Larry Page's flying taxi startup Kittyhawk calls it a day

"If anyone can do this, we can," burbles air taxi startup Kittyhawk's homepage, which may now need an update since the company has announced it is to cease operations. In a terse note on Twitter yesterday, it said: "We have made the decision to wind down Kittyhawk. We're still working on the details of what's next." The …

[James O'Shea]

it lasted longer than I thought it would

1. It was a Google-toy. Google-toys never last long.

2. It was a flying car thing. No, none, zero, flying car things have proved practical. Not even autogyros.

3. It was an all-electric aircraft. Batteries are heavy.

4. It was heavily hyped. The combination of Google-toy, flying car thing, and all-electric aircraft never looked practical to me, and all the breathless hype compounded things.

Way back when this thing first surfaced I pointed out some problems and was roundly downvoted. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2013/11/21/zee_aero_flying_car/ and, well... it's history now.

[TeeCee]

Re: it lasted longer than I thought it would

I suspect that they realised that their usual approach, of just turning a popular service off when they felt like it, stood a good chance of killing people if they actually got this working.

Thus the early bail out.

"...We're still working on the details of what's next."

A tenner on "tumbleweeds" please.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: it lasted longer than I thought it would

"Way back when this thing first surfaced I pointed out some problems and was roundly downvoted."

On the other hand, much the same was said about the Wright Brothers. If people don't try, things will never be invented. There are problems now which may eventually be overcome. Or they may not. But not trying because current science or materials technology currently says no doesn't mean one should not try and solve some of the problems now. At the very least, the partial solutions will likely improve other areas of science and technology The hype over so-called AI is another example of this. We all know here there is no such thing as AI, at least in the terms the hype implies, but the algorithms and machine learning is getting better (many of the problems IMHO are the training data used, much of public facing stuff being trained on random scrapings from the web).

[Howard Sway]

Larry Page's flying taxi startup Kittyhawk calls it a day

They've finally made the Wright decision.

"It'll never fly" they said, and it never did.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

More things fail than succeed

I bet if some one drew up a spreadsheet of all the failed projects, cancelled projects against the ones that have actually worked well and are still going strong to this date... One list is going to be long and the other very short.

and I don't include projects that simply involved them buying up some one else's IP/idea/company and pretending it was theirs.... google are good at that... just like every other tech company

[Claptrap314]

Re: More things fail than succeed

This.

When Google bought itself out & created Alphabet, it moved all of the non-core stuff to separate divisions. You know how Sergi referred to those divisions? "Other bets". He wasn't being flippant. He was making clear that these were, by design, high-risk, (hopefully) high-reward ventures. The brass expected most to fail.

Of course, some of Google's ventures have been particularly dubious. Whether this was (at the time) properly one of those, I leave to experts.

[Il'Geller]

Re: More things fail than succeed

“…involved them buying up some one else's IP/idea/company and pretending it was theirs…”

No longer fashionable to buy a patent, technology or company. It's much easier to steal and become the richest people in the world. Brin, Page and Zuckerberg are proof of that.

[Daedalus]

Robinson's revenge

There are laws of society and then there are the laws of nature. Nature wins every time.

We know what it takes to push a vehicle up into the air and make it move sideways, because we've been doing it for 80 years. And then somebody comes along with a claim that they can do it smaller and cheaper.

Nope. Smaller means more power because you're moving less air faster. Cheaper isn't going to happen if you need to have a more powerful engine. Like say, 500 hp.

What does Robinson have to do with this? The eponymous company has been manufacturing flying cars in all but name i.e. small helicopters, for decades. They don't use big rotors because it's fashionable. It's necessary.

There have been a few honest efforts at multi-rotor cars that need modest amounts of power. The rotors are big, of course. There have been some laughable efforts keeping the rotors low to the ground. Be careful disembarking. Like those cars that become aircraft (a good car is a lousy aircraft, and vice versa) there's always going to be an impossible scheme pushed by somebody. Flying submarines, anyone?

[James O'Shea]

Re: Robinson's revenge

Been done. (In fiction...) https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/diving.html and https://www.fabgearusa.com/1-32-diecast-flying-sub-from-voyage-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea-with-lights-sounds-and-a-remote-control/ for just two examples.

Doing it for real appears to be somewhat more difficult than making a flying car.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Robinson's revenge

Actually, Robinson do it by using very light rotors. A consequence of this is that when the engine fails, there is very, very little time (3s, from memory) to establish autorotation. Otherwise you die. And quite a few people do, in fact, die.

[Frank Bitterlich]

Re: Robinson's revenge

Flying submarines, anyone?

Where's the Kickstarter page?

[Il'Geller]

Only what I created works and brings money: the Internet search and Artificial Intelligence. But what Brin, Page and Zucker created — all don't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If anyone can do this, we can"

And they were right. Nobody can do flying taxis (or cars).

Until we have Jetson's technology, they're grounded.

[Big Softie]

Don't worry about the detail, this will be big, give us your money

You have to admire these big-time visionaries with grandiose dreams usually backed up by poor track records of having actually achieved anything. They still manage to pull in huge investments from people who should know better to fund wildly optimistic ideas that many an engineer or anyone with a large dollop of common sense would say "that'll never fly..."

My observation of working in tech for many decades, and I may be wrong and stand to be corrected, is that investors appear to be doing even less due diligence now than in the past, and certainly far less than they should be doing. Is this a natural consequence of our species and society become ever more affluent...we can afford and accept huge losses on the basis that one of these projects might just deliver?

[Anonymous Coward]

"almost inaudible within 30 seconds of takeoff,"

Who forgot to charge the batteries?

"Joby Aviation"

<snigger>blue ice?

[Anonymous Coward]

3 Dimensions....

.....some people have trouble driving cars in just two!

[imanidiot]

Another one bites the dust

Shame so much money was wasted on such a stupid project but saw that coming a mile of. Now it's just a matter of time before the rest of them die too.

[Michael Wojcik]

Infrastructure

So the plan was you'd take ground transport (a "taxi", in the old days, but now for most people probably goddamned Uber) to an airport, board your personal RC aircraft, be flown to another airport, and take ground transport from there to your destination?

Yeah, we have that already. It's called conventional air travel.

The thing about taxis is that, when the system works properly, they pick you up where you are, and bring you where you want to go. Making that multimodal is not a win for most use cases. For longer trips, you have to go multimodal – but these little RC planes only went 100 miles or so, yeah? That's not much in the US. I've had plenty of business day trips, back in the day, in the 100-200 mile range where we just drove.