Ditch the petrol

Forget flying cars, electric vehicles are the key.

Flying cars are a trope of futures writing, a scifi classic that never seems to arrive ( see Dick

Pountain’s column on p32). Last issue, one of the stories in this section described Rolls Royce’s partelectric flying car – a helicopter that turns into a small plane, kind of. In September, Bristol startup Vertical Aerospace revealed a video clip of its own version, a quadcopter that it hopes will be zipping passengers between cities within four years. The companies naturally eschew the term flying car, although they might have to find a sexier term than VTOL, or “vertical take-off and landing” vehicle.

What’s fascinating isn’t the idea of flying from London to Cambridge in a tiny drone copter – let’s face it, the prices will likely be sky-high versus even Britain’s pricy train fares – but what’s powering these machines. Rolls Royce has a part electric, part gas turbine system, while Vertical Aerospace is entirely electric. If you can fly a five-seater quadcopter hundreds of kilometres on a battery, you can definitely power a runaround car.

Forget driverless cars and VTOLs (see, told you it needs a better name). It’s electric-powered vehicles that actually matter. The sooner we ditch petrol, the better – not least because of that whole looming climate change disaster and the air pollution choking our cities. Once we’ve got batteries parked in our driveways and on our streets, it’s a whole lot easier to make use of renewable energy sources that are intermittent in power generation, such as solar or wind. When paired with smart grids, batteries can draw down power when it’s cheap and clean to recharge, and even supply it back to our homes to power our appliances, which will hopefully help wean us off dirtier energy sources. Flying cars and autonomous runarounds may remain dreams of the future for the time being, but electric transport means that we get a better chance at having that future.

Besides, who wants to fly around in an autonomous, airborne taxi if you can’t see out of the windows because of all the smog?