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China gives Ehang the first industry approval for fully autonomous passenger-carrying air taxis

China gives Ehang the first industry approval for fully autonomous, passenger-carrying air taxis

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/13/china-lets-ehang-operate-fully-autonomous-passenger-carrying-air-taxis.html

Ehang shares have nearly doubled in price this year, before trading was temporarily halted Monday pending a significant announcement.

China gives Ehang the first industry approval for fully autonomous passenger-carrying air taxis::Ehang shares have nearly doubled in price this year, before trading was temporarily halted Monday pending a significant announcement.

23 comments

just_another_person

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This will surely go without any issues at all.

avater

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China has apparently enough people for beta testing...

vacuumflower

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Even for alpha testing TBF.

just_another_person

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Dark...but very true, and I imagine the CCP people had a very similar thought.

gregorum

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Autonomous cars are barely working. How the hell is this a good idea?

TwinHaelix

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To be clear, I definitely agree that this is a bad idea.

However, one of the hardest things about making autonomous cars work is avoiding traffic and pedestrians. If air traffic control can be managed such that these avoid other aircraft (and things like buildings and cell towers, obviously) I could actually see this as easier to get the software working.

Chais

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There's less air traffic now. But if you approve the first autonomous air taxi, you'll soon approve the second and third and before you know it there are thousands of those things whirring through every major city and then you have just as much traffic and one more dimension to worry about.

Brickhead92

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Yes, but that's a future problem. People don't care about those problems.

Chais

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Fair

Cethin

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Still a relatively easily solvable problem. The problem with cars is using infrastructure designed for people. They need to read signs, detect things (humans in particular) in the way, and deal with other human drivers. If these communicate with each other (and don't clog signaling frequencies) they should be able to handle each other autonomously fairly well in the air.

AdamEatsAss

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Agreed, above trees and buildings there is a lot less air traffic to worry about. But you get into the inherent dangers of air travel. Helicopters are especially dangerous, unlike planes if they lose power they cannot glide at all. In addition they take off vertically, assuming there will be set takeoff landing areas, checking for rapidly ascending and descending aircraft will be very important. Birds are always a concern when it comes to propellers too. And if used in a city up and down drafts created by large buildings like skyscrapers will provide a large controls problem, let's hope those controllers can reliably handle impulse forces.

yogurt

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Helicopters can autorotate, if quadcopters lose power they tumble with no control at all

tigerjerusalem

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Specially if things are built from the ground up (pun intended). A new system relying in communication between software and sensors should be relatively easier to deal than the fuzziness of reading signs and reacting to random elements around you.

gregorum

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I can see how the autonomous control part might be simpler due to there being fewer objects to avoid colliding with, but there’s the no-small-matters of the additional dimension to navigate combined with managing complex avionics vs the simpler control mechanisms of a car. Dealing with takeoff, landings, crosswinds, and many other things are much more complicated than driving a car.

redcalcium

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I hope they have excellent navigation system which at least won't crash the aircraft if the gps/glonass/etc signals suddenly got disrupted (bad weather, interference, military activity, etc). Having a big taxi drone suddenly trying to emergency autoland on your roof due to gps failure would be horrible.

NeoNachtwaechter

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Autonomous cars are barely working. How the hell is this a good idea?

Traffic is so much easier in the air.

vinniep

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China coming in with the latest in new tech for people with too much money to accidentally kill themselves. The finest innovation in the field since the Cesna.

gregorum

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We’re going to have fucked up news reports like the ones in Robocop.

xia

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...and you think noise pollution is bad now? Just you wait.

vacuumflower

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I mean, it beats moderate intensity artillery shelling...

blendedracer

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"What could possibly go wrong?" Jeremy Clarkson

Ejh3k

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Nope. Not ever will I ride in an autonomous air taxi. I'll never need to be somewhere fast enough that death is a major possibility.

simonced

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All my brain thinks is: "great, more surveillance cameras, and in the sky now..."

A_A

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How can we prevent bad guys changing their control modules to remotely drive these choppers through crowds ?

ChaoticEntropy

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Do they have many non-autonomous passenger carrying air taxis...? Helicopters aren't exactly day to day transport but now you want to skip straight to filling the skies with unmanned vehicles?