The subject of this documentary (and, for all I know, the director) see this as a story of plucky inventor against the US government. But to most people I think it will come across as a demonstration of why most successful companies have a professional CEO *separate* from the inventor...
Dr Moller is undoubtedly a smart guy who is very good at mechanical engineering. Unfortunately that doesn't make him very good at understanding what the population wants. And so we get a constant dismissal of "government interference" as though the government (and population at large) have no legitimate interest in preventing blocks of metal from randomly falling out the sky.
We get no discussion of energy storage issues - I expect the demo vehicles can probably go no more than a few miles, given how tiny they are, but what's the long term energy strategy here? Will these things use gasoline (what sort of mpg?) Will they use batteries (does the weight to storage ratio make any sense?) The issues of piloting and navigation were likewise completely ignored. The implicit message seems to be that the company has pivoted from "everyone will be a pilot" to "autonomy will do it for us", but the company seems to have no real interest in autonomy and computing; they're certainly not devoting their resources to that.
Ultimately the whole thing is rather sad. Dr Moller seems to feel that the world owes him the chance to spend his life playing with his engines, regardless of how the whole thing doesn't obviously fit together into something realistic. If he were willing to compromise just slightly, to have accepted that the flying car was not going to happen in his lifetime, he could likely have accomplished real achievements at a conventional aerospace company. But he prefers to insist that he's right, it's the rest of the world that's wrong.
In a way he feels like George Boole pursuing the Analytical Engine. Yes, in theory, Boole was right, such devices could be made and would be valuable. But he was wrong in the particular insistence that they could be made from brass and powered by steam, and subsequent events don't change this wrongness. Dreaming is fine; but things are achieved more by engineers than by dreamers.
I saw the same thing in the General Magic documentary: smart people with the fatal flaw that they're unwilling to accept the gap between their vision and what the world actually wants, and who land up blaming the rest of the world for their failure rather than learning anything from it.
Dr Moller is undoubtedly a smart guy who is very good at mechanical engineering. Unfortunately that doesn't make him very good at understanding what the population wants. And so we get a constant dismissal of "government interference" as though the government (and population at large) have no legitimate interest in preventing blocks of metal from randomly falling out the sky.
We get no discussion of energy storage issues - I expect the demo vehicles can probably go no more than a few miles, given how tiny they are, but what's the long term energy strategy here? Will these things use gasoline (what sort of mpg?) Will they use batteries (does the weight to storage ratio make any sense?) The issues of piloting and navigation were likewise completely ignored. The implicit message seems to be that the company has pivoted from "everyone will be a pilot" to "autonomy will do it for us", but the company seems to have no real interest in autonomy and computing; they're certainly not devoting their resources to that.
Ultimately the whole thing is rather sad. Dr Moller seems to feel that the world owes him the chance to spend his life playing with his engines, regardless of how the whole thing doesn't obviously fit together into something realistic. If he were willing to compromise just slightly, to have accepted that the flying car was not going to happen in his lifetime, he could likely have accomplished real achievements at a conventional aerospace company. But he prefers to insist that he's right, it's the rest of the world that's wrong.
In a way he feels like George Boole pursuing the Analytical Engine. Yes, in theory, Boole was right, such devices could be made and would be valuable. But he was wrong in the particular insistence that they could be made from brass and powered by steam, and subsequent events don't change this wrongness. Dreaming is fine; but things are achieved more by engineers than by dreamers.
I saw the same thing in the General Magic documentary: smart people with the fatal flaw that they're unwilling to accept the gap between their vision and what the world actually wants, and who land up blaming the rest of the world for their failure rather than learning anything from it.