Blog 4 - How autonomous flying taxis could change the way you travel
How
autonomous flying taxis could change the way you travel
Rodin Lyasoff in the late 90s was studying aerospace and many people
told him, Aerospace is boring, everything in aerospace has already been done. He
felt that they were a little bit off the mark. And in fact, I think the next
decade is going to be another golden age for aviation. For one thing, and this
is where he got excited, flight is about to get a lot more personal.
In the last century, large commercial airplanes have connected
cities across the globe. And 100 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for
all of us to fly here from around the world for a five-day conference. But it did,
and most probably without a second thought. And that's a remarkable achievement
for humanity. But on a day-to-day basis, we still spend a lot of time in cars or
actively trying to avoid it. Some of my best friends live in San Francisco, He lived
in Mountain View, about 40 miles away. We're all busy. At the end of the day,
we're separated by something like two hours of heavy traffic. So frankly, we
haven't seen each other in a few months.
He worked in downtown San Jose, which is near the airport. And
there are actually days when I can leave work, get on a plane and fly to Los
Angeles faster than I can drive to San Francisco. Cities are only getting more
populated, the roads are full, and it's really difficult to expand them. And so
in a lot of places, there really aren't a lot of good solutions for getting
around traffic.
But what if you could fly over it? The sky is underutilized, and
I would argue it will never be as congested as the roads are. First of all,
you've got a whole other dimension, but also just safety considerations and
air-traffic management will not allow bumper-to-bumper traffic in the sky.
Which means, in many cases, flying can be a long-term, compelling alternative
to traveling on the ground.
Fie instance you call an Uber, it takes you to a nearby landing
spot -- we call these vertiports -- there's an airplane waiting for you there,
flies you over all of the traffic in the middle, and on the other side, another
Uber takes you to your friend's house. And he said Uber, but I really think we
need to congratulate the Lyft branding team for their forward thinking in
choosing their brand.
So in that example there are a few extra steps, I admit. But
it's 30 minutes versus two hours, it costs around 60 dollars, and you get to
fly. We're not there yet, but we are a lot closer than you might think. So one
of the first things we need is we need an aircraft that can take off and land
in small spaces and quickly take you where you want to go. And helicopters can
do that today, but traditionally, helicopters have been just a little bit too
expensive, just a little too hard to pilot and just a little too noisy to be
used for daily transportation in cities. Well, electric flight and autonomy are
changing that.
Electric flight, in particular, unlocks new possibilities for
vehicle configurations that we just could not explore in the past. If you use
electric motors, you can have many of them around the aircraft, and it doesn't
add a lot of extra weight. And that gives you redundancy and safety. And also,
they are cleaner, cheaper and quieter than internal combustion engines.
Autonomy allows the transportation network to scale, and he actually thought it
makes the aircraft safer. Commercial flights are already automated for most of
their duration, and believed there will come a day when we won't even trust an
airplane that required a human to fly.
So, one of our teams at A3 wanted to see just how close this
future really was. So they built and flew a prototype of one such vehicle. And
they made a point of only using mature, commercially available technologies
today. We call it Vahana. It's fully electric. It takes off and lands
vertically, but flies forward like a regular airplane. It's fully self-piloted.
You push a button, it takes off, flies and lands, all by itself. The prototype
that you see here is designed to carry a single passenger and luggage. And it
can go about 20 miles in 15 minutes.
And his estimate for a trip like that is it would cost around 40
dollars, which you can really build a business around. It has multiple
redundant motors and batteries, you can lose one, it will continue flying and
land normally. It's pretty quiet. When it's flying overhead, it will be quieter
than a Prius on the highway. It's intelligent and has cameras, lidar and radar,
so it can detect and avoid unexpected obstacles. And the team really focused on
making it efficient, so the batteries are small, light, and they last longer.
For reference, the Vahana battery is less than half the size of a Tesla Model S
battery. It's about 40 kilowatt-hours. And can hot swap the batteries in just a
few minutes.
And he thought that in a few years, people will be comfortable
getting by themselves in a self-piloted, electric, VTOL air taxi. But the team
is busy working on the next version, which is going to carry at least two
passengers and fly quite a bit farther. But more importantly, there are over 20
companies around the world working on vehicles just like this one right now. My
best guess is in the next five years, you'll start seeing vertiports in some
cities, and little airplane icons on your ride-sharing apps. And it might begin
with a dozen, but eventually, we could have hundreds of these, flying around
our cities. And it will fundamentally transform our relationship with local travel.
In the past
century, flight connected our planet, in the next, it will reconnect our local
communities, and reconnect us to each other.
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