Imagine a simple scenario. Take your $260,000 Helix to the grocery store to pickup groceries. While you are in the store a mother fighting with her kids accidentally damages your Helix backing up the car. Are you going to hop into that thing even with what might be considered minor damage? Probably not because you would not know how to evaluate whether it is safe.
A car. You'd just hop in to determine if it is drivable.
Not just after an incident, but what sort of maintenance requirements and burden will there be now? Can there be an equivalent to the beater for flying cars?
No, there cannot (at least not legally). Aircraft are subject to strict maintenance and inspection requirements based on both calendar time and operating hours, and a certified mechanic must sign-off on the completed work. Out in rural areas there are a few private pilots who fly poorly maintained "beater" light airplanes and get away with it because authorities never show up at the local grass strip but this is never going to be tolerated in urban areas.
Flying vehicles are fundamentally a different beast. They need to be light and are therefore more fragile. Also my car engine quitting while driving is not necessarily a life threatening situation. When you're a thousand feet above the ground just about any failure can be life threatening.
So no I wouldn't think flying a beater around is a good idea. People generally get away with flying unsafe planes now because they fly over unpopulated areas. They only kill themselves. Start flying over populated areas and you can wipe out a kids soccer game.
I think this is a case where I simply don't know enough, but couldn't auto-pilot be a lot easier and safer when adding a new axis? A lot fewer things to run into in the air, and if you could just rise or fall a couple dozen feet to avoid an collision seems safer.
The big limitation of autopilots is that they can't handle emergencies. By their nature emergencies are unpredictable so programmers can't reliably code for emergency situation handling in advance. An experienced human pilot at least has a chance to figure out a solution by reasoning from first principles and reacting intuitively to novel situations. These new eVTOL aircraft have a certain amount of redundancy built in but realistically if anything goes seriously wrong they're just going to spin and crash (or maybe pop a recovery parachute if so equipped and within the flight envelope for those to work).
Autopilots also can't handle VHF voice comms (with a very narrow exception for the Garmin Autonomí system in certain situations) or perform "see and avoid" traffic management in VFR.
Not sure about the autopilot part (even planes autopilots follow a flight path). I'm not an expert either, but with roads, there are clear lanes and markings. And ability to generally see around you, and judge distance.
Is what sets the lanes in the air are traffic controllers and flight plans? We're already short on traffic controllers. And there are already lots of near-misses (and not near-misses) even with the heavy regulation and control. Can't imagine having it as mass personal transit driven manually. There'd need to be a mass central system that controls everything, and in that case, might as well just keep it commercial
The energy efficiency isn't great either on personal aircraft
If it's autopilot you could probably also channel the vehicles to specific routes such that they maintain a road like set of channels where they're flying so the rest of us can not worry about random flying cars zooming around our yards and playgrounds.
We already do this with planes which have corridors they fly along.
