You get a flying car factory (RAR!)

[Batman]

This talk of freight suddenly makes me think of attaching those lifters to container ships. Big enough to deal with turbulence (I hope), trained crews, and drop the cargo off on any convenient flat area. It's already the cheapest way to ship things as I recall.

Those ships will also have no means of propulsion once they're out of the water. Also, most container ships can't offload cargo on their own, they require harbour facilities for that.
Applying the technology to mass cargo transportation is a damn sensible idea. But I don't think just bolting the lifters from the factory onto existing cargo ships is going to work.

[Darmalus]

This talk of freight suddenly makes me think of attaching those lifters to container ships. Big enough to deal with turbulence (I hope), trained crews, and drop the cargo off on any convenient flat area. It's already the cheapest way to ship things as I recall.

Those ships will also have no means of propulsion once they're out of the water. Also, most container ships can't offload cargo on their own, they require harbour facilities for that.
Applying the technology to mass cargo transportation is a damn sensible idea. But I don't think just bolting the lifters from the factory onto existing cargo ships is going to work.

I wasn't imagining bolting the lifters to existing ships directly, since they would likely lack the required strength to survive outside the water. More combining the concepts.

I'm sort of imagining a large flying boat-like machine with one or more hatch and crane assemblies in the center to drop off and pick up standard containers. Tho it would probably be similar to the modern transport network, really big air-ships taking mass cargo to distribution centers where it gets offloaded to smaller and smaller transports until it reaches it's final destination. Only it would be completely free from any need for road or rail. It would probably be the end of the rail network and reduce roads to a shadow of their former importance and utility.

[Purple]

Why not just mount the lifting gear on the shipping containers? Or one of those huge electromagnets that lift stuff?
You could easily have a container ship that unloads it self without any port facilities if you made a crane that consists only of a lifting head and an antigravity drive.

[Borgholio]

Has anybody mentioned using the anti-grav units for cheap space launches? Use them to get up out of the Earth's gravity well and then you wouldn't need much more than maneuvering thrusters for orbital changes.

[Simon_Jester]

Has anybody mentioned using the anti-grav units for cheap space launches? Use them to get up out of the Earth's gravity well and then you wouldn't need much more than maneuvering thrusters for orbital changes.

Well, if you just use the antigravity device straight, then you wind up hovering above the Earth's surface at some fixed height- how you control altitude settings on the thing I'm not sure.

The problem is that this is not a stable orbit; if you turn off the antigravity device the hovering "satellite" will fall straight back down* to the surface. To attain a stable orbit you need to be moving sideways at enormous speed.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Now, if you can get out of the atmosphere you can attain this orbital velocity gradually, using a highly efficient engine such as an ion thruster. But you still need an engine.

*Allowing for Coriolis drift or things of that nature, perhaps...

[Borgholio]

Well, if you just use the antigravity device straight, then you wind up hovering above the Earth's surface at some fixed height- how you control altitude settings on the thing I'm not sure.

Depending on the height, that's still a great help. You wouldn't need nearly as much rocket fuel since you wouldn't be starting from a dead stop on the surface, and you could carry much heavier payloads as well. Same idea as launching a shuttle from the back of a 747, only possibly higher given the performance of an anti-grav unit.

[Me2005]

Why not just mount the lifting gear on the shipping containers?

Exactly what I was thinking. Then tie them to the back of an AG-truck and make sky-trains. Per the OP, they might not be able to lift fully-loaded standard shipping containers, but since they work off electricity and they have magic batteries they'd probably be a great option.

Depending on the height, that's still a great help. You wouldn't need nearly as much rocket fuel since you wouldn't be starting from a dead stop on the surface, and you could carry much heavier payloads as well. Same idea as launching a shuttle from the back of a 747, only possibly higher given the performance of an anti-grav unit.

And there'd be less drag to deal with than there is starting at sea level. The magical batteries/engines on these cars might also be useful to space launches.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if you just use the antigravity device straight, then you wind up hovering above the Earth's surface at some fixed height- how you control altitude settings on the thing I'm not sure.

Depending on the height, that's still a great help. You wouldn't need nearly as much rocket fuel since you wouldn't be starting from a dead stop on the surface, and you could carry much heavier payloads as well. Same idea as launching a shuttle from the back of a 747, only possibly higher given the performance of an anti-grav unit.

You don't gain much delta-v in a launch to LEO, because only a small fraction of the total delta-v required to get there is vertical. It's significant but not huge; there's a reason why real rocket launches tilt over and thrust practically horizontally for most of their flight, as soon as they clear the first 10-20 miles of atmosphere.

The advantage is more significant for longer-distance trips where more of the delta-v is vertical: trans-lunar injection or interplanetary flights.

[Wicked Pilot]

Readers two decades from now would be thinking, 'what a quaint 20th century viewpoint'.

The scenario stated 'Most of it's components, save for it's countergravity cells and power cells are fairly normal earth technology.'

So maybe in 2035 this may be the case, but maybe not, either way, not relevant to the conversation. In today's normal earth technology, your ideas are completely out of line.

but automation of the entire flight to the point of just dialing in a destination is technically possible and will be implemented (it is already for certain drones).

That's fucking hilarious. You list me a drone that performs all flight functions and decision making without any human input. In normal flight regimes and in emergency situations. It better be able to do that, because unlike drones these sky cars don't have expendability as their biggest asset.

Moller Skycar for all its faults did get this part right; full autopilot control with centralized, automated, dynamic flight-planning as the primary mode of operation.

While you're at it, show me a Moller that actually flies...

[Broomstick]

Last I heard, Moller was being sued for fraud.

[phongn]

One question is, how does it handle a combination of the above problems? Say, if it's raining in a construction zone, or if the pedestrian is wearing light-absorbing clothing? Or if there's a possibility of ice making the surface of the road behave differently than the software is programmed to expect?

No idea. They keep training the vehicle and searching for more and more edge cases to teach it (plus, Google's machine learning guys claim that a lot of what we think are unusual, novel or unexpected situations are straightforward for it).

Also, the thing about construction zones is that they're most challenging when you have to make a judgment call about where to make your turnoff, things like that. I'm not sure how the automated car could handle that without the ability to (at the very least) read signs.

Why do you assume it can't read signs? OCR is not a difficult problem (and Google's already done extensive work in that field for Google Books, reCAPTCHA and Street View). Plus it can watch traffic ahead and do prediction on what it should do as well.