Uber plans taxi in sky by 2020
Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, hates the phrase “flying cars.”
But he took to a Dallas stage on Tuesday to announce that Uber will offer a flying-car taxi service in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Dubai by 2020 — something he said “fits cleanly into our mission” and Uber’s focus on “big bold bets.”
“It’s natural for Uber to turn its eyes to the air: push a button, get a flight,” he said to an audience of several hundred people gathered for a three-day summit called Uber Elevate. “Urban aviation can replace long-distance commutes.”
Uber is among a bevy of well-funded companies pursuing the sci-fi vision of flying cars. Google co-founder Larry Page has a Mountain View startup called Kitty Hawk led by Sebastian Thrun, who launched Google’s self-driving efforts. French aerospace giant Airbus is working on the idea, as are several smaller players.
Uber’s approach is different, however. Rather than creating its own flying machines, it wants to partner with other companies, for both the aircraft and the infrastructure. What Uber brings to the party is its 60 million riders, who one day could see an option to hit “Uber Elevate” in their ride-hailing app to call a drone.
Holden said, seemingly without irony, that Uber also would bring its expertise on working with government and communities, because it already has relationships with regulatory authorities. That appeared to ignore the company’s history of clashing with regulators worldwide.
For that matter, plenty of observers noted that Uber may be relieved to have a chance to focus on futuristic visions instead of the present controversies engulfing it, such as a lawsuit over its selfdriving car project and accusations of a toxic workplace culture and sexism. A judge ruled Tuesday that Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber’s self-driving effort, must testify in the lawsuit filed by Waymo.
Uber has inked deals with five companies working on aircraft development: Aurora Flight Sciences, Pipistrel, Bell Helicopter, Embraer and Mooney. It also has agreements with real estate companies — Texas’ Hillwood Properties and Dubai Holdings — to start scouting places for “vertiports”; Holden said it’s identified four sites in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And Chargepoint, the largest operator of electric-vehicle charging stations, will figure out how to top off the batteries.
The proposed vehicles look more like drones than cars. Technically they are electric VTOLs (vertical takeoff and landing, pronounced vee-toll). They fly themselves straight up into the air like a helicopter — meaning they can more easily take to the skies from dense urban environments — but then fly forward like a small aircraft.
Uber looked into actual helicopters for local transit but rejected them as too expensive, noisy, fuel-consuming and otherwise impractical, Holden said.
In October, Holden published a 99-page white paper outlining Uber’s vision of air transit, including vehicles that would travel 100 to 150 mph, eventually making it cheap enough for the masses to use as daily transport.
“Just like artificial intelligence, flying cars have been promised for decades but are arriving now,” he said on Tuesday.
Plenty of big obstacles remain, such as creating a new air traffic control system and persuading regulators, experts said.
The idea that the VTOLs may be autonomous is actually a plus, said Karl Bauer, executive publisher of Kelley Blue Book and Auto Trader. “Normally it requires years of training to learn to fly. But if you’ve got computer-controlled flying devices that are all talking to each other, the average Joe can just tell it where to go and it flies itself.”
How realistic is Uber’s projection of sky taxis by 2020? It wouldn’t be the first tech company to plant a stake in the ground, er, air, with an overambitious timetable, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, some experts said.
“I love that Uber’s a big cheerleader in this space,” said Missy Cummings, director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and a NASA researcher. “It’s great that they’re trying to generate excitement. But the big hurdles are safety and certification. We’re not ready for you to jump in your own drone and hop over to Oakland.” Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid