So presumably it could detect one of them breaking and just turn it off.

"EHang’s much-touted, recently granted certification comes with numerous flight restrictions that it has failed to fully disclose to investors. The restrictions invalidate the bulk of its potential commercial use cases, including restrictions against flying in densely populated areas, in shared airspace, and out of sight of a ground crew.

EHang claims restrictions will be progressively lifted, but according to China-based eVTOL experts, EHang’s flagship aircraft would need a billion-dollar redesign and an entirely different class of certification to avoid the limitations."

Also from the Chinese Civil Aviation Authority:

https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/t20220...

"EHang EH216-S Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System Special Conditions.pdf" (in Chinese) - https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/P02022...

All commercial planes have it at this point. And most part 91 airplanes (General Aviation) have it at this point. Without ADSB you cannot fly in or near class A, B, or C airspace and must stay below 10,000 feet. Which largely makes having an airplane useless for most people.

There are still airplanes flying that have no electrical system but even then some of them have retrofitted a system.

This is not correct. There is no hard requirement for GPS nor anything that requires “something that transmits its location”. There is also no requirement for a flight plan or communication with ATC.

I can take off from an uncontrolled airport with no GPS, no transponder, no plan, and no radio and as long as I’m in the correct airspace I’m completely legal and within my right to do so.

There are some differences with these rules through out the world.

I'd imagine rail and bicycles to be more practical.

It’s sad to see America fighting over old manufacturing jobs while China is leaping ahead.

It used to be the other way round.

I hope America goes back to its previous innovation cycle

I was answering with the purposes of flight-taxis in mind. I doubt that they will fly in high altitude and deem it quite likely that they might want to pass uncontrolled airspace at some point. And if you're flying in uncontrolled airspace you just can't count on the presence of it. In fact, missing transponders are an occasional source of accidents in these spaces. There are lots of gliding enthusiasts that aren't equipped.

P.S.: Commercial planes (esp. big ones) should have hardly any contact points with flying taxis.

We have helicopter rental “blade” in New York and various other cities, and similar devices to this in development. As is usually the case(and is usually to our benefit), we have an external bias, and more stringent aerospace laws. I applaud them for this but do not turn this into some “America bad” doomerism

It’s mostly a legal innovation that allows that, others have moved onto a more car-like form factor

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cx20nwlqe07o

In the future in a good way or a bad way? I haven't seen or heard of any tech being used only in China that i would actually want in my city. These "air taxis" for example are way too loud

Why not a helicopter with space to do CPR etc? As is already done...

This is just plain wrong. With glider planes, you can fly around wherever you like (in the non-restricted airspace) and aren’t required to have ADS-B or FLARM in Europe. Most people don’t do it but you could entirely rely on visual detection to prevent collisions.

Tokyo feels more retro futuristic than modern futuristic. Aside from the Shinkansen, a lot of the tech and software you interact with there feels antiquated and even borderline terrible. Meanwhile in SF there are self driving cars everywhere, tech company billboards everywhere, apps with great UX, etc.

SF varies widely be neighborhood. Public transport is not the final solution for SF, instead it’s driverless cars.

> It is both amazing and sad to see China is literally in the future compared to the US in terms of infrastructure and social development.

To be fair, it's usually easier to build state of the art, when you start from scratch. Western countries have a big legacy they build decades ago, which has to be used and maintained for decades to justify the investment.

And as a visitor, it's also more likely to only see the fancy parts, and not be confronted with the dark parts, especially when you have a strong leader who's dedicated goal is to sell a positive view of the country.

If a drone flies at a speed that gives birds time to take notice and react/avoid, does it remove the danger ? I wonder if there is wide variation among species.

Which part of the world is that?

What do you mean by "social development?"

Nepal maybe

Minecraft?

I've not heard about DUIs being used to revoke visas, but I've definitely heard about criminal records making it hard to get visas. And that's not just in the US.

XPENG is also building an EV with a built in passenger drone.

I think it remains to be seen whether they will ever be a viable mode of transport. Helicopters have been used, usually by the very rich, for quite a while. They need serious infrastructure and have very high associated costs.

You stayed in the Tenderloin? Geez.

Most large US cities have, "bad neighborhoods." It's not specific to blue states.

The US cities with top highest violent crime rates are more likely to be in red states:

https://www.police1.com/community-policing/articles/where-ar...

I am no fan of the two-party system but your view of the parties is almost 20 years out-of-date and is ignoring some pretty glaring issues.

No they are not.

I get what you are thinking. Detection, maneuvering and trajectory planning are all much easier than on a road. If you mandate built in transponders collision avoidance is also easy.

But what you are forgetting is everything that isn't normal operations. What do you do if anything fails? A car can just stop, break failures, even steering failures can all be reasonably mitigated. This is not the case when you are in the air. Any failure mode needs fast and accurate reactions, even when critical systems have failed. That is why a passenger plane has two pilots. A modern passenger plane can do most of the flying by itself, yet the pilots need to be there.

Aerospace standards are higher and more difficult to adhere to, ensuring any kind of reasonable safety is extremely difficult. How many of these flying into sky scrapers are acceptable?

Believe me or not, I've read plenty of info in the Internet and I don't think I've found this app. Weird! Thanks for information, it looks like a missing piece. Hopefully my future trips will be more fun. I've used Google Maps and Apple Maps, but both were bad.

This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

>This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

Most of these are a total nightmare to implement. There is no such thing as a "controlled descent" into a dense urban center. Even keeping maneuverability with a single defective motor is a hard task, you need to develop and test for this.

>On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

So ground control can do what? The only reasonable way these could ever safely operate is with a high degree of sensor fusion, information about nearby crafts, their trajectories, obstacles, etc. combined together. You can not put a human into that system and have him make split-second decisions.

>With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

Passenger plane automation is also "just" a software problem. It is just an enormously difficult software problem with exceedingly high stakes. The problem is not that it is "impossible", but that it is extremely difficult and not worth the risk getting it wrong.

Again, what is the acceptable failure rate for these things crashing into sky scrapers? If it is zero, we are very far away from them being able to take flight.

i guess Lilium-like scams can go so much further if basically all entrepreneurialism is just a function of Founder-Proximity-To-The-Ruling-Party

Read those threads again, I am not petitioning for 'forbidding politics' but for applying the same rules to all discussions related to politics - no more 'rules for thee but not for (D)'. It has become impossible to keep politics out of the discourse since everything has been made political.

> The US cities with top highest violent crime rates are more likely to be in red states

Red states with blue cities, an important distinction. I looked it up - https://ballotpedia.org is a good place to start - and would be interested to see this disproven.

In what way is my view of the parties out of date?

As much as that might be true to some degree, I doubt most people are comparing China's best to their grandparent's collapsed barnhouse in the boonies. The best I've seen (NYC is the best I'll publicly mention, but also a few other east coast cities) basically look like Ravenholm compared to the photos/videos of what's coming out of China.

I wouldn't trust anything that can't auto rotate or glide to be safe to fly. A drone style copter falls out of the sky if there is any failures at all at any point in time in flight making it an inherently unsafe method of travel.

I overall agree with you, but not about these. Drones have no way to recover from any sort of mechanical or power delivery failure. They can't glide or auto-rotate and have zero control or maneuverability on any failures, they just fall straight out of the sky. In open clear areas an emergency parachute might be fine, but drone style flight is not efficient at all so not suited for longer distances and you only really need taxis in more urban areas where deploying a chute will likely just smack you into the side of a building and you fall anyways.

Thats nowhere near the noise of helicopter.

That's what cities are literally are for. Go rural if you are a decel.

It's a cop out in my opinion, it will never scale or be as useful , reliable or enjoyable to use as a well designed, operated subway. Besides Tokyo, Shenzhen, Beijing etc, will have both, subways and driverless, flying taxis, drone delivery and still be ahead of most major US cities in terms of transport options.

You have to visit a top tier East Asian city to understand just how good they have these things running, safe, clean, reliable, always on time. Like, it's amazing. Uncomprable to anything I've experienced in any major US city.

I think if a New Yorker went to Tokyo they'd be amazed how far ahead they're public transport is.

There are also health benefits to using public transport which I think we will see play out with self-driving, people will just become slobs when a car comes to their door, picks them up and drops them at the next door. Using a subway is actually a bit of healthy exercise.

If it’s fewer fatalities per mile than cars, they’re probably ready today!

Air travel is more dangerous than car travel on a per trip basis.

These are also much more dangerous than cars in case of a failure.