Uber Aims to Make its Flying Car Service Cheaper Than Ground Car Ownership
At Uber's Elevate conference, the company revealed some price targets for its upcoming vertical takeoff and landing flying taxi service:
The passenger cost per mile, [Uber Head of Elevate Eric] Allison said, needs to be competitive with the variable cost of car ownership. Car ownership, on a per mile basis, costs between $0.464 to $0.608, according to AAA.
However, uberAIR will not be cheaper on a cost per passenger mile at launch. Initially, uberAIR will cost $5.73 per passenger mile. In the near-term, Uber says it will get the cost down to $1.86 per passenger mile before ideally getting to $0.44 per passenger mile. At that point, it would actually be cheaper to use uberAIR.
uberAIR is scheduled to begin testing in 2020, with the first official passenger trip in 2023.
Additionally, Uber will collaborate with NASA and the U.S. Army on its uberAIR plans:
Under the agreement, Uber will provide NASA with details and data on its plans for a flying taxi service, which the agency will use to simulate flights over Dallas-Fort Worth. This data will address scenarios involving air traffic, collision mitigation, and air space management. It is NASA's first such agreement related to urban air mobility (UAM) specifically focused on modeling and simulation.
[...] Uber also signed an agreement with the US Army to develop and test "flying taxi" aircraft for the company's mobility service. The company will jointly develop and fund research into rotor technology with the US Army's corporate research lab.
Previously: Uber Lays Out Vision for Flying Commuter Transit
Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Cars
Related: An Idea That Just Might Take Off
Related Stories
A story over at Popular Science tells about how they flew Icon's A5 "The Affordable-ish Personal Airplane For Everyone". Could this finally be my flying car?
Icon has spent seven years developing a two-seat light sport aircraft simple and safe enough that anyone can learn to fly it. The A5 is that aircraft, and to test the hypothesis Hawkins gives me control of the airplane in one of the busiest airspaces in America.
The A5 is a departure from what most people would typically think of as a small, propeller-driven airplane. Able to take off and land from both runway and water, it looks more like a winged jet ski than a Cessna. The rear-mounted propeller makes for an unobstructed forward view. The wings fold and sweep rearward, allowing the A5 to sit on a trailer for towing and fit through a garage door. Its 100-horsepower engine runs on regular automotive fuel. Perhaps most importantly, the A5 is packed with a number of innovative safety features that make it a very forgiving aircraft for pilots of all skill levels.
The A5 can trace its roots directly back to an Federal Aviation Administration rule change in 2004 that created a new classification of pilot's license and aircraft. The Light Sport Aircraft rule and associated Sport Pilot License created the regulatory space for a new type of recreational airplane meeting certain weight and performance requirements. It also created a lower barrier to entry for pilots wanting to fly these slow-moving, lightweight, fair-weather-only aircraft.
Weighing just 1,000 pounds empty, the A5 tops out just above 100 miles per hour but only needs to be moving 40 to 50 miles per hour at takeoff (a low stall speed is among the FAA's light sport aircraft requirements). It requires less than 900 feet for takeoff and landing on water and less than 650 feet on a runway. It can travel 427 nautical miles on a tank of gas.
At roughly $200,000 for the most basic model, the A5 isn't aimed at everyone. But Hawkins is banking on the idea that there are a whole lot of people out there that see a $200,000 personal airplane as a more rewarding investment than a boat or sports car. Icon delivered its first A5 to a customer in July and has deposits for 1,500 more.
Uber on Thursday laid out a vision for on-demand aircraft that can whisk commuters to home or work in a fraction of the time it would take on the road.
The ride-sharing giant assessed the feasibility of what it called "vertical take-off and landing" vehicles in a 98-page white paper, inviting innovators and entrepreneurs to take flight with the idea.
San Francisco-based Uber said it will be reaching out to cities, manufacturers and others about the concept.
"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," said the white paper, authored by Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden and product manager Nikhil Goel.
"A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities."
Diagrams in the paper showed aircraft bodies of various designs with propellers that can rotate to allow for vertical lift-off or landing, then move into position for flying forward.
Perhaps Vitalstatistix was onto something.
In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute.
Moore's research (PDF) into so-called VTOL—short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, flying cars—inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last summer.
Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of Google's rivals: Uber Technologies Inc. Moore is taking on a new role as director of engineering for aviation at the ride-hailing company, working on a flying car initiative known as Uber Elevate. "I can't think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real," he says.
Uber isn't constructing a flying car yet. In its own white paper published last October, the company laid out a radical vision for airborne commutes and identified technical challenges it said it wanted to help the nascent industry solve, like noise pollution, vehicle efficiency and limited battery life. Moore consulted on the paper and was impressed by the company's vision and potential impact.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:30PM (5 children)
Imagine how many they could kill from the air.
Seriously, these people need to be taken behind the barn. They have no business designing technology.
When is the arrest warrant going out for the deployment of intentionally crippled self driving software? [soylentnews.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:52PM
I applaud, and totally support, the idea that they try their tech really really far from my house.
They triggered my BS detector by giving 3-digit future prices, the fact that said price is unrealistic by aviation standards (including takeoffs/landings and vehicle costs) notwithstanding.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bart9h on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:05PM (1 child)
I have just finished making my t-shirt with a giant qrcode on the front and the back, which translate to "I AM NOT A PLASTIC BAG".
Now I can walk safely on the streets again.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:39PM
Why not the URL for Goatse?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday May 10 2018, @07:27PM
Oh, my God!
OH, THE HUMANITY!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:56PM
Let them start in a "dereg" state, get the kinks out there, and THEN they can bring it to our blue states. Deal?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:36PM (4 children)
Generally you see whacked out stuff having nothing to do with core competencies when a company is dying or rudderless. So I don't have to pull the financials to know Uber must be having problems.
Helicopter transport is an attractive market because the NYC shuttle business has three public heliports in Manhattan and for supply and demand reasons the supply is constrained so you pay like 5x as much for a ten minute ferry to the airport as you'd pay for an hour long sightseeing tour simply because people willing to pay for a copter instead of an hour long taxi during rush hour will pay "anything" so it superficially appears to be a hungry market of great profitability... however the reason why the supply and demand imbalance exists is you can't land on rando skyscrapers only three public ports and there's a lot of safety law stuff to enforce such that the fundamental problem isn't that you need a shitty app, the problem is Manhattan needs like 50 heliports to carry all the possible traffic which would collapse the price, not 3. Yes I totally believe if you don't follow any transport laws and building codes and all that stuff, you can heli-transfer much cheaper than current NYC rates, much much cheaper, but a crappy app isn't going to fix any of that.
AFAIK "vertiport" in Chicago is the same issue. Tons of demand, like one public heliport in the loop, guess what the price is for that hyper limited commodity, and no a shitty app isn't going to magically build more helipads.
There's nothing really enjoyable about a commute in NYC or Chicago, not that I've seen when visiting. If you dropped the dough for a bizjet rental or maybe first class, it would be sensible to drop the dough for a heli-transfer; its never going to sell to cattle-car class econo plane transport crowd and there's not enough real estate for the helipads anyway.
If you think liberals whine about how evil cars are in an urban environment, for a good time ask them about helipads, the top of their heads pop right off and laser beams come out of their eyes... they, uh, aren't fans.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
And helicopter transport is so popular it has sprung up in hundreds of cities across the nation... Oh, wait.
Even the NYC operations are scheduled flights. I don't think anybody is doing on-demand.
But lets assume it magically appeared, and you could hail an Uber from any of a few dozen places (saying nothing about anyone's front yard or rooftop). They will instantly find this doesn't scale. You can't dump dozens of aircraft, even those that stay below some arbitrary altitude, into a smallish area and expect it to go well.
The flying taxi world of The Fifth Element is not coming to a city near you.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:30PM
Well, the special sauce of NYC is NYC is old and has weird geographical constraints such that its painful to go from the cool places to the airport and the cool places are ridiculously rich. I don't see it selling, well, pretty much anywhere else. Maybe the Wash DC area would LIKE it but I don't think the national monument SAM sites would respond well.
It would be an epic battle to watch, as drivers know you can tell the local speed ticket revenue generators and taxi medallion rent seekers to stick it, and get away with it, at least for a little while, but WRT aviation you can't randomly fly planes around buildings in NYC without immediate F-16 or F-22 response and merely slightly delayed FAA response. Uber fake taxis could run for months before legal speed bumps, helo service will probably make it about one flight, maybe less.
It looks like NYC helo service is ridiculously profitable if you don't look at the details, but the restriction on supply is the limited number of heliports and some FAA hand wavery such that merely making an app and telling the local licensing authorities to suck it might have worked great for making taxis that aren't regulated like taxis, but its not gonna fly (get the pun, fly?) with helo service.
I don't really get the point of "uber is small scale" because the NYC services I'm aware of use 4-seater choppers not CH-47 that would be analogous to a chartered bus, so helo service is already small.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:25PM
Back in dot com days, I had promoters trying to get us to sell a system for "under $100 a copy" - sure, great target guys, except that a component of our system is a Handspring Visor (flavor of Palm Pilot) that retails for $99. Now, we could buy them in bulk and maybe get that price down some, maybe even to $40 a copy, but then we're adding our own gear to the system which is also costing up more than $100 to purchase the components to build, not counting build labor, quality testing overhead, etc....
They still went out and pitched the concept as "under $100 per copy."
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @07:09AM
Maybe, maybe not dying. Possibly the REAL AGENDA is starting to rear its head. Either tha or they are bloody desperate! Hunting for a nice, juicy MIL contract. Those are worth billions! You can supply a toilet for $800 or $8000, there is no beancounting or accountability. F-35 that can barely function, hundreds of billions down the hole, and no heads rolling. So Uber are trying to sweet up to this kind money and deal...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:09PM (7 children)
I just saw a news clip where a Fox station in Orlando reported on testing and marketing driverless cars to the public.
The young reporter seemed convinced and if I remember correctly, said something to the effect of there won't ever be another driverless car accident again, with a smile. Obviously he won't compensate the next victim's family.
Can Uber purchase local news stories?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:21PM
Driverless cars were never expected to eliminate 100% of accidents and fatalities. Only greatly reduce them, and that's if the vehicles are not in beta mode.
It sounds like the kind of mistake a local reporter would make, especially if they were exposed to lots of hype and Uber kool-aid.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:28PM (5 children)
The reporter probably would say those things for credit deposited in their uber account.
Journalism has slipped so far, its now on a level of Burger flippers.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:45PM (3 children)
And who are you more foolish to trust? A face on a screen telling you half truths, or an unseen hand in a kitchen preparing your food?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:21PM (1 child)
The face on the screen, because it can't spit into your food the way most Mexicans do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:10AM
Yer so stupid we're almost sorry for you. Almost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:36PM
Never believe a smiling, attractive person who makes promises about tech!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @07:14AM
Just for a second I had an image of a burger with flippers, like a seal. My random contribution for today towards mankind's demise.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday May 11 2018, @02:33PM
All great and wonderful that one wants to lower costs. It is easy to lower costs in space and air travel. The easiest way to do so would be to conveniently ignore any regulations that you don't want to follow, like all those pesky safety aspects. Uber has lots of experience trying to get around regulation, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.
This sig for rent.