2025-04-01XThread

Source item

We wanted flying cars. We got them with Chinese characters. When I last posted on this, many responses like this came in: - Those aren't cars, they don't have wheels! - Those aren't planes, they don't have wings! - They're too risky! But in reality, the Chinese just made different tradeoffs. And are shipping. https://t.co/MuDhe6Gi3i The estimable @elidourado — a genuinely great guy — noted these were just scaled up quadcopters. And concluded power & risk would be too high. But China has experience from shipping ~10M DJI drones. So they're doing it. We'll see what happens. See also: https://t.co/6IfDHwZUQf @elidourado Good q, but no. SCMP reported it on March 31. See here: https://t.co/R4aVgFfIjP https://t.co/QtZZKHdJXX https://t.co/nxvseh5SU1

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We wanted flying cars. We got them with Chinese characters. https://t.co/zIHQShu3kd
balajis ↗

JUST IN: 🇨🇳 Chinese regulators grant the country's first-ever approvals for two companies to operate autonomous passenger drones (flying taxis). https://t.co/iAQtXF1DMC
BRICSinfo ↗

@balajis April first?
21MMandNoMore ↗

@elidourado I take the other side of this. There are 16 motors on each one of these. That is a lot of redundancy. The probability of two failures coinciding with one another 1/16^2 and so on. 1/16^n for n simultaneous failures. The design is basically fine. I also don't see how you can infer how much of their full capacity is being used.
Ryan_G_Lambert ↗