Applied Physics to replace conventional paradigms
The AFWERX Division of the US Air Force held a symposium week of 7-11 Dec 2020 offering to prime development of a commercial Flying Car market in their Agility Prime program to serve military purposes.
Of the 50+ vendors competing for DOD contracts the first to achieve certification is Joby Aviation who (having partnered with Toyota and UBER's Flying Car division, who themselves had been working with NASA) by Feb 2021 achieved a SPAC valuation reported as $6.6B (Reuters 2021) and also $6.6B (Bloomberg 2021) and $6.6B (Santa Cruz Tech 2021), a jump from the then recent valuation $5B (21 Jan 2021).
An important enabling aspect, of the AFWERX and Agility Prime programs, is their willingness to modify existing govt contracting procedures to be able instead to deal on commercial terms with start ups developing Flying Car technology so a commercial market matures significantly and quickly for military use.
Alternatively, General Scientifics now offers an experimental propeller-replacement-unit predicted to achieve the same lift as propeller units. Since the innovation technology is still experimental the power consumption levels and costs per lift of equivalent mass are unknown, in need of further engineering.
The proposed propellerless lift technology innovation was submitted Aug 2020 to NASA's innovative tech search NIAC program. Discussions continued up to Summer 2021 with the lead physicist of the NIAC tech review board, concluding that a working proof of concept was needed to win NASA support.
If current experimental efforts towards proof of concept succeed, the point here is that propellers on these propellered flying cars could in theory be eliminated, along with air turbulence around them and perhaps sound reduction (unless the driving motors are still loud). Optimizing exterior vehicle shapes to the new manner of propulsion (no neeed for overhead canopy of propellers) would no doubt result in drastically different looking vehicles upon adoption of the new innovation tech.
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