But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension.
Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!?
If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30min pre-checking the aircraft, checking the weather, reading NOTAMS etc. Not to mention the potentially pretty intensive communication with ATC et al. required to make sure everybody stays safe.
Getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work than getting a drivers license, proficiency has to be continuously demonstrated, maintaining airworthiness of an airplane isn’t exactly cheap either and pretty heavily regulated.
And all that should be “automated”, certified and approved?
Not saying things can’t be automated - but no shit, the spark plugs in a Cessna are like 50$ each for that “aviation certificate”...
Even if there ARE rules and guidelines how to certify autonomous vehicles like that - like how does anybody imagine that a novel aerial vehicle like this actually IS CERTIFIED within a lifetime?
Pilots still walk around a multi-million $ fighter jet or aircraft equipped with the most sophisticated avionics because “a bird nest in the engine intake is hard to detect and difficult to resolve mid flight”.
Investing in one of the most heavily regulated, difficult to scale and extremely expensive to operate industries is brave... Even more so when this industry is low margin and “kept dying every couple of years”...
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
Oh and you'll have to fuel the airplane with avgas which costs $5/gallon and contains lead, and you have to wonder WTF??
There's no technical reason aircraft engines cannot be turbocharged, fuel-injected, fueled with regular unleaded gas, and cheap. Aircraft engines should have followed the innovation advancements that have happened in car engines, but they haven't. This is probably because of regulation, monopoly power, liability, and a host of other reasons, but as an engineer I find the situation ridiculous.
No autothrottle, no FADEC, and that plane new costs close to $1 mil. Short of the turbine world, its the best you can get but its still ancient tech. Following a magenta line on autopilot is not a hard problem to solve.
They rely on a Continental that was developed in the 80s (so quite new) - but doN’t you still have to adjust the mixture manually (e.g., manually adjust the air to fuel ratio)?
I mean, the cool stuff you are describing can easily end up at 500k-2MM USD with a fully trained private pilot...
Every car since the early 90s has done away with the choke, but for some reason in a 2020-built C172 I still have to do this... :X
I would argue that this insistence on safety certification makes actual flights less safe. Because it results in it not being done, leaving something to the pilot who is more error-prone than an automatic system.
I haven't heard of accidents in GA aircraft that were due to poor mixture (though I haven't looked, and it could technically cause one if you set it too explosive) but when I still flew there were several incidents reported by our maintenance company who complained about cylinder scoring due to overheting.
It would be much better to have this automatically managed, and more environmentally friendly too, because there is no need for 'full rich' settings during takeoff/landing, it would just adjust it to ensure sufficient cooling. The full-rich is just a precaution to avoid the pilot miscalibrating it during this critical flight phase (and to avoid overheating on the ground of course).
Rotax (Austrian company) actually builds great engines. They are heavily used in ultra-light airplanes with much more “relaxed” certification.
And you are right: in the ultra-light market, we see a giant boom because of lower certification hurdles and actually much safer systems: automated engine control, constant speed propellers, ballistic parachutes, etc. But Maximum Take-Off-Weight (MTOW) is 650 kg (Germany) that leaves you with a skinny wife/husband, some gas and light baggage...
Airplane engines are operating in tougher environments than car engines - hence bigger tolerances and less sophistication in some parts. They also must not fail. I mean, the engine has to be ok with starting up at 100 degrees F on the ground, climbing at maximum power to 10’000 ft, with below freezing temperatures within 15/20 min and descending down again with an urgy pilot pushing down the cylinder heat temperatures from 400 to 200 degrees fahrenheit within minutes (due to power reduction and increased speed cooling the engine).
That said highly recommend any materials from Mike Busch on this topic. Super knowledgeable and has moved the needle in getting people to understand how engines operate.
There is of course a minority religious sect within GA who follow lean-of-peak theory and mess with their mixture constantly for better mileage (and possibly better wear, but that can go either way).
They are the only reason you can step into an aircraft with a reasonable expectation of making it safely to your destination. Disasters are generally not caused by obvious large issues, but a multitude of smaller compounding, seemingly benign causes that could otherwise be easily dismissed. The massive body of regulation around aviation is a direct result of this. Each one is almost always a direct response to a particular incident that killed people.
...in 1970.
Not saying that all aviation regulations are bad, but the fact that carburetors are still used in general aviation is pretty damning.
All of the aircraft in existence have been certified in what is (for a very old person) one lifetime. I think we’ll be fine.
Their schedule seems to have 5 years for development, and 5 more for certification.
That seems reasonable.
>That seems reasonable
That sounds laughable. Garmin, an established, well-funded, and well-connected company, spent multiple decades to certify one system with the FAA.
You know why Piper/Cessna airplanes look exactly the same and keep using 50 year old engines? because of safety.
You know why pilot spends 30min pre-checking the aircraft? safety
You know why getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work? safety
Everything in aviation works around safety. If you want to innovate, sure, go ahead. If you want to innovate and do it safety and reliable, oops, that's going to cost you a lot and that's the same reason why there are not many players in aviation, engineering an aircraft or new powerplant is a big up-front cost with probably little return.
At the current standards, apparently the only hard requirement is a pulse.
- Turn too early/late past an arbitrary point in space
- Turn the wrong direction
- Descend too early past an arbitrary point in space
- Use the wrong altimeter setting
- Failing to recognize and troubleshoot a failed instrument
- Failing to recognize signs of hypoxia
Not to mention dealing with emergency procedures while you don't do any of the above
Here is an example from a few years ago where a 777 missed a mountain by a few seconds after some non-standard instructions by ATC
In a plane you don't have that single goto option. You have to know the correct response to every possible situation and it's different in each case.
Plus, many mechanical failures in an aircraft will kill you. Most things in a car won't. You need to learn how to look after a plane, and what to check for.
Some FAA regs and procedures are written in blood, but most are written in a way to prevent blood in the future.
I also like to echo the products Garmin is incorporating to increase the UX in the cockpit. They address some of the things you outline.
Remember, aviators aren't engineers, they are operators. The license requirement is there to ensure that pilots can do basic things like triage, malfunction diagnostic, ad hoc solution generation, energy management, communicate, etc.
(It is in German though).
A big German magazine did a rather intensive “how much sense does it make” story: https://www.aerokurier.de/elektroflug/flugtaxis-kein-markt-f...
So they do seem to be doing something right...
The lack of chaanges may just indicate that the current paradigm is a rather good one. If anvbody came up with a working scramjet, regulation would be a minor hassle.
It's really physics that are limiting here: supersonic travel is too inefficient both economically and environmentally. And personal autonomous local transport (i. e. "flying car") is impossible without some sort of breakthrough on noise.
Just like most 3rd world countries these days have better 4G coverage than supposedly 1st world countries like Germany, or rural US.
And guess the country :-)
I would never start such a business in the US or Europe.
Don't look at fighter jets, as they are basically jet engines with guns and little control surfaces added.
As for airworthiness - there's a good reason for that - these things literally fly over your head.
But the point is: even if politicians DO push that and even if the rules and regulations are written down - doesn’t mean that they will be granted a certification.
I mean, funnily enough, they don’t yet even KNOW what they will have to adhere to and achieve and start burning through 300MM USD in investor money...
Boeing, Airbus, Cessna, Cirrus and Piper have dozens of years of experience and KNOW how to get planes certified - and yet they essentially “re-use older certifications”...
Fun times when they get told they need two ballistic parachutes or they need at least 30 min safety backup for hover flight (e.g., each Cessna pilot has to make sure he has 30+min fuel reserve). Your engineers will commit suicide when you surprise them with “oh there was this ask...”
And then the weather - I mean, seriously, there are super strict rules about visual minimas for flights in the US and Europe. If you go instrument rated things get even more complex and bureaucratic. Not to mention that instrument flight is PROHIBITED in Germany below 2000+ft in uncontrolled airspace...
Ah, and I want to see that flying electric lawn-mower make his way across the Alps with 50kts headwind, freezing temperatures at cruising altitude. Pilots landing in Innsbruck need special training for “Foehn” Approaches and when the heavy winds roll over the city and airport you can hear the pilots pushing full throttle in final to counter the 2000+ft/min downwash.
The world of atoms is harder than software, but it's awaiting disruptions like these.
I know the meaning may have shifted over the years, but i've always interpreted it as "audacious and unlikely to succeed", rather than any particular moral / altruistic content.
The problem is probably nobody wants to pay for that.
Sure, perhaps your age may indicate a preference for that kind of project but DDE was 70 when he started the moonshot so it's less likely to be age and more likely to be a predisposition to that sort of thing.
Moonshots afaik are risky ideas/ventures that have the potential to "moon" i.e. make a shit-ton of money. Solving a problem with no funding can't be a moonshot by that definition.
As an air-taxi skeptic, I have to say I am refreshed to see a startup actually spend more than five minutes figuring out the market fitness problem. Focusing on bypassing geographic barriers seems to be a much better use case.
I am still pretty skeptical on the idea overall. Everyone drools over the travel times and not enough on the confounding factors. Getting to and from the taxi. Dealing with regulations. We can't even make public transit in dense urban cores work - why would this much harder idea work?
I find it amusing that one of their examples of bypassing noise ordinance restrictions is to follow existing infrastructure routes. The irony seems lost on them.
Yeah, I noticed this too in their depiction of a hypothetical Palo Alto vertiport. The caption “high-throughput vertiport with intermodal last-mile connectivity” made me think it would ideally be located by the Caltrain station, but the road in the illustration didn’t look like El Camino and there were no train tracks in sight. I later realized during their “low noise footprint” discussion that they were depicting a vertiport located towards East Palo Alto and using 101 as the flight corridor.
My guess is they recognize the irony but are trying to strike a judicious balance.
By contrast, getting approval to build a small footprint vertiport and use some unused or underutilized air rights seems easy.
This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a mature and well understood technology then, but the realities of operating in urban areas under a variety of weather conditions just doesn't allow for these services to be A) safe or B) economical.
"It'll revolutionise personal transport but we estimate it'll kill 40,0000 people in a horrible way per year"
Like many things that are harmful in some way cars got grandfathered in (as did alcohol and tobacco) - if someone came out with an equivalent of alcohol with the same side effects it would be banned immediately as well.
In fact the UK did exactly that with the psychoactive substances laws - we didn't ban a particular drug we banned any drug with a set of side effects - largely because the chemists got really good at tweaking the underlying chemical structure enough to evade the law.
Is that fair? Maybe?
Is that reality? Yes.
This isn't like the invention of cars. We have had all manner of airplanes for over 100 years and know how they work. This is like the NYC helicopter taxi boom in the late 70s and 80s where a number of fiery and high profile crashes put an end to the industry.
The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...
Society will learn to tolerate 4-6 deaths at a time, but not on the 737 scale.
Lots of things in dense areas also are not necessarily on an easy route near a highway, so if that's the limitation you run into Concorde's old problem of "where can you actually fly this thing?"
Therein lies the problem with public transportation in the US. What do you do after you get to Tahoe, Santa Cruz, or wherever? Most of these places are devoid of functional public transportation, and rental car companies have long lines and routinely screw people over and overbook.
And will the FAA allow you with your tent stakes, hiking poles, bear spray, and camping stove with fuel on the Lilium Jet? (What else are you supposed to do in Tahoe?)
The air taxi is not on top of your house.
You need to actually go from your house to the Lilium jet starting point (at least 30 minutes or more in these complex urban setups) and you need to be in advance for the take-off, eventual security checks and security briefing (like any plane).
After air turbulences, then you are at the Lake Tahoe stuck in the middle of nowhere.
You can take your Instagram picture and wait for the next plane to go back.
Was that really worth saving 1 hour in your life ?
The alternative is to gather with friends on the morning, go get your friends with your car on the way, have a lunch picnic, have a tour around in the nature, discover unexpected places. Come home for dinner.
No stress, no schedule, quality time with friends.
That is a world of difference from Europe, China, or Japan, when you're usually thrown into a food court when you get off the train, and buses leaving every 10 minutes to everywhere you could possibly want to go. Planes replicate that drop-off experience in the US, and Lilium will need to as well in order for it to be a comfortable experience.
That goes for even for suburban trips. How do you get from wherever it drops you off in Palo Alto to say, Facebook or Google's offices? Or the thousand other companies that don't have company shuttles?
Or in the case of Lake Tahoe the area ski resort, hotel or casino might provide shuttle service.
Shuttle service is not adequate. Most people do more than just visit a hotel or ski resort. I think the "easy" US-side solution to this problem would be for there to exist a better, more competent car rental service that doesn't require lining up or saying "no" 10 times to humans trying to offer you add-ons, is available 24 hours, is guaranteed, and is located within a 10 minute walk of wherever the Lilian drops you off.
Kind of like ZipCar, but ZipCar has zero cars in Tahoe, 2 cars for the entirety of Fresno (wtf), and cost twice as much as Enterprise for a daily rental despite the fact that they don't have to hire as many humans, which is backwards. ZipCar should be costing half as much as a place with brick-and-mortar and human agents.
If it's $100/flight I might use it once per month to get to Santa Cruz or Lake Tahoe.
If it's $20/flight I might consider LIVING in one of those places and commuting to work.
Edit: Oops, didn't see that they did. Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch
Ok, so this isn't going to cause me to move.
> If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70).
> Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might not be something you’d do every weekend, but saving you three hours each way might well make it worthwhile for an occasional trip.
But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.
"Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet" ... ah, mountain flying with batteries, what could possibly go wrong.
Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice. It seems like they have a ballistic chute for backup when the power fails, but it might be hard to deploy that when you cannot do any spin recovery.
>Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice.
Not to mention any form of traditional aerodynamic control surface: "With 36 single-stage electric motors providing near-instantaneous thrust in almost any direction, control surfaces, such as rudders, ailerons or a tail, aren't required."
They've really doubled down on their VTOL shindig. Seems like a pretty big gamble making an aircraft that's entirely dependent on its propulsion system for basic aerodynamic stability and control (I'm also curious if the wings would make noticeably less lift in a glide). "Intrinsically simple design," huh?
Where I would really worry, of course, is the software driving all of that. It's very likely it will need some sophisticated control systems and may not even be inherently stable aerodynamically.
However engine failure can also occur on fuel-powered aircraft. And at least this thing has a whole lot of engines so it could afford the failure of a few. The batteries could be subdivided in sections.
This. Why would a battery powered aircraft be more susceptible to failure than another engine type?
Not just no... fuck no. I absolutely do not want what is an already awesome place to be fucked up even more by someone installing an airport (vertical or not) in the middle of the valley floor.
That said, it is so light that maybe it would be in range of consumer cost.
It shouldn't need that; you can already forgo all that for a private jet/helicopter flight today. You're not going to take down a skyscraper and a few thousand people with one of these; it's more like crashing a car.
You spend hours and hours in a car you buy. Most small AC have a TTAF of 300 hours or less. And they are YEARS old. Literally nothing is wrong with a carb engine. The planes get fairly good efficiency compared. People also seem to think that planes are being bought at sold in the volumes of cars. Most AC are fairly older. This is why innovations like avionics are up while airframe and engines are low.
I get it that it feels like there's less innovation but I would gather to say there's more. Especially when you get out of the turboprop market. It's essentially the motorcycle industry versus the cars in the road.
The Lilium jets also have a lot of small engines, allowing for multiple failures in flight.
A lot of commenters are also missing the fact that Lilium plans to use pilots initially, until regulations allow for autonomous operations. (it's not mentioned in the article)
I'm sure there will be plenty of problems, but it will be interesting to see if the idea is viable.
I think one of the biggest deal-breakers will actually be noise. Those things are loud.
It took UCSF 5 years to get their helipad. They had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on noise studies.... for exclusively emergency flights
In my career I've worked in both mechanical and software engineering and IMO the mechanical engineering involved here is daunting. Caveat: when I was in that industry 3D printing was just around the corner and you could print a part per day and the machine cost $80k, so probably creating and testing prototypes is far more pleasant now.
This looks like a truly fun project to work on that's full of frustration, waiting, scrapped parts, broken CAD models, regulatory bs, good regulations that save lives, tons of changes in direction, mercurial investors, endless naysayers, and all done while considering that chances of success are small. Honestly it looks fun as hell.
As someone who's been on and off involved in moving-people-technology, it's two-fold: it's "in the physical world" so you have all of the attendant problems (objections from people around the proposed construction, overlapping government bodies, cost, and that "the real world" isn't "sexy" for investment).
And second, if you make something that's very efficient but looks too much like public transport, there's a whole market of people, at least in North America, who simply won't ride it. Where I live, I had several coworkers who lived next to a bus route or train line that went directly to our offices and they'd still pay for a daily Uber.
The tricky part is the well designed and well run part and as you alluded to they run into a lot of real world issues during construction.
They also really need to be state run at break-even or even subsidized since the benefit is the general increase in economic productivity across the whole region rather than an opportunity to make a lot of money.
So politically they don't really fly in the US.
You can get an R44 with better range and payload for a couple hundred thousand. This will be an electronic nightmare requiring extensive certification and maintenance efforts. Cessna can't even sell ridiculously old designs for reasonable prices due to certification overhead.
https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-h...
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/05/10492-tesla-model-s-mai...
https://www.tesloop.com/blog/2018/7/16/tesloops-tesla-model-...
Uber, Lyft, Musk's Boring Company, and all their variants... there are tons of people working on improving commutes.
But IMO there isn't a technical problem to solve. It's social and political. We shouldn't be asking about improving commuting, but reducing its necessity and distance.
Not that it would be easy, I'm just surprised something so ambitious doesn't also include automation.
At first glance I would have thought automating a small plane would be easier than automating a car - for one thing there are fewer things to crash into.
FAA has lot of restrictions to allow a planes to fly with pilot in it. Imagine convincing them that without pilot.
Does that kind of regulation inhibit progress in some domains, sure - is the cost of the loss of that progress worth it against the likely outcome of de-regulating it absolutely.
Safety regulations are written in blood and when organisations like the FCC, FDA etc fall down on the job people die.
I want my cyberpunk aircar as much as the next geek but not at the price of having them fall out the sky because some programmer made an error at the end of a 70hr work week to make a deadline for shipping.
And you can much more easily demonstrate the limits of an automated aircraft. Simulated bird-strikes, thunderstorms, power-outages, emergency landing in fields, blinding by laser-pointers, stray bullets or whatever scenario the FAA throws at you can be done without the risk to the (non-existent) human pilots, just the cost to VCs.
Whether that argument would work on them is a different matter, but I find it quite convincing.
Autoland has achieved FAA certification. It’s now available on select G3000® flight deck-equipped aircraft. And it’s coming to more soon.
If anyone at lilium is reading. Please contact our firm. Would love to contribute to this moonshot and allocate some of ouwr UI/UX firm’s resources to contribute and help simplify the software side of things. (See bio)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ...
Hilly terrain makes it hard to make straight roads. Quite a lot of big cities don't have direct road connections.
In a relatively flat USA, you don't have a lot of similar spaces.
I remember seeing a row of houses built along a grassy strip that operated as a runway. Like their combined backyards were literally the airstrip.
Switzerland has 8.5m people on 41k km^2, while Alaska has 0.7m people on 1500k km^2.
Considering the prospects for decreasing availability of fossil fuel, and questions of climate impact, it seems to me that this is not sustainable on a mass scale, at all. I would guess this initiative will either become an alternative for the very-rich to using helicopters, or not get off the ground.
(... ok, that pun was a little underhanded, I admit.)
Self driving is something that may be solved and can become practical for popular use with current and near-term foreseeable technology. Everyday mass use VTOL is not. Sorry, the Jetsons lied to you.
Many companies are working on this problem currently. I would say consumer accessible, piloted electric VTOL is closer than fully self driving vehicles.
No kidding. They promised Rosie and we got Roomba.
> The Lilium Jet engine has been fully developed in our in-house sound lab where we have used proprietary acoustic modelling software, simulated on high-performance computing clusters, to optimize its design. As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off. On the ground, the aircraft will move to and from parking bays using separate electric motors, allowing it to be as quiet as a typical electric car.
The usage of future tense (will be) makes me somewhat skeptical
I don't really want to experience what Kobe Bryant experienced though.
This strikes as quite an odd thing to do and my bet is that either one of the big guys (Airbus, Boeing, etc) will launch a competing aircraft and kill them, or they will be acquired. Even if they continue as an aircraft manufacturer I am doubtful about the mix with being a taxi company.
It also seems an awful lot of money to develop one small plane.
I live in South East London and it can easily take over an hour to get to Heathrow, which really eats into a weekend if travelling for work. I'd love to be able to go to a more local vertigo, check my luggage and just have to clear international security at the main airport.
Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk Aero, Wisk, Terrafugia, Opener, Lillium, probably more.
Its already been mentioned here how regulated this industry is, and they aren't going to be able to pull the Uber model of asking for forgiveness instead of permission.
Guessing some consolidation is coming up.
The ultralight Gyrocopter can fly with unleaded 95 Octane and with strong wind of more than 40 knots (see circumnavigation of of Iceland) and its wonderful technology [1],[2].
This is a strange example to include in here – that's a pretty expensive (one-way?) commute.
With sufficiently-enlightened regulation (for which I wouldn't hold my breath), these could run, for example, from the rooftops of Google buildings in Mountain View to the rooftops of their Embarcadero-SF building. Or downtown Palo Alto to a downtown SF pier. Etc.
If physically possible, safe, & available for the prices they're claiming, this would have a big market. And, competitors, like the Larry Page-backed 'Kitty Hawk': https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pa...
The case for VTOL in particular becomes a lot less convincing when you're primarily looking at the kind of regional travel Lilium mentions here--why not just electrify an existing FW aircraft and operate out of existing infrastructure (https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-announce-s...)? Small airports are pretty ubiquitous, and going through an FBO largely eliminates long waits for security and boarding (not to mention alleviating some of the last-mile transportation issues).
I can't stress enough that nothing is simple about VTOL--even if this aircraft lacks complex hydraulic, fuel, and oil systems, any failure in the (electromechanical?) control actuation systems will likely prevent transition to/from hovering flight. It looks like the control surfaces may be designed to have multiple, independent segments (hopefully with redundant actuators) to mitigate these kinds of failures (aside: it's fascinating to see a GA aircraft designed to be dependent on TVC for basic stability and control), but a loss of even one of these segments might not allow a safe power margin for a vertical landing near max gross weight, and it doesn't look like the wheels were designed at all with roll-on landings in mind.
All that said, I wish the engineers working on this thing the best. The current demonstrator is a great-looking machine, and it'd be awesome to see this kind of thing succeed.
What's the hardest thing for them? Regulation? Else?
There are helipads all over the city and none of them can be used with the specific exception of flight-for-life helicopters landing in Mission Bay.
Yet the market always has solutions up its sleeve! Short range flight!
Or maybe transit from one airport to another within a city.
And then be economically justifiable.
Most people taking the plane everyday hate it.
It's a so-so idea.
This aircraft proposal will not be able to negate the effect. Think small boat on a lake - even with azimuth thrusters, still bobs up and down back and forth with the waves. Larger boats don't experience the effect as much, due to mass - same with large airliners.
This is only half true. Legally, Amtrak has priority, and railroads are required to cede right-of-way to passenger trains. In practice, the railroads don't cede priority nearly as much as they should. This is an ongoing fight. Amtrak has a whole site about it here: https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
The interesting thing about American railroads is that unlike all other forms of transportation in the US, railroads pay property tax. Therefore, to reduce tax bills and improve their books for mergers, many railroads tore up their improvements.
Now consider viewpoints like this Economist article: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2010/07/22/high-speed-rai... "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it" and you get why passenger rail is discouraged.
1: As in a single track for both directions, meaning there are limited places where a north-bound and south-bound train can pass each other.
Additionally Amtrak doesn't have right-of-way on those rails, so delays due to freight trains are super common on that section of track.
This means the tracks are not graded for high-speed relative lightweight passenger rolling stock. Also, the passenger trains need to fit into the schedules dictated by the freight traffic.
Which is really a shame. The track from SF through Lake Tahoe runs just past Sugar Bowl and into Truckee, and is about 180 miles. A ski train would be really easy.
I was also surprised at train travel in Norway on my recent visit; I hoped to book a ticket from Oslo to Bergen but it was basically impossible. Only a couple of trains a day, all sold out. I drove instead, which was also a shock, since I spent virtually my entire drive at or below 80kph. The train would have been roughly the same speed -- so, not as bad as your Tahoe example, but not great by continental European standards either :)
Also the commuter/long distance tracks are all owned by the freight liners, so passanger trains have to yield for them. There are also hour+ stops at some stations.
Furthermore, an amtrak will only hit a top speed of 79mph, and only a few times during the journey, while a car can stay at 75mph for most the journey.
You've never driven to Tahoe on a holiday weekend, I see
Train routes don't exist. Outside commuter routes long distance rail basically don't exist in the US, outside a few connectors between major cities.
This is IT: https://trn.trains.com/~/media/files/pdf/map-of-the-month/tm...
Keep in mind the scale here... see that small-looking gap between Flagstaff and Tucson? That's 400km... you could fit most European countries in there.
The costs of acquiring land for rail projects are also higher, because of very strong property rights.
Basically there are a lot of reasons, some of them are not mere political disagreements.
But I really hope some day the EU will standardise this too, and get more tracks built. I'd love to take a train between Barcelona and Amsterdam. But right now it is 2 hours by plane or 14 by train with 2 changes. And the price has a similar ratio in favour of the plane, which makes the train simply nonviable.
