It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech in this day and age. If someone invented an electromagnetic hovercar tomorrow, it will be available for sale next week and regulations will follow after.
> It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech
“Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.
Ok, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending?
I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper.
Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads.
We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.
>I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power.
No, they assume magical anti-gravity technology. "magical infinite power" implies they're basically a hovercraft, forcing air downwards to hover. Without a shroud, even with infinite energy available, this means constantly blasting high-speed air all around the vehicle, which has some really obvious practical problems. It works for drones because they're small and lightweight and not near the ground and not even that close to each other.
>Lifting stuff against gravity is not free
It's close to free when you have magical anti-gravity technology. Similarly, traveling to other star systems hundreds of lightyears away in a couple days isn't so hard when you have magical FTL propulsion technology that somehow warps spacetime.
You're misunderstanding fundamental physics. Things staying in place do not require energy. The reverse is true, things falling give up the energy they already have.
The aim is to prevent them from losing energy.
We already do this, they're called geostationary satellites.
Also, it's not weight, it's mass.
smoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.
You asked what advantage would it have over rolling rubber, not how would one do it (you wouldn't with current understanding of physics and energy density/portability). Any at advantage vehicle like that is still in the realm of scifi.
Yes but it collides with our understanding of physics as well. Floating anything with significant weight within an air atmosphere requires constant power, you will at least have to profuce an upwards force that is equivalent to the downwards force. Depending on how efficiently that force is transfered you may need much more. A wheel made of rubber or steel (trains are freakingly efficient!) does give you that much cheaper.
Now theoretically one could envision some energy form that is so abundant it doesn't matter anymore that you constantly fight gravity, sure. But what most people seem to imagine is some magical tech that decouples the vehicle from the force of gravity, while still coupling it to the planet (or whatever the next relevant relevant frame of reference is) somehow. This kind of magical tech makes sense in films or scifi books, but if we just collect together what it would need to be, it is hard to envision any actual potential mechanism short of "we live in a Matrix and we lesrn to control the program".
That's a good question. When (if) we figure out how to practically travel at FTL speeds with a "warp drive", we might figure out the answer to this question too.
To be honest I think FTL is likelier than magical "sticks you to a fixed point in space relative to a rotating planet"-technology.
Sure you can do that with pushing air and a global positioning system, so if eventually we invent an eventual anti-gravity drive or something that may be used for the same thing. But wether such an entirely fictional device could be then made to (1) fit into a car sized vehicle and (2) be powered by whatever the most powerful mobile energy source is at that time and (3) become affordable to anyone outside of the 0.01% is another question.
>To be honest I think FTL is likelier than magical "sticks you to a fixed point in space relative to a rotating planet"-technology.
I disagree. I'm no physicist, but given how gravity seems to be related to the structure of spacetime according to Einsteinian physics, and a lot of FTL ideas seem to center on the idea of "warping" spacetime, I suspect the two are highly related, and if FTL is possible at all, it'll be also related to artificial gravity.
The only technologies that are commercialised quickly today are the ones that can be commercialised quickly. The ones that can't won't be for decades yet.
In short, if a tech takes 40 years to be commercialised it would have been invented some time in the 80s.
Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars