Uber have disrupted the transport system in a massive way since their inception, destroying the taxi industry, trialling self-driving vehicles, and completely ruining the “quick-let’s-bolt” plan that so many have carried out (don’t do this: it’s bad karma, plus you’re not as fast a runner as you believe yourself to be).
Now they are taking the next step into sci-fi madness with their Elevate project: basically a flying taxi system, with vehicles that can land and ascend vertically, and plans to make runways and peak-hour congestion a thing of the past.
We’re still reeling from the introduction of a driverless vehicle into ol’ Sydney town, so it’s quite a shock to hear Sydney featured heavily in the company’s plans, with Uber’s chief product officer Jeff Holden revealing that both Sydney and Melbourne will be involved in trials as soon as 2023.
Better still, the company predicts that fares won’t be much different to those of UberX.
“The New South Wales government is very excited about cracking transportation problems in innovative ways and Sydney certainly has a traffic issue,” Holden told The Australian Financial Review.
“We have a rigorous framework [for selection] and we look at how much the city needs it. We’re looking for congested cities that have a particular geographic pattern that lends itself to it. In urban aviation you have an aircraft that can travel about 60 miles at 150 to 200 miles per hour, they have to be very quiet, energy efficient and they need to take off and land from vertiports on the outskirts of the city.
“We have no bias in terms of geographic location and it doesn’t need to be near the US. Sydney is a clear option.”
“We looked at all the barriers to doing it and we used the helicopter as our starting point. We realised why they didn’t work – it was the noise, safety issues and efficiency – so we needed a new type of vehicle,” he said.
“That showed us the path and galvanised the aviation community because a) it now seemed believable and b) they believed if Uber was behind it, there will be hundreds of millions of active users by the time it launches, which is a huge demand.”
