this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Flying car stories are like battery tech stories, always one around the corner that's going to revolutionize the industry. Just clickbait based on the glaring lack of technical details.
Anyway people can't avoid accidents in two dimensions, adding another dimension would make that orders of magnitude worse. The only way flying cars can work safely is 100% autopilot. They still can't get autopilots to work without incident in normal cars.
I don't know or care much about flying cars, but tech, including battery tech, does advance a lot. The problem is that you hear about new development today, but it only gets to the market in about 20-30 years time. Remember graphene craze decades ago? All the news were about this magical material! Well, now you can buy graphene reinforced tyres for your bicycle https://www.vittoria.com/ww/en/tyres/enduro-trail/mazza and material doesn't make headlines anymore.
Speaking of battery tech, I use quite a bit of LiIon batteries for my hobbies and my god 18650s from early 2010-s were so shit compared to what we have today! You either had to choose high power cells or high capacity cells. Something like Sony VTC3 could give you 30A safely, but only had 1,600mAh. You can now get a 25A cells with 2,800mAh which are suitable for most applications and yet provide almost double the capacity. Or you can switch to 21700 size and enjoy 40A cells with almost 5,000mAh capacity. This is nuts! We couldn't dream about that in 2013.
Don't forget that with batteries in particular we basically always design our devices to use up all that new capacity rather than having them just go longer without charging. If you could fit a modern Iphone battery into one from 2010 it would probably run all week without needing to recharge.
Original iPhone had 1,400mAh battery, iPhone 14 Pro has 3,200mAh. It's almost double the capacity, but nowhere near to run all week.
True, but gravity is a bitch.