Imagine escaping a traffic jam by literally rising above it. Flying vehicles have been the stuff of science fiction for decades – but 2040 could be the era when people beat the nine am rush by airborne auto.
Companies including Airbus, Google and Uber are currently exploring vehicles that are electric and can vertically take off and land (VTOLs) – in other words, city-friendly flying vehicles that would create an entirely new dimension of travel to bypass congested roads, while dropping off passengers exactly where needed.
VTOLs might carry several passengers like Airbus’ CityAirbus, or be designed as affordable, one-seaters like the Vahana concept craft, or the Ehang 184 that will fly in Dubai this year. Along with swooping commuters above busy roads, VTOLs would also be ideal for delivering packages to city addresses by air, defusing the road congestion that today is increasingly caused by a glut of delivery lorries.
Unused urban spaces would gain new life, as areas such as building roofs or parking lots became repurposed as landing pads.
Current concepts for VTOLs work via multiple vertical thrust propellers configured around a central cabin, navigating by driverless technology which, as with driverless tech in cars, is likely to be safer than with a human pilot in charge.
Today, an early form of the VTOL, the helicopter, is an alternative means of transport to the clogged roads of Sao Paolo and its underdeveloped public transit infrastructure.
In the cities of 2040, VTOLs would be just one of several modes of transport in extensive and meticulously plotted urban networks, where passengers would take multi-modal journeys with seamless connections between road, rail, and sky travel.
A modular car, like Airbus’s PopUp concept, illustrates how a future multi-modal commute could work – an autonomous pod would slot into a copter module for flight across congested areas, then dock at a convenient hub to latch onto a set of wheels and drive the remaining distance.
Future commuters might think nothing of journeys where they head downtown in a self-driving bus, switch to an autonomous flying pod to soar over a traffic jam, before linking up to a carriage of other pods to shoot through the Hyperloop for a conference in the next city.
Would we own our own autonomous flying vehicles? As alluring as the idea sounds, self-flying vehicles are most likely to be accessible through ridesharing services – Uber intends to launch a fleet of self-flying taxis by 2020, while Sao Paolo’s on-demand helicopter app Voom has plans to expand to other megacities. Hubs throughout the city, which might be public or privately owned, would allow future flying vehicles to charge, park, or of course, dock their propellers and take to the streets.
For now, the airborne automobile has a long regulatory road to climb – a new type of safety certification must be set out before any can fly, and despite operating at the same altitude as helicopters, a more robust air traffic control system is needed to handle the complexity of dealing with thousands of on-demand VTOLs that fly themselves.