In less than a decade, Uber has redefined the idea of flexible labor and gutted the American taxi industry. The company launched a fleet of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. It's on its way to becoming the most valuable startup ever.
Whatever. Today, Uber is promising flying cars.
Flying. Cars.
Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network---to be called "Elevate"---of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes---for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. Theoretically.
These aren't flying cars in the sense that they both drive on the ground and soar through the air. Uber is using the much more exciting, Jetsons sense of the term: a future that lifts you over the brutality of traffic jams and congested roads.
That dream has been around as long as planes and automobiles. The idea landed the first of many Popular Science covers in 1926. Henry Ford promised the tech was nigh in 1940. And it's exactly the sort of thing Silicon Valley's proponents say modern technology companies can and should produce---instead of useless apps and infantilizing on-demand services.
Now, Uber plans to be the one to make the dream happen, with a chunk of help. The San Francisco-based transportation goliath has no intention of designing or building these things, instead hoping to catalyze the market, bringing together private and government parties to solve a pile of technical, regulatory, and infrastructural problems, from battery density to aircraft certification to air traffic control.
"If you can do all those things," says Jeff Holden, Uber's product chief, "you've got the potential for a new transportation method."
Once the pieces are in place, Uber can do what it's already done with cars: enrolling pilots, connecting them with its massive customer base, advising on routes, and collecting its share of the fare.
"We're just turning the corner now to make that possible," Holden says. "Our intent is to help the industry get there faster."
Believe it or not, building a flying car isn't the hardest part of this scheme. Within five years, according to the white paper, Uber expects the market to produce a fully electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing plane that can fly 100 miles at about 150 mph, carrying multiple passengers and a pilot.
Aviation experts say that timeline makes sense. Boeing and Airbus have already introduced lightweight, composite materials and fly-by-wire systems to commercial aviation. Consumer drones have proven sophisticated software can make flying a multi-propeller aircraft as easy as thumbing an iPhone. Computers and electric cars have pushed battery technology forward, and the US Department of Energy is spending tens of millions of dollars to accelerate research.
Holden predicts Uber Elevate will operate fixed wing, tilt-rotor aircraft, which take off from helipads instead of space-hungry runways, then swing their propellers forward for efficient level flight a few thousand feet up.
Battery power has no hope of running a 150-passenger jet at Mach 0.8, but it could work for these slower, lighter aircraft. Because each propeller lifts more than it weighs, and electric propulsion does away with the weight and complexity of linking rotors to an engine, you can slap on a whole pile of the things. As a bonus, using lots of little rotors instead of one big one (as on a traditional helicopter) cuts down on noise concerns.
Uber has plenty of potential partners. Last year, NASA flew its GL-10 Greased Lightning, with 10 motors, for the first time. California-based Joby Aviation plans to have two-seat, 12-motor, fully electric VTOL taxis in operation within five years. Germany's eVolo says its Volocopter---with a whopping 18 propellers---is supposed to be ready for market in 2018. The Pentagon has put $89 million into Aurora Flight Sciences' LightningStrike, a hybrid-powered VTOL that resembles a big harmonica chasing a little harmonica.
"I think it could happen very very quickly," says Tom Aldag, director of R&D for the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. "There are a lot of other headwinds, though."
What really might keep flying taxies from soaring is old-fashioned red tape. "From a certification standpoint, it's a humongous stretch," says Richard Pat Anderson, director of the Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "You're talking about multiple novel technologies, and the last word the FAA wants to hear is 'novel.'"
Right now, the agency doesn’t even have a framework to certify commercial electric aircraft. It's never certified a civilian VTOL plane, though it's looking at the AgustaWestland AW609 civil tiltrotor and Bell's 525 helicopter.
And, Anderson says, the FAA will not be thrilled about semi-autonomous planes whipping human brogrammers through SFO’s glide path. Today's navigation systems are far less sophisticated than what these aircraft would demand, controlling a dozen or more propellers simultaneously.
Yet Holden remains optimistic---mostly because of the agency's consensus-based standards system. Since the mid-1990s, the FAA has allowed the private market to draw up the rules that govern new types of aircraft, which it then tweaks and approves. That's how the FAA created the Light Sport Aircraft class, which ushered in new designs like Icon's stall-resistant, folding A5.
Electric propulsion and semi-autonomous software are fundamental to making this kind of aircraft viable and safe, Holden says, so regulators should accept them. "I feel like we can drive a lot of the thinking, and marshall people to put together a compelling proposal for the standard."
The FAA might go along with it---but don't put your money on the 2021 arrival date. "For them to apply all these novel topics in the space of five years is really tough to conceive of," Anderson says.
Say someone really figures out how to make this plane, and the FAA says it's OK to fly. And say the FAA and NASA finally implement the long-promised "NextGen" air traffic control system, to keep these things from smacking into one another.
Then Uber has to implement the service. Holden says the company might buy the aircraft and hire pilots to fly them, or team up with a manufacturer who holds onto the titles while the ride sharing giant connects them with passengers and advises on routes. Either way, he says today's model, where people drive passengers in their own cars, won't apply here. Owning a plane requires a lot more capital.
No doubt Uber will find willing passengers and pilots eager for a payday. The trickier part will be getting local governments on board, especially since the company boasts a less than sterling history of getting along with regulators. And that's not just with cars; in January, Uber dropped its temporary, promotional helicopter service in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival after officials said the flights violated county codes and posed a safety hazard.
"We're coming into this in a collaborative form," Holden says. He expects to spend the next few years convincing local lawmakers they should embrace flying cars as a way to cut down congestion.
It's not a bad argument. "There is a clear market for on-demand aviation if you could make it practical, and that’s driven a lot by service road congestion," says R. John Hansman, who runs MIT's International Center for Air Transportation. And if cities don't go along at first, maybe they'll get on board when residents start demanding the ever-so-cool service the folks across the river take to work.
The good news for Uber is that unlike other futuristic forms of high-speed transportation, like maglev trains and Hyperloop, most American cities already have the infrastructure to run flying cars. The US has nearly 6,000 helipads, most of them privately owned. You'd just need to make sure they've got an outlet, to charge up tired aircraft.
“One of the most fundamental problems of most transportation solutions is that they lack infrastructure," says Mark Moore, NASA's chief technologist for on-demand mobility, who reviewed the white paper. But that's not a problem here. "That's pretty cool, and potentially much more agile and nimble."
Holden expects Uber Elevate could launch in a bit more than five years, and that over the following five it would garner users and spread to new routes. What Uber rider wouldn't pay the same fare, or even extra, to fly instead of drive? There's a reason the company's valued at nearly $70 billion.
And if you really just want to take a short trip, where flying at 150 mph wouldn't really work? No worries: That's what the self-driving cars are for.
With additional reporting by Aarian Marshall and Joseph Bien-Kahn.
