Tesla's flying car ?

Last night I was showing my young children a video I saw on Reddit of a guy riding around in a personal passenger drone and today I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, Search Engine, and the story they did titled: "Where's my flying car?". We're approaching a very near future where we're going to start seeing more people flying around above our heads.

The podcast episode was based on a The New Yorker article titled, "Are Flying Cars Finally Here?" written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who is featured in podcast) and featuring his experience with Pivotal . In the podcast they mentioned that what has changed in terms of viability of personal flying cars is basically the pricing and power density of....BATTERIES AND SMALL MOTORS!

Guess what other industry experienced massive disruption due to the same items: passenger vehicles. And guess who was the main driver of that disruption: Tesla! (I used Tesla Energy recent post as inspiration for the doctored image above)

A quick, extremely unofficial summary of the history of Tesla's experience kicking off the EV revolution:

• Create expensive proof of concept Electric Ground Vehicle "toy" to start bringing in revenue (Roadster)
• Bring an expensive EV for larger audience (Model S/X)
• Build out charging infrastructure for said vehicles (Supercharger/Destination Charger)
• Bring a less expensive EV for even larger audience (Model 3/Y)
• Integrate autonomous driving (FSD)
• Build solutions off the ecosystem that's been created (robotaxis or whatever)

And if you look at the above bullet points, it's not hard to image Tesla (or a company like them) following that same model for an Electric Air Vehicle. Literally bullet by bullet down to ride hail autonomous vehicles.

Except Tesla already knows how to build the charging infrastructure and would only have to allow for landing pads at their new sites.

And they already know how to do AI/Self Driving and it's not that much more complicated in the air (maybe better cameras for farther off obstacles but there's actually less obstacles than what there are on the ground).

Now, I don't know if flying cars make financial sense for anyone, or if regulation will prevent profitability for anyone who tries, but it sure is cool to think about.

The future of personal mobility is being revolutionized by the price and power density of batteries. That is true for passenger cars, electric bikes, scooters...and possibly flying vehicles.

It's an exciting time for #cleanenergy!