© EHANGThe Ehang 184, a passenger drone
If you summon an Uber in 10 years' time, you will probably
get a car that drives itself. But then again, you may not be travelling in a car at all.
The taxi-hailing app is working on technology that would allow airborne passenger drones to fly its users short distances around cities, it has emerged, raising the prospect of a future in which skylines are dotted with Uber aircraft shuttling commuters back and forth.
Jeff Holden, Uber's head of product, told technology website
Recode that the company is researching "vertical take off and landing" (VTOL) technology. Instead of the helicopter-style rotor blade drones, VTOL aircraft have fixed wings like planes, enabling them to fly silently, while taking off and landing vertically.
Amazon's delivery drones,
currently being tested in Cambridgeshire, use a similar technology to cut down on noise and extend their range.
Holden said Uber wanted to "offer our customers as many options as possible to move around" and that the technology could be available within a decade.
"It could change cities and how we work and live," Holden said, pointing out that moving traffic from the road to the air could dramatically cut down on congestion and the time it takes to cross cities. He said he envisages aircraft taking off from and landing on the roofs of buildings.
© AFPUber is already testing driverless cars
While the idea may seem far-fetched, Uber is not the only one researching passenger drones. Earlier this year Ehang, a Chinese company,
unveiled the 184, an autonomous quadcopter drone designed to carry a single passenger, with a battery life of 23 minutes. The 184, which has been slated for release as early as this year, is expected to cost up to $300,000 (ยฃ232,000).
Google founder Larry Page is one of the major believers in flying cars,
putting $100m of his own money into startups developing the technology.
However, filling our skies with passenger drones within 10 years is an ambitious undertaking, and would require hundreds of pages of new regulations, not to mention consumers who would be willing to put their life in the hands of a small self-flying aircraft. It would also, presumably, be incredibly costly to develop.
But Uber is already at the forefront of developing self-driving technology. Earlier this month it began testing a
driverless car service in Pittsburgh.
I have no doubt that the McMansion big wacked face stuffers will be overjoyed and clamoring for these. Especially since their masters have intentionally herded them into kill boxes of condensed highway systems. This being the planed obsolescence of the combustion motor for mass private transportation.
With these they will be in wonderful mass control. Oh sure you're going to be saving time, just so long as that time is controlled as well as where you're going to be allowed to go.
Ford, Fiat, and other major corporations have already planned out the next electrical grid which include their ownership thereof, the electrification of the roadways, the elimination of your right to free travel by their already accomplished surreptitious usurpation of the public right to freely travel on the public highways, and, as always, this includes a willing participation in their plan to control and rule your kids lives and futures.
We already have the bankers insurance corporations owning the public highways, already paid for by all of us, co-opting the police as their own private army. We already have them owning the power grids we all paid for and taxing us for it by calling it their power system an billing you to use it.
Well stupid is as stupid does I guess. Oh yes, please just climb in to a machine which has absolutely no aerodynamic qualities whatsoever, hope that there is no failures, or that it's been hacked, or that you've gotten on the dispose list for bad mouthing a political hack, corporate CEO, or a million other reasons those people might choose to off you, and then pay for ride to death. Seriously, sounds great and all, but thanks and no thanks. If I'm gonna go airborne it's in a machine I own and control.