The dream of flying taxis whizzing through the skies above our cities may be closer to reality than you think.
Chinese company Ehang offered a glimpse this week of what could lie ahead, releasing its first video of passengers climbing aboard its autonomous drones and taking off with the push of a button.
It’s one of a bunch of companies racing to bring their different versions of computer-controlled airborne taxis to market. The contenders include big plane makers like Boeing (BA) and lesser-known startups.
Ehang says it first managed to carry passengers in its drones back in 2015 and has since racked up at least 40 successful journeys. It hadn’t shared footage of the flights publicly until this week.
Its video suggests the Chinese startup is ahead of companies in the U.S. and Europe in the push to develop a new generation of aircraft that could potentially ferry people across cites, from one rooftop to another.
This is a different game from helicopters. Smaller, electric-powered aircraft are changing the shape of flying.
Rather than traditional gas-driven engines and large propellers or rotors for forward and vertical flight, new designs spread out the work across many small electric motors. They’re giant, people-carrying versions of the small remote-controlled drones that have become hugely popular with consumers around the world.
Ehang created a buzz at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016 where it showed off a prototype of its passenger drone, the 184. But it says the technology has come a long way since then.
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People are now flying around in autonomous drones https://t.co/UbDQQKVrC5 pic.twitter.com/pPoSpoPUqN
— CNN (@CNN) February 9, 2018
Isn’t this amazing?
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