Uber’s ‘flying cars’ set to land in Dallas by 2020

SAN JOSE — Uber plans to demo its first “flying cars” in U.S. cities by 2020, the ride-hailing company said Tuesday, moving one step closer to a future where workers take to the air for their daily commutes.

The first places to get a glimpse of the futuristic vehicles will be the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates — both within three years, the company said during the Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas. Uber hopes to conduct passenger flights at the World Expo in Dubai in 2020.

“Flying cars have been promised for decades but are arriving now. So we actually get to live in this era of flying cars,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, said during the conference’s opening keynote Tuesday morning, which was livestreamed online. “We have a lot of work to do, though. This isn’t going to be easy.”

The Uber Elevate Summit, a three-day event attended by manufacturers, regulators and investors interested in vertical take-off and landing aircraft — called VTOL but more often referred to as flying cars — marks Uber’s most detailed update on its Elevate program since first announcing its interest in the vehicles last October.

Kicking off the event Tuesday morning, Holden outlined a future where a rider will open the Uber app and choose “UberAIR.” Then the company might send a standard Uber to shuttle the rider to a “skyport,” where he or she can board a flying car, which would likely be shared with other passengers. A trip from San Jose to San Francisco, which often takes at least an hour and a half in traffic, would take 15 minutes by air, Holden said. And the flight would cost $1.32 per passenger per mile — about the same as Uber’s standard car service.

"This is why Uber’s running at this as opposed to taking a kind of careful approach, a slow approach to this,” Holden said. “We just want to usher it in as fast as possible because we all want to live in this world.”