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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.
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Waymo has cars that drive themselves and are dramatically safer than people in most conditions and yet they're only in select cities.

Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars

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> Waymo has cars that drive themselves

With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.

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I don't know the costs and logistics of such an operation. Maybe you do?
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> 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.

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What advantage would hovering have?
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No Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).
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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.

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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.
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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.

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It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
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Communication technologies have been evolving for billions of years
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