When it comes to white papers, the only limit is Uber’s Imagination™.
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I think these will be common around the same time we have a 30 minute hyperloop between Boston and Washington DC, Amazon drones are doing deliveries, cars are all fully autonomous, and we’ve sent people to Mars. Now that I think of it, vehicle accidents in the future are going to be spectacular.
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I find it hard to imagine flying vehicles will be anything except fully and strictly autonomous (at least while in crowded cities) due to humans barely managing to drive in 2 dimensions. But I suppose if you traveled back in time and brought a stage coach driver to Indianapolis speedway he might think the same thing about traveling at those speeds.
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Luckily, we’ve already got boat snowmobiles though.
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Uber Clearly has more money than they should.
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I love this meme of crossover vehicles creating one vehicle that does two things badly… but the picture clearly shows a flighted vehicle that has no wheels. Meaning its only a car in the sense it takes 4 passengers and their luggage.
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They should maybe drop the VTOL requirement. How about an autonomous electric-powered paraglider robot? There are lots of trikes and quads like this that have been demonstrated, and with the ability to send some power to the wheels you could, in theory, take off from many existing roads (and perhaps get around at low speeds on the ground). Landing is straightforward with a chute. Making it electric would help with the noise level, and that sort of engine will hopefully become competitive with fossil fuels, if the technologies involved continue to improve. Though progress with batteries has been somewhat slow.
When it comes to high-density city centers, it’s perhaps not practical, but I could see this kind of transportation operating at pretty high capacity around the peripheries of the cities, especially places where there’s a lot of traffic congestion like northern Virginia, LA, etc.
i just hope they sound like those flying car things on the Jetsons.
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Yeah, but Cessnas didn’t have built-in stereo systems back then. How would he listen to Shirley Bassey belting out his theme song on 8-track?
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Hmmm…will tomorrows flying cars be confined to to flying roads?
Because I don’t want just anybody, driving their car over my house…
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I’m investing in omnipresence tech. Travel is so 21st century.
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Hate to be pessimistic but really batteries?
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Gotta pump that stock!
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They’ve just been told that their drivers in the UK are employees and their VAT avoidance scheme is illegal. The rest of the EU will be very interested. Oh look, flying cars! Ignore the taxman behind the curtain!
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Only calling it “Elevate” because “Uberchet” might be tricky to pronounce.
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Does no one realize how terrible this would be. Freeways in the sky. Thousands of cars flying around over our heads. Drunk drivers crashing and falling. Constant noise and cannot even see the sky because of these contraptions. Stop it. That is a really stupid idea.
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I wish more people realized this. Who’s gonna write the white paper extolling the power of white papers to solve our big engineering challenges?
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Don’t worry. They will be autonomous and interconnected. Sort of an IOFT - internet of flying things. What could go wrong?
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