Ride-sharing service Uber has announced its plan for introducing flying cars named as VTOL in 10 years.
VTOL is the abbrevation of “Vertical Take-off and Landing” .
Uber published a massive 98-page white paper detailing its plan to launch an “on demand aviation” service called Uber Elevate.
According to Uber’s plan, you can travel from San Francisco’s Marina to work in downtown San Jose in only 15 minutes instead of two hours.
And, you could save nearly four hours round-trip between São Paulo’s city center and the suburbs in Campinas. And, uber’s Flying Cars can reduce your 90-plus minute stop-and-go commute from Gurgaon to your office in central New Delhi to a mere six minutes.
Every day, millions of hours are wasted on the road worldwide. Last year, the average San Francisco resident spent 230 hours commuting between work and home—that’s half a million hours of productivity lost every single day. In Los Angeles and Sydney, residents spend seven whole working weeks each year commuting, two of which are wasted unproductively stuck in gridlock. In many global megacities, the problem is more severe: the average commute in Mumbai exceeds a staggering 90 minutes. For all of us, that’s less time with family, less time at work growing our economies, more money spent on fuel — and a marked increase in our stress levels: a study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, found that those who commute more than 10 miles were at increased odds of elevated blood pressure.
On-demand aviation has the potential to radically improve urban mobility, giving people back time lost in their daily commutes.
Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground
A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically called VTOL aircraft , will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities.
Recently, technology advances have made it practical to build this new class of VTOL aircraft. Over a dozen companies, with as many different design approaches, are passionately working to make VTOLs a reality. The closest equivalent technology in use today is the helicopter, but helicopters are too noisy, inefficient, polluting, and expensive for mass-scale use. VTOL aircraft will make use of electric propulsion so they have zero operational emissions and will likely be quiet enough to operate in cities without disturbing the neighbors. At flying altitude, noise from advanced electric vehicles will be barely audible. Even during take-off and landing, the noise will be comparable to existing background noise. These VTOL designs will also be markedly safer than today’s helicopters because VTOLs will not need to be dependent on any single part to stay airborne and will ultimately use autonomy technology to significantly reduce operator error.
Uber says that in the long-term, VTOLs will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car. Normally, people think of flying as an expensive and infrequent form of travel, but that is largely due to the low production volume manufacturing of today’s aircraft. Even though small aircraft and helicopters are of similar size, weight, and complexity to a car, they cost about 20 times more.
Ultimately, if VTOLs can serve the on-demand urban transit case well — quiet, fast, clean, efficient, and safe — there is a path to high production volume manufacturing which will enable VTOLs to achieve a dramatically lower per-vehicle cost. The economics of manufacturing VTOLs will become more akin to automobiles than aircraft. Initially, of course, VTOL vehicles are likely to be very expensive, but because the ridesharing model amortizes the vehicle cost efficiently over paid trips, the high cost should not end up being prohibitive to getting started. And once the ridesharing service commences, a positive feedback loop can ultimately reduce costs and thus prices for all users
Uber report says that VTOL aircraft is achievable in the coming decade if all the key actors in the VTOL ecosystem — regulators, vehicle designers, communities, cities, and network operators — collaborate effectively.