Above: Uber made that big announcement back in October, when it unveiled Uber Elevate, an ambitious program to get cars—or at least Ubers—off the road and into the sky.
Few things have come to symbolize our collective hopes for the future quite like the somewhat outlandish concept of flying cars.
Long portrayed in films and futuristic television shows as the height of consumer technology, the flying car has so far eluded even our most brilliant minds – but perhaps not for much longer.
Following the publication of a whitepaper on the subject of virtual takeoff and landing (VOTL) aircraft, Uber has hit the ground – er, sky? – running with what it now refers to as Elevate, a program whose mission is to explore the feasibility of consumer-level flying aircraft. The implications are enormous, even if the roadmap to such a breakthrough is far from certain.
Landing big talent
One of Uber Elevate’s first major victories was landing some big-name talent in Mark Moore, an ex-NASA engineer who worked on advanced aircraft for the purposes of exploring outer space. Moore himself is well-decorated and published, having released a paper of his own back in 2010 about how realistic it would be to deploy helicopter-like VTOL vehicles on a large scale.
The two are a natural fit, both having been interested in the possibility of this type of vehicle for several years. The ultimate goal is to make this futuristic concept into something practical: a wide roll-out of low-flying vehicles that could potentially solve a host of modern headaches, including traffic congestion, global warming and the crumbling state of American roads, bridges and other key parts of our infrastructure.
The Sisyphean task of maintaining our roads – not to mention paying for them – could become much less of a burden in the coming years if we no longer have to accommodate wheeled vehicles.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. Naturally, even the concept of flying taxis raises more than a few questions about how these vehicles could possibly work in practice,…